Have you noticed this, you on your _Auvergne_? Once in a while one has a true, honest, real tip--as, for example, when Fourgues or I tell things that we have seen with our eyes and heard with our ears on the _Pamir_ in Archangel, or Norway, or England, or somewhere else. Not jokes, but things like “two and two make four” and “two hands have ten fingers.” Well, then, Fourgues and I spin our little yarns when we are asked to, as though it might interest people and as though they wanted to know the truth. God bless you, not a bit of it! The higher placed they are, the less they want to know the truth. When you have told them something they know is true, they answer, “Whatever you do, do not repeat this! We must not make the public anxious!” One would ask nothing better than to hold one’s tongue provided the people in high places do whatever is necessary to remedy the evils they say must be kept dark. But when you see that it’s not at all in order to put things right quietly, that they order you to hold your tongue, but only that they may sit with their arms folded doing nothing while those who are not informed imagine that everything is being done--well, old fellow, it’s pretty rank! Or else these same official people don’t know that what you tell them is true--don’t know it officially, that is. So there’s no point trumpeting it into their ears. They listen to nothing, hear nothing, do nothing. Fourgues told at Mudros, at Salonica, and at other places the stories Flannigan told him in Trondhjem about the kind of submarine warfare the Germans were preparing for us. As he has an unholy memory for details, he repeated things from the German papers, with figures and all particulars. Well! All the Naval chiefs made fun of him as they did in the Fleet a year and a half ago. When he spoke of the _Cressy_, the _Hogue_, the _Aboukir_, the _Lusitania_, the _Bouvet_, the _Ocean_, the _Gambetta_, and all the others that have gone down, they answered that it was pure accident; that the Germans couldn’t do anything more because their submarines had been sunk--that all measures had been taken, that in less than six weeks the war at sea would be over, and that it was only necessary to read the papers! Whereupon Fourgues, somewhat astonished, pointed to the papers where the heading “Maritime News” is printed with one or two blank columns beneath. But when he assumes that these columns hide something, he is told that he is a coward and a panic-monger. Then he gets furious and holds his tongue for fear of saying too much. But he confides to me that with pudding-heads like that to look after things at sea, with those on the ships too old and those in the Ministries indifferent, we can expect anything of the Germans who won’t beat about the bush. He says it’s lucky for those who direct the English and French Naval affairs that the public understands nothing about it, otherwise they would get it in the neck in Parliament as the Army blokes did and we should be taking