Censorship

By lagging post from somewhere in France, Violinist Yehudi Menuhin last week got a fan letter from the Western Front. "Now that our life, which can be taken away at every instant, has become more sharpened," wrote a soldier in striving English, "I want to say my admiration for the ones who have enjoyed my civil time. . . .

"Yesterday, drinking coffee in a farm and listening to the radio, I heard the speaker say, 'And now you will hear Partita No. 1 by Bach played by Yehudi Menuhin,' and the music flew in that farm as some years before in the Opera House in Paris, or the Salle Pleyel. And I remembered your playing with Enesco and orchestra under direction of Monteux and the only remembrance of these souvenirs of mine was so hot, they swept away the winds in the country, the planes overhead, and the anti-aircraft engines, and the guns and all that sort of thing. . . ."

From this poilu's note, the censor of Secteur Postal 390 had excised not a line.

Instead he enclosed a card with a message of his own: "I had to open this letter as it is my duty. I am also somewhere in France. We have no more real concerts, and our only pleasure is to hear the records on the wireless. It is not necessary to say that yours are the ones I prefer. . . ."

Pun

When the history of World War II pamphleteering is written, the showers of autumn-tinted, leaf-shaped bits of paper which the Germans dropped on the French front lines last November will not be forgotten. On them was printed: "AUTUMN

"The leaves are falling; we too will fall like them. The leaves die because God wills it, but we die because the English will it. Next spring, no one will remember any longer the dead leaves or the killed poilus. Life will pass on over our graves."

Underneath was a drawing of a skull wearing a French trench helmet.

Last week Nazi pamphleteers turned out new copy which was dropped in France. It boasted, nonsensically, that Germany had received "a million tons of cereals and two million tons of fodder" from Russia. But it tried chiefly to drive a wedge between Britain and France by means of a pun:

La France en armes pour I'Angleterre, en larmes pour I'Angleterre ("France in arms for England, in tears for England").

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