Outside of Tiflis, in the Caucasus, in whose bazaars eighty languages are commonly spoken, I suppose that the Sixth Section of Military Intelligence, familiarly referred to as M I 6, is the nearest modern equivalent to the Tower of Babel. This section is charged with translating into English books, periodicals, newspapers, pamphlets, posters, proclamations, army orders, war diaries, confidential reports, Heaven only knows what besides, which appear in pretty much every language under the sun. The translators at present employed in the section make translations from the French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Dutch, Dano-Norwegian, Russian, Swedish, Greek, and Icelandic. This comprises only a portion of the section’s work, however, for it also makes translations from Roumanian, Ukrainian, Czecho-Slovak, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, Albanian, Bulgarian, Polish, Lithuanian, Lettish, Finnish, Ladino (there’s a strange one!), Hebrew, Yiddish, Turkish, Armenian, Assyrian, Syriac, Arabic, Hindustani, Bengali, Chinese, Japanese, Choctaw, and other North American Indian dialects, Samoan, a dialect of the Philippine Islands, and Esperanto. By an ingenious system of filing and indexing the information thus obtained, the section has become a sort of clearing-house for data gleaned from the foreign press. M I 8 is the Cable and Telegraph Section of Military Intelligence. A portion of its work consists in sending and receiving telegrams and cables between the division and its intelligence officers on duty outside of Washington, including the military attachés in foreign countries. By means of special wire connections, remarkably fast service has been provided, particularly with the most important centre, Paris, whence messages in plain text have been delivered in Washington four hours earlier by the clock than they were despatched, while code messages have been delivered at approximately the same time by the clock that they were sent. As an illustration of the peculiar tricks played by the change in time, I might mention—though it has nothing on earth to do with the subject of Military Intelligence—that the news of the death of Queen Victoria was received in New York three and a half hours before the time at which she breathed her last!