M. Emile Massard, formerly editor of a Paris evening paper, the "Presse," who was attached to the Intelligence Department during the war, in continuing his reminiscences in the "Liberté" freely admits that the elaborate attempts to prevent the enemy from finding out what was going on were a complete failure. The Germans always got) their information,. accurately if not rapidly. The French authorities looked into private correspondence, listened in at telephone conversations, censored telegrams and controlled this, that and the other, but, according to M. Massard, they overlooked the simplest and easiest means of communicating with Germany—parcels for prisoners. Anybody could send anything to anybody who was, or purported to be, a prisoner of war in Germany. Scarcely one in a thousand of such parcels, bearing a French name and sent from Paris to some prisoners' camp in Germany, was examined before being despatched. There was nothing to prevent a German spy in Paris from sending information in one of these parcels, with seals and string so arranged attract the attention of the Germans when it reached its destination.
All this was known at the time, but, short of opening every parcel addressed to a prisoner of war in Germany, there was no means of stopping the leakage. The points at which Big Bertha's shells fall in Paris were known to the Berlin public before Parisians had anything but rumour to go upon. A copy of a war-time number of a German magazine, discovered recently in the ruins of a house in the war area, contained numerous photographs of Paris houses which had been wrecked by the long-range shells.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.