TWENTY YEARS FOR A YOUNG TRAITOR.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XXXIX, Issue 10959, 27 December 1911, Page 7

TWENTY YEARS FOR A YOUNG TRAITOR.

HERO CORRUPTED BY SOCIALIST

DOCTRINE.

"In the name of the French people,. Deschamps. Maurice Gaston, for treason and theft, for conduct unworthy of a Frenchman and a soldier, you are sentenced to twenty years' hard labor." The Judge of the Rlieims .Assize Court sat down. .. The sentence was passed oil Maurice. Gaston Deschamps after a week's trial in camera- for the theft of a machine gun from baiTacks, and its sale to a Gercan secret service agent in Strasburg. As the terrible words fell from the judge's lips an old man. in court burst out crying. He was the prisoner's father, who had begged to be allowed to attend 1 the trial, but had been kept out of. court like everybody else during the hearing of the -case. The prisoner remained; unmoved as the sentence was announced. The people in court raised a cheer, which the Judge sternly suppressed. The story of Gaston Deschamps is not only a criminal romance, but it contains a lesson. His crime (one of-those crimes 'which- every decent man in every country thinks of with disgust), the betrayal of-the secrets of his country's defence to a- foreign' power, was the direct result of Socialism and Socialistic teaching. For inquiry into the early life of Gaston Deschamps, the son and grandson of French soldiers, shows that much reading of and listening to Socialist doctrines had tauglit him to disregard .all authority, to consider "the world one large human family," and to live for himself first, for "-the cause" next, and forget that his country, Franee, had any claims on him at all.

Deschamps' parents, though not rich, were comfortably off ,and' the lad had an excellent schooling at the college at Meaux. He was a clever lad and would have done even better at school than, he did, had it not been for his love of adventure. In the trial the defence put in reports from the schoolmasters in which the boy's character is described as "open, courageous, andi adventurous. He saved a schoolfellow from drowning when he was twelve years old. He stopped a runaway horse at the age cf fourteen. At fifteen he was one of the ringleaders in a strike against the masters, which he had workedl up after study of Socialist newspapers, which one of the day boys obtained' for him in Meaux, and- smuggled into the school. The strike lasted two days. Deschamps persuaded his comrades that the masters had "no right to make the boys work for longer hours than they, the masters, worked themselves," and the result was the barricading of. the class-room and no work at all for forty-eight- hours, after which Deschamps was severely punished, and work went on quietly, Some weeks after the school strike, during the holidays, Deschamps went to a music-hall in Meaux one evening to see a woman "looping the loop." She rtide down a steep inclined, plane on a bicycle, turned a somersault, and fell into a net. -The evening that Deschamps was there the woman killed Herself. Next morning the music-hall manager called on Monsieur Louis Deschamps' father, with a letter which the boy had written to him immediately after the accident. He had offered to take the place of the dead woman, and to "loop the loop" the next evening. A lad with such a character as this had all the makings of a soldier, but was not a soldier whom his superiors found it particularly easy to manage. In the regiment, as at college, he was in constant conflict with the set over him, and he was always being punished. He was unhappy in barracks, was fond of talking of desertion, which he considered "the duty of a free mail, as a protest against national slavers - ," and one day, at the end of August, 1909, Gaston Deschamps put his theory into practice, c I'm bed over the wall of the barrack yards, and bolted. His colonel gave him a week's grace, and tried to find him. But after a week, when no trace was found of him, Gaston Deschamps was entered on the regimental records as a deserter. Next day a mitrailleuse was missed from the the barracks of the 106 th Regiment at Chalons-sur Marne, and the theft made a tremendous sensation all over the country.

' No trace, however, was found of the thief, though everything pointed to Gaston Deschamps, who had been fond of telling his companions that- if ever he deserted, "as he hoped' to one day," he would "make the torturers in uniform, who broke every law of nature in the name of national defence" (this is pure Jaures) pay heavily for controlling his freedom and for keeping a free citizen under lock and key to do "murderer's work in uniform." The theft had been committed- with some skill aud daring. Deschamps had broken a small window, and had climbed into the shed in which the mitrailleuse was kept. He had kept the tube, which weighed; fifty-eight pounds, wrapped in a brown paper, and walked quietly out of barracks without 'attracting attention, with the stolen gun under his arm.

Then he had gone to the house of friend whom he knew to be away from home, had climbed into his bedroom, left his uniform there, stolen clothes of his friend's, and, dressed as a civilian, had loft by train for Strasburg, where he had hand'ed the-gun to an agent of the German espionage department, with whom, for some weeks, he had been in correspondence. For eight months the French police hunted Gaston Deschamps all over the Continent of Europe, from Germany to Austria, from Austria to the Tyrol, from the Tyrol to Switzerland!, and finally lost trace of him in Baden-Baden, where he escaped arrest by representing himself as a detective and 1 by locking in the bedroom of his own hotel the detective who had found him, while he escaped to the railway station and got clear away by train. But in April of last year, Gaston Deschamps began to long for Paris. He was imprudent enough to satisfy his longing, andi he was arrested on the Place de la Bastille by the same detective whom he had locked' in the hotel room at Baden-Baden a few months before.

Deschamps at first denied' all knowledge of the theft of the mitrailleuse. He had, he said, deserted because of a woman whom he loved,- and without whom he could not live. But one day the examining magistrate . forced! a confession from him. " He lectured his prisoner on his Socialist opinions, and told him what he thought of t-liem. Deschamps lost his temper, and, after an outburst of angry argument, confessed his crime, and gloried! in it. He afterwards denied that he committed it, and said that he had never been to Strasburg, but the French police know that a man in their employ saw him leaving the office of the German secret- service agent there. Gaston Deschamps will now have to submit to the awful ceremony of degradation before 'his former comrades, who will strip off his regimental braid and buttons in the barrack yard of the 10th Regiment at Chalons. And- Gaston Deschamps is- twenty-three, years old, and would have made a splendid soldier and citizen if Socialism had not spoiled him. . " -