The French Ambassador in Switzerland reported that, owing to these
holocausts, important messages from that country, containing orders for
the French national loan, never reached their destination, in
consequence of which the French nation lost from ten to twenty million
francs. And even the letters and telegrams that were actually passed
were so carelessly handled that many of them were lost on the way or
delayed until they became meaningless to the addressee. So, for
instance, an official letter despatched by the Minister of Commerce to
the Minister of Finance in Paris was sent to Calcutta, where the French
Consul-General came across it, and had it directed back to Paris. The
correspondent of the _Echo de Paris_, who was sent to Switzerland by his
journal, was forbidden by law to carry more than one thousand francs
over the frontier, nor was the management of the journal permitted to
forward to him more than two hundred francs at a time. And when a
telegram was given up in Paris, crediting him with two hundred francs,
it was stopped by the censor. Eleven days were let go by without
informing the persons concerned. When the administrator of the journal
questioned the chief censor, he declined responsibility, having had
nothing to do with the matter, but he indicated the Central Telegraph
Control as the competent department. There, too, however, they were
innocent, having never heard of the suppression. It took another day to
elicit the fact that the economic section of the War Ministry was alone
answerable for the decision. The indefatigable manager of the _Echo de
Paris_ applied to the department in question, but only to learn that it,
too, was without any knowledge of what had happened, but it promised to
find out. Soon afterward it informed the zealous manager that the
department which had given the order could only be the Exchange
Commission of the Ministry of Finances. And during all the time the
correspondent was in Zurich without money to pay for telegrams or to