Country girl Anne Maxwell is receiving lessons from choir master Karl Krona, who is secretly a German sympathiser.

Krona shaves off his moustache to pass as a Belgian and establishes an opium den in Chinatown to lure soldiers on the way to the front into deserting.

One hour later, Inspector Fullerton ordered management to remove all billing and reported to the chief of police that certain parts of the film were likely to be objectionable to the Chinese community, and others would prejudice recruiting.

It was only absent from the screen for a few brief hours whilst the censor-board met and decided that after all it was harmless, but the advertisement the incident brought in its train was priceless to Beaumont Smith.

Many another man would have invented somehing of the sort, hoping to catch the censor’s eye and flopped horribly when he found that collection of individuals looking the other way when the incident appeared.