INSIDE THE WAR OFFICE.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 3338, 3 October 1911, Page 2

INSIDE THE WAR OFFICE.

THE TROUBLES OF SECRECY 1 . The management of secret papers within the War Office has always been something of a problem. The system of sending them about in lockod boxes, furnished with special locks, to winch • only certain highly placed, individuals possessed keys, was good in pnnciplo, but it was extremely troublesome, and ifc led to delays. • The plan of pinning a special blue label on the outside of correspondence of this nature. possessed the disadvantage that it indicated to everybody who handled the papers that the contents were confidentialno unauthorised person would be likely to take the trouble to untie an ordinary file of War Office papers to see - what was inside. Besides the blue label to denote secrecy, there was the red label to denote urgency. The worst of these red and blue labels was that they became so- common that, it Was almost impossible to take them seriously. The green label, on the other hand, was, comparatively speakB ing, rare; it indicated that the paper e was concerned with a question to be t asked in Parliament. Supposing that s a question to be .asked in Parliament is of an inconvenient kind, it is al- [ ways of interest to the official who s lias drafted the reply to note in the “Times” how skilfully his wording s has been bowdlerised when the answer s is actually given in the House. ‘ No actual perversions of the truth, you will understand. No terminological inexactitudes. But awkward corners * are rounded off so to speak, and the ' questioner is somehow left no wiser than he was before. - . War Office papers are enclosed in what are technically known as “jackets”—sheets of tough paper the size of a double sheet of foolscap. On the outside are marked heiroglypliics which indicate the people to whom the paper is to go. In the old days the jackets used to be doubled in two, and then tied up tight with.red tape; but some administrator (whose name has not been handed down to posterity as it o’-in-ht to be) hit upon tire device of not folding the jacket in two, so that now the paper opens out flat. Still, there was something also to be said for the old arrangement. Under it, it was almost impossible to write inside when a file once began to become voluminous, because the thing used to shut up; the modern plan is a positive invitation . There are those who find a certain difficulty in reading my hand- [, writing at times, and on one occasion 1 a very high authority indeed mistook 3 the word “to” in a minute of mine for the figure “‘B.” The figure “8” did not prevent the high authority i. from adding a minute of his own, l. based upon what he believed mine was intended to convey. There ensued one of the most bewildering corres--0 pondences which has ever circulated even in the War Office. Nobody could understand what anybody else meant, 0 but everybody recorded his opinion, starting from the erroneous assump--6 tion that he had discovered what the matter was which was at issue. I 0 should not be suprised if that correspondence is going on still.—Colonel Callwell, in Blackwood’s Magazine.