WOMEN SPIES.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXXIV, Issue LXXIV, 12 March 1919, Page 2

WOMEN SPIES.

TWO OUTSTANDING EXAMPLES

There is one field in this war where j woman has won hands down —espionage j writes "F.T." in the Daily Mail. In I this refined and anything but contem-' table art she ha-s made mere man look j about as intelligent as —the villain in J a spy play ! l 8010 and Lody and other men may I have held the stage more,, but indubitably the pregnant spy case of the whole war was that of Mata-Hari, the DutchHindu dancer, who died so bravely before a dozen poilus, her eyes unbandaged and refusing a chair. In this young woman you see crystallised the super-spy. She was an actress, She was pretty, charming, a

linguist. She was a cosmopolitan, had travelled Europe and gained the highest

friendship before the war, and had the entree into the most exclusive salons, there to display her art-—and, incidentally, keep her ears open for the vanitybabble of frivolous "Society"" women discussing their husbands at the front.

She was shot for being largely responsible for that terrible set-back to Nivelle on the Aisne in April, 1917. She was worth an army to the Huns. There are Mata-Hari still lying low today in the capitals of Europe; a dozen •such more vitally affected the war is over than a dozen thousand of the kind all our scares have been about. In this tabloid tale I may recall but one other.

It was at the Hotel Bristol, Warsaw, about Christmas time, four years ago.

The sam a people always stayed at the Bristol; the wives and .daughters of senior officers, the mil'tary attaches and special correspondents, a selection of war brides and chap?roned fiancees, I a dozen or so of entrancing and imperious courtesans; scions, effeminate ono'.ipfh at times, of the local houses of Potocki and Radziwill1, statesmen and , distinguished visitors to the front. Red Cross sistras of high degree (half nun, half Itu d? la Paix), finally' an j incessant flow of officers living fit a ; hundred miles an hour for a few days j before returning: to the front. • i Well, in this Hotel Bristol resided a j brilliant' and pretty "Polish" girl when j she was not working in a Red Cross i train out at Bolimov. This girl w as j everybody's favourite; she had all, j and more, of the accomplishments out- | lined above in Mata-Hari'-s case.

And what, was she doing? Collecting information from every second officer in the hotel, in this way: j "Yes, it is true. I lovo you. Let me dress up and come out to the trenches with you. No? Well, you must tell me exactly where you are. where you sleep,-;fight, live, so that when I think i of you I .shall imagine I r.m actually ! with you!" " I Whereupon she would produce a large ' scale map and get her admirers to ! mark on it full particulars of their life ! in the line—where they were billetted, i and much more information. Should ' ■she want a few battery positions marked in she would transfer her affections temporarily to a gunner. Then came her tour de force. She actually persuaded one of her adorers to give himself up to the Germans, bearing her reports, when on the niglf patrol in No Man's Land. Happily hei victim "ratted" at the last moment and pretty sister—she turned out to be a German girl from Posen—was shot by the moujiks she had betrayed with one arm while tending them with the other.