Besides all this thousands of letters are sent direct to the base censors every day, in cases where soldiers are unwilling that their own immediate superiors should become acquainted with the contents. To humor, therefore, the enlisted man in a former National Guard unit whose censoring officer he suspects of trying to cut him out with The Girl Back Home, the base censor takes the responsibility off the company officer's shoulders; and the enlisted man feels oh! so much relieved. Those clever chaps who devise all sorts of codes to tell the home folks just where they are in France, meet short shrift at the censor's hands. For example, one of them was anxious to describe a certain city in this fair land. "You know grandmother's first name," he wrote naively, thinking it would get by. But the particular censor it came before, having a New England grandmother of his own, promptly sent the letter back with the added comment, "Yes, and so do I! Can it!" Another man was so bold as to write: "The name of the town where I am located is the same as that of the dance hall on Umptumpus avenue in ----" well, a certain well-known American city. He was also caught up; for the censor, being himself somewhat of a man of the world, shot the letter back with the tart comment: "I've been there, too." Those two men, however, were more fortunate than the average in having their letters sent back to them for revision. The usual scheme is for the censor to clip out completely the portion of the letter carrying the damaging information. In case, therefore, a man has written something innocuous--but interesting none the less to his correspondent--on the other side, he is simply "out of luck." One can see it pays to be careful. On the whole--aside from the mania which seems to have possessed some men to give away the location of their units in France--the censoring officials declare that the army deserves a great deal of credit for living up to both the letter and the spirit of the censor's code. They do, however, find fault with the men who continually "over-address" their letters--that is, who persist in tacking on the number of their divisions to the company and regimental designations. This, for military reasons, is forbidden, but many men seem as yet unaware of the fact. Many Thank-you Letters During the first half of January the base censor's office alone handled more than 8,000 letters a day--two thousand a day increase over December, due, no doubt, to the thank-you letters which our dutiful soldier-men felt compelled to write in return for those bounteous Christmas boxes. In the spring, though more transports will be coming over, more men will be writing letters, but still the work will go on. The abuse of the letter-writing privilege by one man might mean the loss of many of his comrades, so the long and tough job of censoring must be "seen through."