AMAZING SPY STORY.

Taranaki Daily News, 30 October 1915, Page 10

AMAZING SPY STORY.

"DEAD" MAN'S DOUBLE. FRENCH WIFE MOURNS A GERMAN AS HUSBAND. Paris, August 18. The following is a true story of one of the German methods of spying. Captain Belmont had been dangerously wounded in an action in the Champagne country, and was carried to a hospital in a little neighboring town, where lie shortly died without regaining consciousness. On searching his pockets when he was admitted the authorities had found a letter addressed to his wife, with the note: "Please forward in case of dangerous wounding." The letter was sent, and Mine. Belmont was able to reach the hospital from iParis beforo her husband was placed in his coffin. The nursing sister who had tended the captain received her and tried to break the nods as gently as possible, but at the first words the widow understood and fell fainting into her arms. The sister, who knew that the dead man's face was fearfully mutilated, managed to persuade the wife not to insist on seeing the dead man's features again, so as "to keep in her memory the face as she had last seen it." Mme. Belinont returned to Paris and shut herself up with her grief, declining the offer of her mother to go and stay with her. Throe months passed and then one morning the post brought a letter, dated on the envelope from a hospital, with the address in the writing of her husband. As if turned to stone she held the letter in her hands, gazing at it with fixed eyes and not daring to open it, scarcely breathing in the mad conflict of feelings that overwhelmed her. Fiiiilly she drew out a letter, and as she road it lino by line she fancied her reason was leaving her. There were only a few words, in a trembling hand, to say that her husband had boon wounded in the Champagne and sent to a hospital on the Normandy coast. He had hung on the edge o? death for months, and it was qnly now that he was saved and had the strength to send her these few lines. The dates he gave of his wound and admission to the hospital corresponded with those given by the nursing .sister, and the wife was left in a haze of doubt and mystery until she went to Normandy, and then the truth came out. There the captain told her that he had been left for dead on the field, and when he came tn himself after many hours lie found himself stripped of his uniform and cap. and n man dressed in his clothes was standing looking at him. Snatching his revolver that had fallen by his side, the captain fired point blank in tlie face of the man who had robbed him, and remembered no more. It was whilst still unconscious that the ambulance men hart found him, as well as the other man, and had sent them to different hospitals. The natural comment on this strange but veracious story would be that all was well that ended well, but, temporarily, the consequences are serious. Captain Belmont having been officially returned dead has no longer any civil state of existence. He lias been wipeij out of the book of living Frenchmen and can no longer give or receive or sign or buy or sell. He is excluded from society, and though ho is alive and well his wife is a widow, and if a child were born it would be a posthumous one. It will probably take months and cost no small sum for him to regain his place in the sun.