The daily Gate City and constitution-Democrat. (Keokuk, Iowa) 1916-1922, 1918-03-04
DANGER IN ALL
INFORMATION
Be Careful Whenever You Write or
Say Anything About
American War
Items.

rBy ]. w. Pegler, United Press Staff
Correspondent
WITH THE AMEAICAN EXPEDl-
TIONARY ARMY, FRANCE. Jan H.
-(By mail.)-Make tho old Boche
pay for all his information. Make
him pay with tho lives OF his sol
dters and with thousands Of shells
and days Of work.
You are safeguarding soldiers
life when you put no more In the ad-
dress of your letters to him than is
necessary to identify him to the pos
tai forces. You may be giving con-
yincing piece of information to the
Boche If you write to Sammy In
France that the boy next door is
training In the 24sth division at
Camp Meade.
The Boche is SEEMING this whole
army for information all the time
It is vitality important to him to know
how many divisions of troops we
have in France, where each division
has its headquarters, who commands
the divisions and regiments, when
each expects to go into the line
! Perhaps the Boche thinks the 24Sth
IS in France. He has been misin-
formed through some spy. If another
SPY carefully unseals your letter to
| Sammy and sees that the 248th is In
Camp Meade and not In France that
piece of information fits in perfectly
in the jig-saw puzzle OF patch work
military intelligence.
Don't put anything on paper that
you wouldn't want the kaiser to see"
| is the advice of one military censor
to his men. Think 1t over and put
this question TO yourself: Would 1t
do the kaiser any good to know this?
| If it would help the kaiser, don't
write tt-don't even talk about 1t
when strangers may hear you"
Many bits Of information. each alb
solutely harmless in itself. are cap
able Of serious harm to Sammy in
Boche intelligence officers. An inno-
cent stray fact may be the complet-
ing link in a chain of information.
Boche spies are trained and valu.
able men. They are constantly dis
appea ring from the Huns intelli-
gence organization and new ones
must be furnished to take their
places. Thus, if the Hun is COM
PEELED TO send spy to root out Ger.
tain information he risks losing that
trained cog In his machine If a
talker with loose tongue and too
much information talks too much the
Boche gets his information free, risk
ing nothing.
Last fall Fritz heard that Ameri-
can troops might be expected in the
line at certain time. His aero
planes spotted khaki-clad soldiers in
a Fench sector. So Fritz planned a
raid to identify those Americans-to
take a few captives and try to pump
them for important facts concerning
the whole expedition.
The raid cost Fritz about 10000
explosive shells, at least one soldier
and perhaps more He had to train
his raiders in the particulars of that
raid and it may have cost him the
/. lives Of some transport troops to
bring up the shells which rained on
/ the Sammies during the action.
| Whatever information the Boche
obtained was bought and paid for in
soldiers and material.
/ So close was the American secrecy
when the troops withdrew from that
sector that Fritz wasn't sure whether
/ they were still there. Some weeks
later it became necessary to his in
| telligence department to make abso-
llutely sure whether the Sammies