SPIES
The thoroughness with which Germany in her plotting to conquer Europe,
and later the world, had infested every country with spies, the
Americas as well as Europe, had organized a system spreading to the
antipodes, has been written history for some time.
There is no doubt that they managed at the beginning of the
war to honeycomb the armies of their opponents with these
“informants”--Germany doesn’t like the designation “spies.”
Well, in the first place, I can attest to the deftness with which they
tapped our telephone wires between the sectors of battle-fronts. But I
can also attest that while German scientific ingenuity was sharp and
clever, the German mind was frequently child-like. For we led them into
many traps and serious defeats again and again by the simple process
of sending false information over these wires we had learned had
been tapped. The guileless readiness with which they snapped up this
bait was sometimes almost comical. They were so cock-sure of their
own efficiency in tapping the wires undetected, that we were able to
play with them again and again--“play” that frequently meant death to
hundreds and even thousands of their men.
German thoroughness of preparation, German patience, German sheep-like
concert of action--these must be granted. But subsequent events of
the war showed that whenever Joffre, French, Pétain, Haig, Byng, the
Grand Duke Nicholas ever faced the greatest of the Boche generals with
anything like an arm of equal military strength, the Boche was beaten.
Serbia, Roumania, Belgium, the child-sized nations of the world--these
have been the conquests of the would-be international bully. Noble
laurels surely and properly fit to adorn the low, brutal, thick-fleshed
brow above the pig-eyes of a criminal empire!
But to get back to spies.
The Oxfords and Bucks were enjoying a rest, encamped near the little,
shell-wrecked village of St. Elois in Belgium. Our most welcome visitor
for several days was a young peasant girl, decidedly attractive because
of raven hair and very blue eyes. She brought us the Continental mail,
she served us with home newspapers, she sometimes brought us roast
fowl and other home-like edibles to enhance our soldier food. She was
frequently as well entrusted with our letters for mailing. She had a
smattering of English which was the first unusual thing I noticed about
her. Peasant girls of the locality can always make a stagger at French,
frequently enough know a little German. But I had never met one before
who could turn a word in English.
About this time became remarkable the accuracy with which the Germans
were planting shells along the roads of our Very rest camp, also how
neatly they seemed to be able to time their shots and how accurately
along the roads which the supply wagons traveled toward the front
lines. If it had been guess-work it would have been uncanny and none
of us for a minute believed it to be guess-work.
One evening a private of my platoon came to me with the information
that he had happened upon the girl seated in a small dug-out in one
of our trenches most studiously studying a paper spread upon the top
of the basket in which she usually brought edibles she sold us in
camp. This private had the good sense to saunter along as though he
had observed nothing. I warned him to continue to say nothing and went
looking for the girl.
She had still an armful of newspapers to dispose of and I observed her
in her free passage in our lines, joking with our soldiers, smiling,
affable, and, you would say, the most simple-minded and innocent of
maidens.
She never asked questions, but she would frequently stand over men at
play with cards and watch the game apparently intently. But, at other
times, if you watched her you would find her standing near a group
of our men who might be discussing our own immediate affairs--our
position, what they had learned or guessed of their commanders’ plans.
Every one had a pat on the cheek and a smile for Marie.
It did not seem possible there could be any harm in her! I began to
think that the private had seen her poring only over some scrap of
newspaper or periodical she had found, most probably one that had on
it a photograph or drawing that engaged her attention. He admitted he
didn’t get a good look at it, but also insisted he was quite sure it
was a piece of writing or pencil drawing.
However, as Americans says, it is “bad business” to dismiss such
matters in war with a wave of the hand. I decided to follow the girl.
She strolled easily down the road to St. Elois in the twilight. I held
off the road behind her as much as I could--wherever the brush would
give me footing. The road was nearly if not quite deserted at the time.
A few peasants’ carts passed. And I noticed that only one of these
peasants apparently knew Marie. They all nodded to her, but they nod to
any stranger on the road in that country. But one spoke to her, stopped
his horse and they conversed for a minute or more. The talk began with
smiles and banter, but presently it seemed to take on a more serious
turn. Finally he nodded his head in very decided confirmation of
whatever he had told her, started his horse and she resumed her journey
to St. Elois. But she no longer strolled. She moved with a smartness of
step that kept me going briskly in the concealment of the bushes and
trees beside the road to keep up with her.
Marie halted before a half-smashed house. The roof was gone and the
upper walls, revealing in stark desolation the empty chambers of the
upper story. But the ground floor of the house remained intact. Marie
loitered for several minutes before this house before she entered it.
In fact, she waited until darkness had completely enveloped the place.
I stole up to the house and groped around the walls. In the rear, a
light popped out of a window.
I wasn’t by any means certain that these things meant Marie was a
spy. For all I knew she might be a refugee. One found many a refugee
Belgian family quartered in such battered places in those days. The
fact that some of the peasant carters had apparently not known her
could also be laid to the same circumstances--that of her being a
peasant girl who had fled from a village in German possession.
But simultaneously with the popping up of the light, I heard a sound
that swept from my mind all such explanations regarding Marie. It came
quite clearly--the cooing of pigeons. That, decidedly, I didn’t like.
The carrier-pigeon has played an equal, if not greater, part with any
other method of secret communication. Not one of the great powers of
the war but has from 100,000 to 125,000 such feathered informants
working between their headquarters and stations in the enemy lines
established by spies. The wireless, telephones, secret codes, expert
signaling of modern warfare has not supplanted the carrier-pigeon.
He had proven his usefulness in war long ago--in the Franco-Prussian
war. It was at the time when Paris was cut off from the rest of the
world, that fanciers in the French capital went to the authorities
and explained that if the birds were sent to Tours in balloons they
would return with whatever news was entrusted to them. Accordingly,
more than eight hundred homing pigeons sailed as captives out over the
fortifications and as certainly returned with information--so much and
in such detail that Parisians have since declared that put into book
form would have made at least 500 volumes.
By a process of micro-photography the equivalent of a sixteen-page
newspaper was reproduced on a film which was inserted in a quill and
fastened to the middle-tail feather of the bird. These films were
thrown on a screen through a lantern that magnified them, just as
moving picture films are now shown.
Belgium from that date took the training of these birds and it was from
this little country that most of them were purchased and there they had
been most largely bred at the outbreak of the war and Belgian trainers
have been busy in the training of them ever since for the Allies.
Through the lighted window I saw the girl in closest conversation with
a man of peasant type. They were going over a small bundle of papers
on a roughly hewn table with the lamp between them. There was just the
rudest furnishing for habitation in the room that had been the kitchen
of the house. They were so interested in the papers that it was obvious
the opportunity was as good as any I could expect to take them by
surprise. So I stole away from the window and to the back door of the
house which opened directly into this room.
I managed to open the door without alarming them, but was so intently
keeping my eyes on them as I crept into the room, that I stumbled over
a loose brick in the floor of the shell-shaken house. Man and girl
leaped to their feet. He lost no time reaching under his blouse for a
pistol. But here I had him clearly at a disadvantage. My own automatic
was already in my hand. I shot him straight between the eyes.
The girl shrieked and started toward me in fury. She had no weapon so I
thrust my revolver into my holster and grappled with her. She fought
vixenishly for a few minutes, but then suddenly relaxed in my arms and
began violently sobbing. After that she very quietly accompanied me to
battalion headquarters. Once over her fit of fury, she made no pretense
that she had been other than a spy in our camp. But she said the man
had compelled her to do this work. She was a native of Belgium, but of
mixed Flemish and German parentage. She said the man was a German, she
had known him to be all the while, but said she loved him and that it
was only her love that had persuaded her to act as informant for him.
Now that he was dead, she said she did not care what became of her,
what punishment was given her.
“You can kill me, too. I didn’t like to do the things I did when the
men in your camp were always so friendly and kind to me,” she said,
“but I would do anything my man asked me to. He could make me do
anything.”
From the dead man’s pockets I secured many papers, going to show that
he had for a long time had accurate knowledge of the locations of our
railroad crossings and stations, the times of the movements of our
convoys and the paths they took, the times of relief in our trenches.
The girl led me to a cote camouflaged in the shattered roof of the
house where were more than a dozen homing pigeons. I took her then to
battalion headquarters. Later at her trial her life was spared, but she
was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment.
On several of the transports which brought the original 20,000
Australians to Egypt for training were detected more than a dozen
spies. One was caught red-handed tampering with the boiler of one of
the transports. A ship’s officer came upon him and there was never a
word exchanged between them. The officer sent five bullets crashing
into the spy’s head, blowing the top of his head off. Two other spies
were suspected, watched, caught and shot. But several others escaped
who tampered with the machinery of the ships to an extent that caused
great delay and in one instance at least, necessitated the return of a
convoy ship to an Australian port for repairs.
At St. Julien I had also direct knowledge of the workings and capture
of a spy--a clever one he was. As at St. Elois the Germans seemed
possessed of a wizard knowledge of our position and their guns were
regularly popping their shells into places within our lines which we
regarded as most well-concealed.
But from the church tower of the smashed village behind us, watchful
men one night saw the eccentric whirling and flashing of a mere
pin-point of light. The village was deemed to have been surely scoured
of spies. In fact, most of the inhabitants had been ordered away from
the place because at that time spies were so thick, and Belgians and
French, supposedly, so often turned out to be of German antecedents or
even of German birth, that the commanders had been all but ruthless in
sending the people away.
But none had suspected the padre--a small, gentle-voiced little man. I
had often seen him and bowed to him. Good Lord, come to think of it, I
had often commiserated him on the misfortune of the loss of his entire
flock!
An officer and a dozen men, the instant the information was reported of
the flashing tower light, were despatched to the church. They met the
good little padre serenely stepping out of its portal. He was asked if
there was any method of access to the tower. He smiled deprecatingly.
“It is no more than a false tower--a poor ornament on a poor church.
There was never a place for a bell in it,” he answered. “Nobody,
gentlemen, could gain access to that tower but a monkey or,” he laughed
in a quiet way, “an aëroplane and the good English seem to have driven
all the Boche aëroplanes away.”
“But the light flashing in the steeple, padre?” insisted the British
officer.
“There are little colored panes of glass in the tower,” he answered
readily enough, “put there to be of ornament when the light of sunrise
and sunset should rest upon them. Might not the flares of your guns
have flashed reflections from the panes?”
The officer considered. He said to me afterward that he was quite
convinced of the padre’s honesty, but thought that German spies might
have made their way by rope ladders or some other fashion to the tower.
He declared that it was more by force of habit than design that he
asked the padre to remain until he and two of his men had investigated
the matter.
They weren’t long in finding out that the “padre” was a liar. They
found a firm spiral iron stairway leading up into the tower and within
commodious quarters where there were a heliograph, rockets and flash
lamps of various sizes.
Meanwhile the “padre” was telling the soldiers that he would go down
the road a little way to his modest home and there await the officer.
And the unsuspecting soldiers were about to accede to the request when
the captain and his men returned from their investigations.
The “padre” suddenly produced a pistol and it spat its fire twice in
the darkness, wounding one soldier, but before he could fire again the
soldier nearest jabbed him in the throat with his bayonet. We were to
learn afterward that the real padre of the church had accompanied
his flock in its exodus and though we never learned anything of our
“padre,” it is certain, of course, he was no priest but an enemy spy.
In the trenches before the battle of Moquet Farm we got the news of the
capture and death of one of the boldest of spies that ever operated
among us. This man had been for days familiarly about the trenches
in the uniform of a British artillery officer. His English was as
faultless as his manner affable and his monocle firm in his eye. I have
never learned what led to his detection, but I witnessed his arrest
and saw him ten minutes later led to execution--a brave man, I must
confess, able to smile philosophically in the face of death and wearing
his monocle as debonairly as ever.
I have been asked so often whether in the excursions that I made from
time to time into the German lines in quest of information, had I been
captured would it have meant a spy’s death before a firing squad? So
I suppose the public generally does not understand the difference in
classification between a scout and a spy. As a scout I went forward
to the German trenches, wearing my British uniform. If caught, I was
entitled to treatment as a prisoner of war. Were I to wear a German
uniform and suffer capture, then the assumption of a disguise would
bring upon me a spy’s death. This is according to the agreements laid
down by the Hague convention. Germany, however, has proven itself so
utterly incapable of “playing cricket” in the game of civilization and
mankind, that I am heartily glad they never caught me at my scouting
tasks.