communications were on a par with everything else.  There was no guarantee that a message paid for would even be sent by the telegraph-operators, or, if withheld, that the sender would be apprised of its suppression.  The war arrangements were retained during the armistice.  And they were superlatively bad.  A committee appointed by the Chamber of Deputies to inquire into the matter officially, reported that,[29] at the Paris Telegraph Bureau alone, 40,000 despatches were held back every day—­40,000 a day, or 58,400,000 in four years!  And from the capital alone.  The majority of them were never delivered, and the others were distributed after great delay.  The despatches which were retained were, in the main, thrown into a basket, and, when the accumulation had become too great, were destroyed.  The Control Section never made any inquiry, and neither the senders nor those to whom the despatches were addressed were ever informed.[30] Even important messages of neutral ambassadors in Rome and London fell under the ban.  The recklessness of these censors, who ceased even to read what they destroyed, was such that they held up and made away with state orders transmitted by the great munitions factories, and one of these was constrained to close down because it was unable to obtain certain materials in time.

The French Ambassador in Switzerland reported that, owing to these holocausts, important messages from that country, containing orders for the French national loan, never reached their destination, in consequence of which the French nation lost from ten to twenty million francs.  And even the letters and telegrams that were actually passed were so carelessly handled that many of them were lost on the way or delayed until they became meaningless to the addressee.  So, for instance, an official letter despatched by the Minister of Commerce to the Minister of Finance in Paris was sent to Calcutta, where the French Consul-General came across it, and had it directed back to Paris.  The correspondent of the Echo de Paris, who was sent to Switzerland by his journal, was forbidden by law to carry more than one thousand francs over the frontier, nor was the management of the journal permitted to forward to him more than two hundred francs at a time.  And when a telegram was given up in Paris, crediting him with two hundred francs, it was stopped by the censor.  Eleven days were let go by without informing the persons concerned.  When the administrator of the journal questioned the chief censor, he declined responsibility, having had nothing to do with the matter, but he indicated the Central Telegraph Control as the competent department.  There, too, however, they were innocent, having never heard of the suppression.  It took another day to elicit the fact that the economic section of the War Ministry was alone answerable for the decision.  The indefatigable manager of the Echo de Paris applied to the department in question, but only to learn that it, too, was without any knowledge of what had happened, but it promised to find out.  Soon afterward it informed the zealous manager that the department which had given the order could only be the Exchange Commission of the Ministry of Finances.  And during all the time the correspondent was in Zurich without money to pay for telegrams or to settle his hotel and restaurant bills.[31]