Todd war diary, 3 August 1914-29 February 1916 / Arthur Todd - Page 343
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[Page 343]
What else could be done? These people threatened to kill everybody if there were any further display of force, and they looked as if they meant it. It wasn't safe to mention brigands to the Caesars.
We had been lotus-eating in Bermuda for some weeks and had had no mail for nearly two months. Messages were sent to the Australian postal authorities, who said they had sent our bags to G.P.O. London. London denied all knowledge of them. So for a time we were at a loss. At last elaborate enquiries revealed that our mails had been accumulating at the Brisitsh Consul-General's office in Washington. Why they were sent there nobody knows. The Consul-General didn't want them, and told us he let them gather in his office expecting orders as to their disposal which, needless to say, never came. It was quite by accident that we discovered their whereabouts. It was curious that our mail should be in America, as we were threatened with all sorts of dreadful penalties if we dared send a letter home across America - which was easily the shortest route - on the ground that it might fall into the hands of the Huns and reveal the great international secret, to wit the presence of the Sydney in northern waters. Our mails were one great muddle from first to last. The Melbourne, which followed us over most of the world, seemed always to have letters from Australia a month or so later in date than we: another example of parochial injustice of which the Writer makes a free gift to the press of the ships' eponymous cities. Still, it was most annoying, for nothing makes the sailorman