GERMANS FOOLED.

Pahiatua Herald, Volume XXXV, Issue 10435, 5 January 1927, Page 3

GERMANS FOOLED.

BY A LOVELY WOMAN ESPIONAGE DRAMA REVEALED. Tiie patriotic work done by a French widow in the war when, under the pretence of becoming a willing agent of the Germans, she fooled them by the information with which she was supplied by her own people, is revealed below. PARIS, November 2.

A gripping tale of espionage and counter-espionage has just been revealed here.

A Frenchwoman named Mathilde Lebrun, the widow of a non-com-missioned officer, managed to get into the German military intelligence service during the war. As an agent of the French Army in Lorraine —officially designated as “Simonne” —she crossed ‘No Man’s Land” on the afternoon of Christmas Day, 1914, calmly walked into the German trenches with a small suitcase and a white handkerchief flying on her umbrella, and smiled at her astonished captors. “I have been badly treated by my 'compatriots because I nursed some wounded German soldiers, and I am now trying to get to Brussels,” she naively explained. 24 HOURS’ GRACE.

The German officers were highly suspicious and questioned her daily for two weeks, being convinced that she was a spy. They discovered that she was intelligent, and finally demanded that she should become a German secret service agent, but “Simonne” flatly refused.

“We will give you 24 hours to reflect, and if you still refuse we will shoot you,” they told her. Mine. Lebrun eventually pretended to capitulate when they offered hex- a big salary. She became agent “R-2” of tlie Crown Prince’s army whose headquarters were at Metz, and made 13 trips via Switzerland to Nancy to get military information for her employers. THE IRON CROSS. The Crown Prince was so pleased with the information she brought from France—it was supplied by the French Intelligence Service —that he bestowed tlie Iron Cross on lier. In the course of these voyages to France, when she brought, back to Nancy. priceless information about German military preparations, <she trapped more than a dozen dangerous German spies working In France, including two extremely dangerous women operating on the Riviera.