SPIES IN PARIS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LI, Issue 15767, 16 November 1914, Page 4

SPIES IN PARIS.

SECRET WIRELESS PLANT.

HOTEL MANAGER'S FATE.

■ " He's been shot; over a hundred spies have been shot at Vincennes and La Mtiette."

This Frenchman was speaking of an hotel manager I used to know a little, says G. Ward Price, in the London Daily Mail. His hotel is off the ChampsElysees, Paris, a place of soft carpets and inlaid wood, marble, and palms. He was one of those suave, self-possessed Germans or Austrian hotel managers who make on you an uncanny impression of omniscience.

They speak every European tongue without a trace of faltering; they know the name of the best hotel, and are personally acquainted with its manager in every city in Europe. They can give you detailed directions for the most complicated journey without opening a single time-table, and their information is right to the last particle; they know at what station the dining-car is put on, and they impress upon you to remember that the train leaves Kleinstadt-am-Fluss 20 minutes earlier this month than the time mentioned in the time-table.

That is how I remember him; always in a frock-coat whatever the season, whatever the hour, day or night; always wearing the diamond pin that a travelling monarch gave him; always alert, though unobtrusive; known of all his guests, lamilmr with none.

Certainly, if we had stopped to think, about it, we should have realised that there was one side of his life of which one saw nothing. He was rich, they said; he owned hotels of his own in Paris and in Switzerland. Was he married No ono knew or even troubled to ask; it was enough that whenever you came to the hotel he was there with the same wonderful memory for your .name and everything about you—the same silent, smooth efficiency. He has been shot, they say. Possibly it is only another of "the exaggerated stories that are passed from mouth to mouth in this imaginative city of cafes and concierges and gossip. Certainly he disappeared immediately war began, while both guests and staff were turned out at an hour's notice, and the hotel -itself is now empty and guarded by the police. We shall know what became of the manager, perhaps, after the war. It was one of the page-boys of the hotel, they say, who, in a boy's way. got out of his attic window on to the roof. He scrambled about in great glee for a while, climbing on to the ridges of the gables, and looking over the housetops right away to the green Hois. At last he came to the turret that stands at tho corner of the —one of

those little ornamental cupolas that architect;: put on to hotels to gratify the hotel proprietor's sense of graceful design, a tiling like a pepper-castor, surmounted by a t,".1l fla:,;-luff. which is stayed against wind by a circle of stout wire ropes running down to the roof.

There is a door in the side of the cupola, with a ladder leading up to it, and the sight of a closed door in a turret is enough to fire the curiosity of any boy. Up the ladder scrambled the little 'page, pushed open the dour—and then started back in astonishment. Instead of being empty, the turret contained a large table, and the table was covered with instruments and coils of wire and wheels. The man sitting at the table had a telephone-receiver clamped over his head, and as the door opened he swung round with a 6tartled word.

Penitently the frightened little boy stood there stammering; apologies. He had recognised the chief of the hotel staff. The manager seized the boy angrily by the shoulder. What business had he there? What did he mean by disturbing important experiments? "Go down at once, you little rascal, and if you say a word about this without my permission there'll be trouble ahead of you. '

Thoroughly scared, the "petit groom" scurried away. It whs sonic flays before lie told anyone (if his strange discovery of the. manager in the cupula with the mysterious coils of wires and telephonereceiver. Rut gradually, first to another page-boy, then through all the servants of the hotel, the story spread. And at Jast one Frenchman who heard it, more alert than the rest, reflected that there was talk of war between France and Germany, and took the trouble to go round to the police station.

Nothing apparently happened. But the military governor of Paris had been told of tho incident, and from windows in houses round the hotel discreet field-glasses were Hatching the unobtrusive little turret. Then there came the German declaration of war, and the next morning several detectives in plain clothes drove up in a taxicab to the hotel.

They crossed the broad hall, with its lofty, gleaming marble walls, to the manager's office. At his rich mahogany desk sat the manager, spruce, self-possessed, capable as ever. "You have been using a secret wireless apparatus on the roof of your hotel for the purpose of conveying messages to the enemy. You are arrested as a spy." Some of the detectives were driving away with their prisoner a moment later. The rest stayed to make arrangements for the immediate closing of the hotel.

And since then the manager has not been seen by anyone. Only from every sice you hear the same story. A courtmartial sitting in one of the big barrack forts round Paris, and the next day a firing squad in the moat, and facing-it the hotel manager, a convicted spy. Is this the true story of his disappearance? I can only say that it is what everyone in Paris will tell you. War is a grim business.