A GENERAL AND THE CENSORSHIP

Dominion, Volume 11, Issue 140, 2 March 1918, Page 8

A GENERAL AND THE CENSORSHIP

SIR lAN HAMILTON'S GBIEV- / ANC'E.

A remarkable letter, written b,c Sir , I.ni Hamilton, C'ommander-in-Chief of the Allied Forces at the Dardanelles, in printed for the first time in the volume of his dispatches which is just published ("Inn Hamilton's Dispatches from the Dardanelles," Newnes, 3s. (id. net). In it he states that. his cable messages were altered ■ and garbled at home: —

"From my individual point of view !i hideous mistake has.'been mods on Ibi> correspondent sicta of the whole of this Dardanelles business. Had we had a dozen good newspaper correspondents hore the vital life-giving interest of these stupendous proceedings woulrl have beMi brought right into the hearths and homes of the humblest people in Britain. Instead of that I wrote cables, of which 1 may at. least sny they are descriptive as far as official phraseology will permit, and they are turned by some miserable people somewhere into horrible bureaucratic cliches or dead languages—i.e., 'We have made an appreciable , advance'. 'The situation remains unchanged , ; and similar god-damned phrases.

"As for information to the enemy, tins is too peurile altogether. The tilings these devils produce are nil read and checked by competent staff officers. To think that it matters to the Turks whether a certain trench wns tiiken by the 7th Royal Scots or the 3rd Warwicks is really like children playing at stcrets." '""*"