Much the same thing happened around Verdun. Many of these frontier
towns had secret telephones installed in the cellars. A French
ambulance worker, taken prisoner, was conducted into one of these
farms to await the convoy she was to join. By accident she was hustled
into a room full of telephonic apparatus, and was able, before she was
hurriedly taken away again, to read the names of some twenty French
villages inscribed over them. She had encountered by chance the central
exchange of the spy farms.
In this manner did the Huns lay their plans for the hoped-for
occupation of France. When the time came for the declaration of the war
the majority of the spies of Germany made good their escape. But some,
in accordance with the orders of their superiors, remained behind to
continue to assist in the conquest of the country.
When the German army was marching towards Paris signals were noticed at
night on the heights of Meudon-Bellevue, and these were answered by
others along the river. Similar ones were noticed near the Gare du Nord
and the Gare de l'Est, and it is a fact that at no matter what hour a
train of stores left the former station bombs were always dropped upon
it. This continued, I have been told by a person in authority, until
certain spies, who had obtained employment with the railway company in
order to signal the departure of the trains, were discovered and shot.
I have often been asked if I think that much spying still goes on,
even in this third year of the war, and my invariable reply is, "Read
the newspapers." Hardly a day passes without a case of espionage being
recorded in the Press. Here are two typical examples which have come to
my own particular notice quite recently.
The first is that of a certain Marie Liebendall, wife of Gimeno
Sanches, born at Düsseldorf and twenty-eight years of age. Accused of
espionage, she was sentenced to death by the Council of War of the
Fifteenth Region. She gave herself out to be a countess, but in reality
is the daughter of the manager of the Mannesmann works at Munich.
After residing in Germany and the United States, she came to France,
under the cloak of her Spanish husband, and devoted herself to spying.
She was arrested at Cerbère, at the very moment she was escaping into
Spain. Imprisoned at Marseilles, she attempted to poison herself.
The second case is that of Frido J. C. von Meyerem, who was sentenced
to death on September 6th last by the First Court-Martial in Paris
and then tried again in November by the Third Court-Martial, the
first sentence having been quashed owing to a technical fault in the
procedure. Meyerem was accused of concealing his German nationality at
Nice in March, 1916, and also of entering the entrenched camp of Paris
in the same month. While at Nice he corresponded in invisible ink
with an espionage agent, who sent him a cheque for about forty pounds.
He was also charged with having furnished the enemy with information
prejudicial to the operations of the army and compromising the security
of the forts and other military establishments. Meyerem was again
adjudged guilty and sentenced to death.
Thousands of these men and women, ready to risk their lives for the
love of money and the German Fatherland, undoubtedly continue their
dangerous work all over France to-day. The majority of them are women,
either the German wives of French subjects or alleged "neutrals." They
are thus free to go about under the protection of their borrowed or
neutral flag, without let or hindrance. Some who are unmarried play, I
am convinced, a more hazardous game by remaining in hiding until night,
when they come forth like nocturnal birds of prey. This is by no means
so difficult in a large city like Paris as one would think, as witness
the case of an Austrian, Michel Augmeister, aged thirty-eight, a native
of Martensdorf, who remained hidden away by his French wife in his
apartment at 24, Rue Brey, for no less than twenty-six months. It was
not until October 25th last that, as his health was suffering seriously
from seclusion, his spouse considered it the wisest plan to give him up
to the police.