NURSE HYPNOTISED

Greymouth Evening Star, 6 May 1940, Page 8

NURSE HYPNOTISED

STRANGE EXPLOITS OF SPIES. Of spy books, which are now booming, it may be said: there are spies—and spies. M. Robert Boucard’s should be fairly authentic, for he is an authority on European espionage, and as a French naval officer in the last war served under Admiral Sir Reginald Hall in the “Mixed Bureau” at Folkestone, a “pool” of British French and Belgian Intelligence.

Mp. Ronald Leslie-Melville, translating “The Secret Services of Europe,” claims that not only does M. Boucard know personally spies and counterspies of every nationality; he has access to confidential reports of a kind which in England “would remain locked up until the dust was thick upon them and the events they described.”

M. Boucard certainly presents some ripe specimens. Before the last war, he recalls, Britain maintained —in accordance with the accepted international game—several hundred “residential spies” in Germany. In 1914, one of them —J.M. 27, a German —was a youth of eighteen, finishing his studies at Heidelberg University.

Called up when war broke out, he was at the front within a few weeks, and with the rank of lieutenant was duly posted to the Intelligence Branch of the H.Q. Staff of the Crown Prince Rupert of Bavaria, then commanding the 6th Army at Lille! The Germans had such confidence in him that they promoted him captain, and he became one of the Crown Prince’s intimate friends. In the Sprang of 1918 .the Germans unmasked much of our spy service behind their lines, but still did not suspect that Captain X. was communicating with us regularly through a neutral intermediary. THE NEUTRAL DENTIST. Alter four years’ distinguished service (to British Intelligence, at any rale), he emerged from the war with the rank of commandant and was actually chosen by the Germans tc serve on the Armistice Commission at Spa! After which, instead of returning with his colleagues, he mysteriously disappeared. Only then did it dawn on them that they had been most impudently tricked: From Spa, M. Boucard' adds, he went straight to Whitehall to collect the reward for his great services. “How,” asks M. Boucard, “can one sound the depths of the mind of such a man, who cheerfully betrayed his country at a criticab hour in its history and now passes his days peacefully in luxurious idleness?”

Mlle. Solange de X., a girl of great beauty, was a ministering angel to the wounded in a French medical unit in the Argonne. The French police discovered that she was on intimate terms with two officers of an Artillery H.Q. Staff, and would wheedle oiit of them the location and strength of gun positions in their sector. and other important details. These she communicated to a dentist in Paris under cover of harmless letters—hieroplyphics written in lemon juice inside the envelopes. ’ When, to the amazement and indignation of the medical unit, she was arrested, she became hysterical, wept, and confessed everything, pleading: “I’m a miserable wretch, and yet I love France and our soldiers. But I couldn’t resist doing what I did. . Her extraordinary story was that, during a visit to the dentist, —a subject of a neutral country—rwith violent toothache, he learned that she worked in a medical upit at the front, and hypnotised her on the pretence of curing her pain. While she was thus at his mercy, he ordered her to betray her country.

She could do nothing but obey him, for she had not the strength to free herself from his influence. She sought to expiate her crime by nursing the wounded unsparingly. A medical examination proved that she was subject to hypnotic influence and could be sent into a' trance.

Terrified of having to answer for her unconscious misdeeds, she poisoned lierself with veronal before the court-martial, —From John o’London’s Weekly.