I read all my English papers twice and a big stack of German ones which I used to have sent up by a friend in the G.H.Q.  Intelligence, who knew I liked to follow what the Boche was saying.  As I dozed and ruminated in the way a man does after fever, I was struck by the tremendous display of one advertisement in the English press.  It was a thing called ‘Gussiter’s Deep-breathing System,’ which, according to its promoter, was a cure for every ill, mental, moral, or physical, that man can suffer.  Politicians, generals, admirals, and music-hall artists all testified to the new life it had opened up for them.  I remember wondering what these sportsmen got for their testimonies, and thinking I would write a spoof letter myself to old Gussiter.

Then I picked up the German papers, and suddenly my eye caught an advertisement of the same kind in the Frankfurter Zeitung.  It was not Gussiter this time, but one Weissmann, but his game was identical—­’deep breathing’.  The Hun style was different from the English—­all about the Goddess of Health, and the Nymphs of the Mountains, and two quotations from Schiller.  But the principle was the same.

That made me ponder a little, and I went carefully through the whole batch.  I found the advertisement in the Frankfurter and in one or two rather obscure Volkstimmes and Volkszeitungs.  I found it too in Der Grosse Krieg, the official German propagandist picture-paper.  They were the same all but one, and that one had a bold variation, for it contained four of the sentences used in the ordinary English advertisement.

This struck me as fishy, and I started to write a letter to Macgillivray pointing out what seemed to be a case of trading with the enemy, and advising him to get on to Mr Gussiter’s financial backing.  I thought he might find a Hun syndicate behind him.  And then I had another notion, which made me rewrite my letter.

I went through the papers again.  The English ones which contained the advertisement were all good, solid, bellicose organs; the kind of thing no censorship would object to leaving the country.  I had before me a small sheaf of pacifist prints, and they had not the advertisement.  That might be for reasons of circulation, or it might not.  The German papers were either Radical or Socialist publications, just the opposite of the English lot, except the Grosse Krieg.  Now we have a free press, and Germany has, strictly speaking, none.  All her journalistic indiscretions are calculated.  Therefore the Boche has no objection to his rags getting to enemy countries.  He wants it.  He likes to see them quoted in columns headed ‘Through German Glasses’, and made the text of articles showing what a good democrat he is becoming.