TRAITOR’S FATE.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXII, Issue 30, 18 January 1912, Page 6

TRAITOR’S FATE.

TWENTY YEARS’ HARD LABOUR. CORRUPTED BY SOCIALIST DOCTRINE. “In the name of the French people, Deschamps, Maurice Gaston, for treason and theft, for conduct unworthy of a Frenchman and a soldier, you are sentenced to 20 years’ hard labour.” The Judge of the Rhoims Assize Court *vas down. The sentence was passed on Maurice Gaston Deschamps after a week’s trial in camera for the theft of a machine gun from barracks, and its sale to a German secret service agent in Strasburg. As the terrible words fell from the judge’s lips an old man in Court hurst out crying. He was the prisoner’s father, who had begged to he allowed to attend the trial, hut had been kept out of Court, like everybody else, during the hearing of the case. The prisoner remained unmoved as

the sentence was announced. The people in Court raised a cheer, which the judge stonily suppressed. The story of Gaston Dcschamps is not only a criminal romance, but it contains a lesson. His crime (one of those crimes, in which every decent man in every country thinks of with disgust)—the betrayal of the secrets of Ins country’s defence, to a foreign Power—was the direct result of Socialism and Socialist teaching. For inquiry into the early life of Gaston Dcschamps, the son and grandson of French soldiers, shows that much reading and listening to Socialist doctrines had taught him to disregard all authority, to consider “the world one large family,” and to live for himself first, for “the. cause” next, and forget that his country, France, had any claims, on him at all. Lova of Adventure. Dcschamps’ parents, though not rich, were comfortably off, and the lad had an excellent schooling at the college at Mcaux. He was a clever lad, and would have done even hotter at school than lie did had it not boon for his love of adventure. In the trial the defence put in reports from liis schoolmasters in which the hoy’s character is described as “open, courageous, and adventurous.”

Ho saved a schoolfellow from drowning when ho was 12 twelve years old. Ho stopped a runaway horse at the ago of 14. At 15 he was one of the ringleaders in a strike against the masters, which ho had worked up after a study of Socialist newspapers, which one of the boys obtained for him in M oaux, and smuggled into the school. The strike lasted two days. Dcschamps presuaded his comrades that the masters had “no right to make the hoys work for longer hours than they, the masters, worked themselves,” and the result was the barricading of the classroom and no work at all for -IS hours, after which Doschamps was severely punished, and work went on quietly. Some weeks after the school strike, during the holidays, Deschamps went to a musichall in Meaux ono evening to sec a woman “Jooping-the-loop.” She rode down a steep inclined plane on a bicycle, turned a somersault, and fell into a net. The evening that Deschamps was there the woman killed herself. Next morning the music hall manager called on Monsieur Louis Deschamps,' Gaston Deschamps’ father, with a letter which the boy had written to him immediately after the accident. He had offered to take the place of the dead woman ,and to “loop-the-loop” the next evening. Deserted. A lad with such a character as this had all the makings of a soldier, but was not a soldier whom his superiors found it particularly easy to manage. 'ln the regiment, as at college, lie was in constant conflict with those set over him, and he was always being punished. Ho was unhappy in barracks, was fond of talking of desertion, which he considered “the duty of a free man, as a protest against national slavery,” and one day, at the end of August, 1909, Gaston Dcschamps put Ip’s theories into practice, climbed over the wall of the barrack yard, and bolted. His colonel gave him a week’s grace, and tried to find him. But after a week, when no trace had boon found of him, Gaston Deschamps was "entered on the regimental records as a deserter. Next day a mitrailleuse was missed from the barracks of the 106th Regiment at Clialons-sur-Marnc, and the theft made a tremendous sensation all over the country. No trace was found, however, of the thief, thought everything pointed to Gaston Dcschamps. The theft had been committed with some skill and daring. Deschamps had broken a small window, and had climbed into the shed in which the mitrailleuse was kept. He hid takn the tube, which weighed 6Slb, wrapped it in brown paper, and walked quietly out of barracks without attracting attention, with the stolen gun under his arm.

Arrested in Paris.

Then ho had gone to the house of a friend, whom ho knew to ho away from homo, had climbed into his bedroom, left his uniform there, stolen clothes of his friend’s, and, dressed as a civilian, had ■ left for Strasburg, where be had handed the gun to an agent of the German espionage department with whom, for some weeks, lie had been in correspondence. For eight months the French police hunted Gaston Deschamps all over the Continent of Europe, from Germany to Austria, from Austria to the Tyrol, from the Tyrol to Switzerland, and finally lost trace of him in Bad-en-Baden, where he escaped arrest by representing himself as a detective and by locking in the bedroom of bis own hotel the detective who had found him, while ho escaped to the railway station and got clear away by train. But in April of last year Gaston Deschamps began to long for Paris. He was imprudent enough to satisfy his longing, and he was arrested on the Place do la Bastjlc by the same detective whom he had locked in the hotel room at Baden-Baden a few months before. Deschamps at first denied all knowledge of the theft of the mitrailleuse. He bad, lie said, deserted because of a woman whom lie loved, and without whom he could not live. lint one day the examining magistrateforced a confession from him. He lectured the prisoner on his Socialist opinions and told him what he thought of them. Deschamps lost his temper, and, after an outburst of angry argument, confessed his crime and gloried in it. He afterwards denied that ho committed the theft, and says that he has never been to Strasburg, but the French police know that a man in

their employ saw him leaving the •iflico of the German secret service agent there. Gaston Deschamps will now have to submit to the awful ceremony of degradation before his former comrades, who u ill strip off his regimental braid and buttons in the barrack yard of the 106th Regiment at Chalons.