THE SPY—A HERO OF SORTS

Dominion, Volume 8, Issue 2419, 26 March 1915, Page 6

THE SPY—A HERO OF SORTS

NEMESIS AND THE END A BATTLEFIELD SKETCH One could not withhold one's respect. The man was a spy. He was unarmed, mufti, the centre o* a squad of bayonets, and he kept step with his guard, marching as resolutely and looking as smart and unconcerned as they. In a few minutes he would bo in a forbid-ding-looking whitewashed room. A brief tribunal, a Court hostile and severe, then his back against the wall of tho barrack square—quick execution. It needs some, pluck, this prying about docks and arsenals or in the country bohij.d the enemy's lines in mufti or ?, fake uniform with a fictitious passport. The average mail when asked to carry a dispatch through heavy fire, to lay a fuso uudor a house occupied by the enemy, or to lead a frontal attack against machine-gun fire is generally afraid to 'argue his peculiar unfitness for the choice. But told to wander about among the enemy's pickets in disguise, to try and locate his batteries and signal his discoveries by manipulating tho hands of the village clock, he might well ask, like the Irishman, if he might be shot before he started. And it is generally to so little purpose (writes Mr. Edmund Chandler in the "Daily Mail"). What, for instance, could the spy hope to achieve who arrived in in tne uniform of a trooper of the 3rd Dragoons with his belt awry, a German accent, and no knowledge of where his regiment was or what it had been doing? So marked a fraud that he fell a prey to tho first Canadian policeman on the bridge. Pierre simoneau. Others are better employed. Pierre Simoneau, for instance—it was not his real name —stood at. the street corner counting, and checked the number of the troops that passed. Of course it is natural to stand at street corners nnd to stare at soldiers as they yo by. Everybody does it. But when one has done it for ten days and has no other apparent business in the place one is apt to attract attention. Simoneau must have been waiting for the touch on his arm, the voice in his ear asking him to step aside and answer certain questions. When at last he felt the tap on his shoulder, the thirty-two pieces of gold in his pocket, thirty louis d'or and two English pounds sterling, cannot have been any great consolation. Simoneau, it appears, was not a patriot, but a bought man. The informer told me that he had sometimes seen him smile as he stood at the street corner counting. 'The interpreter, who arrested him, did not see this smile. The man's face, keen, hard, and foxy, witli bushy red whiskers starting almost from the nose, and a Bmall, red, pointed beard, did not look as if it could contain one. No doubt it was an artificial smile, summoned up to the surface from the depths. It will not do for a spy to look self-conscious, hunted, or depressed. A_ man with a smooth round face and si jolly- grin will escape suspicion longer.

The Spy Unmasked. . In the Sous-Prefet's office he preserved his sang-froid. He described himself as a. time-expired reservist of the marine. He had his papers of discharge; and his weather-beaten face and his clothes —the peaked cap and cape like a longshoreman's—bore him out. The Interpreter, while introducing himself and his business to the Sous-Prefet, had hinted his suspicions delicately in a low voice. "Ah, yes, monsieur, I understand. A spy? he had repeated with all the callousness of a hanging judge; as if it were one more page in a tedious file. He was searched. A loaded revolver was found in a, bulging waistcoat pocket and a German military passport allowing him to leave Lille. The evidence was already sufficiently damning. "What are you doing hero?" "I have come to look for relations." "What relations?" Cross-examined, the man failed to establish any association with the neighbourhood. He was marched off to the gendarmerie, still looking unconcerned. In his room, a garret in the Rue des Echevins, they found some pieces of uuburnt cordite carefully wrapped up in his bedding. "They are souvenirs,' he explained. Nobody could look less like' a souvenir hunter than the longshoreman.

"Where did you get them?" "I picked them up." The interpreter looked puzzled. The gondarme explained. "He can tell his friends the Boches there was a battery of such and such a calibre in such and such a place."

Each place was the'full section of a shell.

It was necessary to take the longshoreman to British Divisional headquarters, and the interpreter turned out a guard of Sikhs—a formidable crew, rain-sodden, fierce-looking, unkempt, fresh from the trenches. Between their fixed bayonets he showed the first signs of uneasiness.- They showed no respect for his whit© skin. Once, when he topped they prodded him, calling out "Beiman admi"—words that he did not understand; The remoteness of his guard from all conceivable human relations, their hopeless inaccessibility, seemed to cut him. off entirely from the promise of life, lo was like being handed over to the powers of darkness. .. . "Coupez la Corge! In th® street Jittle boj6 danoed in pantimime, drawing the back of the thumb across the throat, crying "Coupez la gorge!" Others pointed thicks and mimicked the firing-squad, crying "pong-pong" and laughing merrily. He heard a woman say: "Voila un prisonnierl" "Prisonnier!" her escort replied. "Not for long. It is not worth the paiuo to till the mouths of ces gens la." In the darkness, which Tendered the presence of the guard less oppressive, the spy took thought. Why had he not taken the thirty-two pieces of gold to this family? It had all been for nothing. He would die. and they would not profit. At last, blundering along a muddy drive, they reached a farm with a pennon fluttering above the door and a naked flagstaff cutting the grey light between two elms. Here the spy showed a momentary sense of relief when ho was handed over by the Sikhs to a British guard. But the end was not yet. A sapper in the staff mess recognised Simoneau. Ho bad been D.A.D.R.T. at a railway station at the base, when a mun hurriedly opened the door of his office, stood thero for a minute with his eyes fixed on the wall, and when asked his business 6did that he had been told he would find a doctor there. A man hud been run over by a motor-car outside the station. He apologised, saying the doetor must be on the platform on I he otber side, and then bolted across hurriedly. Nothing more was heard of lum o,- of the supposed accident. Gradually it dawned 011 the men in the office that he had been reading the list of trains, with their destinations and the complements of troops for the different rai)-lie«d6 inscribed 011 a slate on the wall. The man was Simoneau. There was another lount, and that ia why the man was sent south to clear things up. In a certain bakery at tin base a loaf, of bread was issued dail; for every unit at the fronL. The outpm of loaves tallied exactly with the tola! strength in tho firing line. A psendoin. the employ of tin bakorj

had shown too keen an interest in tho tally. He asked 6ome questions whioh excited suspicion, and then mysteriously disappeared before pay day. Whether this third count was definitely brought home to Simoneau I cannot say. In any case he could only be shot once.

After the court-martial, in the few brief moments before the execution of sentence, a student of human nature aeked tho man what his motives were, and Tie said quite simply— "One owes it to one's infants to support them."

It appears that the man was a kind of hybrid from the frontier, with no strong roots in auy soil. He had lost his trade in the war. It is true he does not deservo one's pity, .vet one must respect his courage. Also ono could wish—though this is not good ethics —that the thirty louis d'or and the two pounds English sterling might find their way to "the infants," who aro perhaps untainted by hereditary sin.