THE GERMAN SPY SYSTEM

Otautau Standard and Wallace County Chronicle, Volume XI, Issue 522, 18 May 1915, Page 7

THE GERMAN SPY SYSTEM

One of the most dramatic, incidents of tlie -war was the capture at Amiens of a German Red Cross convoy -with airms, ammunition, explosives, and 48 doctors. Tlio French commander -accepted the; explanation offered him to account for the presence of material of war, and the German doctors amd their French confreres fraternised together for an evening's interchiange bf experiences. During dinner, when the talk ran naturally on "__\op" — the effects -of shellfire. the treatment of gangrene- and tetanus, and ;so on — it was noticed that some of the German doctors showed a singular unwillingness to be drawn into the conversation. Suspicions were aroused. One by one they were taken into an adjoining room, and there submitted to an elementary cross-examina-tion. Of the 48 there were 11 who knew nothing whatever of medicine. They were shot the next morning, and the genuine doctors were sent on to Geneva.

A disguise frequently adopted by the Germans is that of a priest. In Brussels priests took to greeting one another m Latin m order to detect impostors. During the German retreat from Paris a French battalion entered a village which had recently been held by the enemy. They found for a wonder that the church and the priest's house adjoining it were still intact. The venerable cure welcomed them, with open arms. He was invited to join the officers' mess and say grace before diner. He rose and m*urmured a Latin prayer, that would have imposed on any layman. But, as it happened, one of the French officers was not a layman but an abbe. He listened to the cure's effort with growing astonishment, and when it ended proceeded to ask him some technical questions.. The man m the soutane could not answer them. He was a -spy left behind by the Germans while they carried off the real cure as a hostage. At Malines Germans were discovered dressed as nuns. At Le Mans two of them, one robed as a priest and the other as a woman, were caught trying to blow up a railway bridge. At St. Die four were found m * the uniforms of French officers, attempting to rush through the French lines m a motor car. Five, with Red Cross badges on their arms, were arrested when on the very point of entering Paris m a oar loaded with bombs and explosives. At one place they attached contact wires and batteries k> a bridge, co that anyone setting foot on it sent an automatic signal to the gunnel's three miles away. At another, foreseeing which house the approaching French would probably , choose as their -headquarters, they tethered a white goat on the lawn to serve for the guidance of an aviator and his bombs.

The ingenuity and audacity of these ruses, of which I have given only such instances as I have been able to verify with tolerabla completeness, are self-evident. And unquestionably, as- I said before, they have proved useful on occasion, and have helped the Germain., to score some incidental successes. But it is very doubtful if, so fatr as they are; part and parcel of the spy system, they bring m any military return' at alV'equ'al to 'the expenditure of thought, energy, and money. At the headquarters of the General Staff m Berlin there have "been laboriously collected the "dossiers" of all the generals and most of the officers m the armies of Germany's probable enemies. Tftiey are cleverly prepared, and cover not only the weak ' and strong points of the officer's oharacter and -personality, but his financial position, ha 6 friends of both sexes, his habits and hobbies. _ From time to time no doubt the material thus brought together enables a clever spy to entrap and suborn some luckless or impecunious lieutenant, and very ' occasionally it may prove an advantage to be well informed as to the temperament of the commander who is immediately opposed to One. But even so, the direct profits of all this elaborate pigeon-holing must be ludicrously disproportionate to the care and . persistence lavished upon it. — Sydney Brooks m "The Atlantic Monthly.' *