The Ypres Times.
45
The first copy was immediately translated into German and sent to every
Kommandatur in the Occupied Territory, and distributed to the spies who circulated
among the inhabitants. If one of them overheard a piece of news which obviously came
from it, the retailer was arrested and made to say where he heard ithis informant was
then examined, and so, by degrees, they arrived at the original finder of our sheet, and
fine and imprisonment fell upon him.
When I arrived in Bruges the day after the evacuation by the Germans (until they
evacuated at an hour's notice, the population who were commanded to keep within doors
had no idea that the Germans were really in retreatthough they had sent away their
ladies two days before), on my letting out that I was the editor of the Courier I was
solemnly kissed by four aldermenI had previously been kissed seven hundred times in
forty minutes by the population on general principlesthe calculation was made by
counting kisses for one minute and multiplying by the time it took me to fight my
osculatory way from the middle of the Grande Place, where I stopped my G.H.Q. car,
to the Hotel de Ville, where I had to interview the Echevins and some leading
inhabitants.
But the services rendered by the Courier to the Occupied Territories of France and
Belgium were duplicated by Adastral House and Crewe House for those of Italy, though
there was no Italian edition of our sheet. Far more important were the millions of
leaflets in German appealing to the German population, largely written for us by scholarly
prisoners of war, who regarded their capture as an emancipation from the horrors of
Hell and implored their fellow countrymen to realise that they could never win, and
extolled the social charm, and abundant food which were the lot of German prisoners
in our prison camps. These sheets, and lurid pictorial broadsides, combined with the
maps showing the advancing British lines issued from Beaumoire-Montreuil by Capt.
Hazledine, must have spread consternation in a starving army whose every victorious
advance showed them that at the end of four years we were as well provided with
tinned pineapple, sardines, and 18-pounder shells as we had been when we started out.
A curious psychological feature that was impressed upon us very early in our
activities, was that any abuse or caricature of the Emperor, defeated our endsthey
simply would not stand it. But what they loved were the reprints from their own Social-
democrat papers, the Arbeiter Zeitung and Volkstimme, which, suppressed the moment
they appeared, reached them onlyas the heading of the Courier informed them Durch
Euft ballon."
The process of releasing the paper was interesting, and it accounts for the shortage
of the yellow tinder-strips for cigar lighters from which home-smokers suffered in 1918.
Our propaganda sheets were threaded on silk paper-fasteners a dozen at a time, and
these were in turn threaded through strips of this tinder about a yard long, and
fortified by a copper wire running through them. These were called releases
and were sent over daily in vast quantities, together with an ample supply of large paper
balloons.
Up to March, 1918, our propaganda sheets were dropped by aviators, but then the
Germans took to imprisoning any airmen whom they caught. Two of our men were
condemned to ten years' penal servitude, but upon our Government threatening to effect
reprisals in kind upon German officers, they were released and sent to internment camps.
After that Dr. Chalmers Mitchell originated the hydrogen balloon service which was
doubly effective, as we could send a vastly larger mass of literature by them, and they
were very seldom prevented distributing by contrary winds. There was always some
point at which we could get over."
Here is a typical day in the life of a Propaganda Officer after March, 1918. In the
morning we rang up Meteors," a meteorological service directed by Col. E. Gold,
and found out where, along the line, the upper air currents were blowing towards the
