MAIL DAY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 9 April 1940, Page 3

MAIL DAY

WITH OUR TROOPS IN EGYPT. POST OFFICE ORGANISATION. (N.Z.E.F. Official News Service.) March 12. The sound of this eager cry in the tent linos of the 2nd New Zealand Expeditionary Force is pretty sure to mean only one thing—that another big New Zealand mail has arrived. Letters from homo seem unable to come too often for us. and wore those who wrote them to witness the excitement they bring to the camp they would 4<now that the time had been well spent. Just when we are beginning to wonder how far away the next mail can be. someone comes hurrying to his tent with the nows that a truck laden with bulky mail bags has just pulled up at the Division's post office. After that it's merely a matter of time before the first letters have been sorted and gathered in by eager hands. In the last mail there were anything up to 20,000 loiters for us —hundreds of thousands of words telling their stories of joys and sorrows and carrying titbits of news from distant homes, scattered little records of people and events which travel far through the camp by word of mouth before the day is out. Then, after the letters have been read and re-read, we are in the mood to take out pencils and paper ourselves, and tell our side of the story. I looked behind Iheso mail-day scenes on a visit to the Divisional post office the other day. and found that our letters are handled there almost exactly as they would be in any New Zealand mail room. Incoming mail is divided into letters and papers, which are redivided according to the units to which they are addressed. Finally they are divided again into the principal sections of each unit. Then the sorted mail goes out. cither by truck or by runner, to the units' orderly rooms, and soon reaches the individual soldiers to whom it is addressed.

On normal days the postal staff operates two deliveries of mail from local addresses and England and other countries, together with air mail from the Dominion. Outward mails are collected from unit orderly rooms after they have been passed by the regimental censors and are checked in the post office for censorship and correct postage. After the stamps have been cancelled. air and ordinary mails are separated and sorted according to principal post offices. Then they go on thenway to Base censorship and postal sections for shipment to their destinations. I was interested to learn that, every letter I write home is handled solely by New Zealanders from the time it leaves me until the time it is read in New Zealand. In the case of mails addressed to other countries. British and Indian Army postal sections co-oper-ate with us in their despatch. The organisation of our post office is running like clockwork. The staff has a nucleus of New Zealand Post and Telegraph Department mon. and the others have quickly fallen into the routine. Il took the staff only three and a half hours to get our last big mail cut for delivery.

Now and then the postal men have mysteries to solve in the way of indefinite addresses, but they have the help of a card index system handed down from the New Zealand postal organisation in the Great War. Files compiled from embarkation rolls and routine orders enable them to trace every man Io his correct address. , And there is humour- in the job al times. After all. it must sound funny Io hoar some of us. just after one mail has been distributed, asking: "Any idea when the next mail arrives from New Zealand?"