PRICE OF A SPY.

Taranaki Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 144667, 29 April 1915, Page 6

PRICE OF A SPY.

BOUGHT FOR TEN FRANCS. DEAD MARCH TO DEATH. We were out upon one of the few sunny mornings Flanders has known this year (writes a correspondent to tho Daily Mailh A lone road, bordered upon either hand by poplars which appeared to wish they had never been horn and by ditches lately full of dead Gormans, led to a village which was a village no more, ami. incidentally, to a farmhouse which Dickens would not have loved. Such n forlorn place I have rarely seen —roof off. stables down, cabbage patch but a pool of liquid mud, a hayrick half eaten, and a lew rags of washing on a line just to show that “madame” was .still at home. Vc passed it by with a sense of relief and drove on toward the village. Then wo saw tho spies. THE PATH OF DEATH. There were two of them, and they walked amid a little company of soldiers: their hands bound behind their backs and their fares exceedingly pale. Roth had the round, chubby laces qt the Germans, and both wore their hair clipped almost to rhe'skull. One wrs dressed in a dark blue blouse as though he had been a butcher: ihe other might have passed for a fat farmer recently returned from market. Of the soldier.* gulirding them hut two carried rifles—the others. 1 wits told were the witnesses, and at their head walked n smart Belgian officer, who carried a cane in his hand. Thus constituted, tho procession turned in at the garden gate of the mean farmhouse. and wa* lost to our view. •Just lor an instant, while the men were passing, the younger of the two looked me fid! in tho face, ami his eyes tried to read mine in quite a curious way. Ji t * may have been thinking that here was a stranger and a civilian, and that the presence of such a one might, cause delay. 1 cannot fay what it was. but the expression seemed that ni a hope born in a flash and in a flash gone by. THE STORY OF THE MILL. MV drove on‘live kilometres and-once more came to a ruined village. Here in the shade of a splendid mill that may have looked across the waters since Alt a ruled the Low Countries. I hoard my second story of the spies. “Do you ste that indir” asked my soldier fneml. j told him that it was iiiipossib'e not to see it. “Well/' ho ran on. “it tost us the lives of a good many men. Our fellows used to bivouac in what's left of tills village, and they never could understand how it was that directiy a detachment cam:’* here the Germans opened fire ou them. One day a small noy, who had crept back la his home from the ditches, dropped a woid which set an officer thinking. The Gormans were firing, and tin* mil! was working;. “They Aoized the miller and draggty] him to the commandant. Witnesses swore that the mill had always started directly French or Belgians came into tho place. Tho man was staggered, hut the evidence was too numb frr him. He confessed in the end that lie had sold himself for ten franes. i’JI show yon tho bullet holes in the palings against which they shut him —just a huddled heap of flesh he made a quarter of an hour after they had taken him—nnd his mill wn.s still ivmking. as som(*om> discovered ironically half an hour after he wax dead.”

THE TRAITOR-SHEPHERD. This is a. typical story. There must he hundreds of palings in France today pock-marked for posterity hv tlio bullets which ended the life of .spies. A friend of mine passed one not far from Vpres the other day, and heard a story no less remarkable than that of tlio miller . T liis time a shepherd was concerned. Onr fellows could not understand why tho Germans Plot the range of their guns directly the battery was moved: but ono nay the usual smart officer appeared upon the scene and liepan to interest himself in agricultural pursuits. There was a shepherd, ho observed, and there wore sheep. Tlie. latter appeared to have a bins toward field artillery which was quite remarkable. No sooner was a battery moved from one hillside to another than they followed it. Such a phenomenon naturally led to a. parley with that Arcadian simpleton h.v a soloct company of ditsinguished officers. The fellow confessed immediately, and having admitted that lie also had been bought for five francs, he was led to the wayside aud shot. SHOT FOR BAD PARSING. Bnt here, and there, though rarely, a spy is as amusing in the box as an elderly gentleman who has written love loiters to ai! orphan. One such man turned up recently in the French linos. Ho word the uniform of a British staff officer, and spoke French fluently. When asked why he was inspecting our trenches so closely, he said that Iho British had sent him to Imp forage. Now it happened that in that particular place the reverse had been the case, and tiie French were "borrowing forage of the British. So the man was suspected immediately. Upon the top of this what should happen but that a British officer came up and confronted the follow. "Speak English,” he, said to him. The man’s answer was that as French officers wore present, ho preferred to use a language employed by all. Of course they pressed him. and in the end he stammered a sentence which would have knocked out the meanest professor of languages that ever ranted in a school So they shot him because of his parsing.