THE ARMY'S MAIL- BAG

Dominion, Volume 10, Issue 2911, 25 October 1916, Page 6

THE ARMY'S MAIL- BAG

15 MILLION LETTERS A WEEK. Although complaints are made from time to time of delay in the receipt of letters to and from the front, the Army postal arrangements, which are .on a vast scale, are ; working admirably, says the London l 'Times." ' Generally it may be assumed that letters sent from England to the Expeditionary ■Force in France .take three days to . reach men in billets and four days soldiers in the trenches. • All letters for the troops are dealt with at the Home Base Office in London, where the work of sorting is performed., There is a separate mail Dag for every unit, both, for letters and parcels. All the base shops to which allusion was made in Lord Northcliffe's article recently are similarly treated. About 10 millions of letters are dispatched to the armies every week, and about three-quarters of a million parcels ! The mails are made up not only for the forces in France, out for the troops in Egypt, Salonika, Mesopotamia, East Africa, and other parts of the world. Colonial sections deal with colonial letters both at tho London Base Office and at the front. Alt the cross-Channel routes aroused, and three special trains are run daily for the Army mails alone. Letters posted last night would leave for France iii tho morning. At each port on the other side tho personnel of the Army postal service are in attendance to see that tho mails are put into the supply [train. They are dispatched without delay to railhead, where they are taken oyer by the servico and sent on. to the. .refilling point by motor-vans. There they are handed over to the postal orderlies, who convey them by horso transport to tho billots and .the 'trenches. s Tho number of letters sent home 'from the front exceeds five millions weekly, ond this vast correspondence has to be handled ill the_ first instance at tho base. The sorting is dono in London. Several hundreds of women are employ-. , ed at this work, and their numbers are , increasing every day. They perform their task very satisfactorily, hut of course not so well as sorters of long experience, nor can they deal with heavy

parcels. Letters which for any reason ' <iro undeliverable arc sent tack and reI .turned to the senders. The business is 'a gigantic, one, for which there was no IpTecedent, and the marvel is that, with ; ia- greatly depleted staff, the department has been ablo to cope, with it.