"We have," said Dawson. "Not many cases, perhaps, but sufficient to
show the existence of a very real danger. It is, indeed, one
particular instance of direct communication which has brought me to
you to-day. Orders were given not long since that all new cases, that
is, all parcels addressed to prisoners whose names were new to local
lists, should be opened and carefully examined. Some six or seven
weeks ago parcels began to be sent from this city addressed to a
lieutenant in the Northumberland Fusiliers. There was nothing
remarkable in that, for though we are some distance here from
Northumberland, young officers are gazetted to regiments which need
them irrespective of the part of the country to which the officers
themselves belong. In accordance with the new orders all the parcels
for this lieutenant--which usually consisted of bread, chocolate, and
tins of sardines--were examined. The bread was cut up, the chocolate
broken to pieces, and the tins opened. If the parcel contained nothing
contraband, fresh supplies of bread, chocolate and sardines to take
the place of those destroyed in examination were put in, and the
parcel forwarded. For the first two weeks nothing was found, but in
the third parcel, buried in one of the loaves, was discovered a
cutting from an evening newspaper which at first sight seemed quite
innocent. But a microscopic search revealed tiny needle pricks in
certain words, and the words, thus indicated, read when taken by
themselves the sentence, 'Important naval news follows.' At this stage
I was sent for. My first step was to inquire very closely into the
antecedents of this lieutenant of Northumberland Fusiliers. I found
that his friends lived at Morpeth, that he had been taken prisoner
during the Loos advance of September 1915, and that he had died about
a year later of typhoid fever in a German camp. His friends, as soon
as they had been informed, of the death, had stopped sending parcels