DEATH IN THE GUTTER
SIR,—A journalist must accept the sub-editor's shears as a normal penalty for writing too much, but occasionally he must point out that, un- intentionally, they have modified sense. When I wrote that a young officer's voice shouting 'cease fire' in an Algiers street on Monday, March 26, 'echoed through France' I meant it literally, not emotionally or symbolically. His voice, the groans of the wounded and dying, and the noise of the sub-machine guns were all recorded by a radio reporter in the crowd and were put out in the next news bulletin of Europe Number One—a well- known French commercial radio. Such sound re- porting of street demonstrations, much more moving than any television film, is a special, though of course not exclusive, feature of Europe Number One news bulletins, and has certainly been valu- able in bringing home to Frenchmen in France the nature of the Algerian problem—as for instance during the Moslem demonstrations of December, 1960. Sometimes, as perhaps on this occasion, when a violently emotional scene is conveyed out of context, the result is more disputable.
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