THE SPY.

Taihape Daily Times, Issue 220, 30 April 1917, Page 3

THE SPY.

THE MEMOIRS OF DER GOLTZ.

BREACH OF TRUST.

"EXECUTED" BY A DEUL.

New York. Captain Horst von der Goltz, alias Bridgman Taylor, self-confessed German spy, and leader of the dynamite plot to blow up the Welland Canal, Canada, makes further revelations in the World of the perils of work as an accredited secret agent of the Imperial German Government.

The captain-spy, who is writing his autobiography because he feels he has been betrayed by the All-Highest's Government, and is thus absolved of fealty to its service, tells a thrilling story of how a few thoughtlessly uttered words caused the death of a fellowspy. In every case where any of his Statements could be compared with collateral evidence, says the World, they had been found to coincide with the facts as otherwise established. The fellow-spy was Lieut. Franz, the brother of his chum, Willie von Heiden. One sunny December morning (say* von der Goltz) we were all at the home of Willie's father, a junker of East Prussia, and while Willie counted shells in the gun-room I went to summon Franz from the bedroom he used as a study. A BROTHER SPY. Yon der Goltz, whom Franz did not know to be a brother spy, found the young lieutenant busy over some big sheets of paper, which Franz shoved aside, and excused himself while he stepped into the adjourning dressingroom to change. • Von de.r Goltz, with his usual prying curiosity, in his friend's two minutes' absence, examined the sheets of paper. "The tingle of the great discovery shot all through me," he writes. "I knew that the previous summer Franz spent a long furlough in the Argonne, fishing and botanising, so he said. He had told us stories of his sport. Now I saw through his bluff. Those maps were maps of a French border fortress. Lieut, von Heiden was doing important work for the intelligence department of the General Staff. Like me he was entitled to the shameful name of spy! A fatalist! Why not? If I had obeyed my natural impulse and given myself away my exchanging fraternal greetings with my colleague, so romantically discovered, he might have saved himself Was it mere chance that made me play the innocent, instead; and be the innocent too, as fan as intent was concerned? When Franz returned dressed, I was standing looking out of his window. SHOT DEAD. Von der Goltz yatcr mentioned his discovery of his spy "tutor" in the Wilhemstrasse, with the result that, a little later, Lieut, Franz was shot dead in a carefully engineered "duel" by a brother officer in the garrison town of his' regiment. His opponent was Capt. von Z , a notrious deullist, who had been transferred to the regiment for the occasion a few days previously. The alleged ground for* the duel was that Franz had stepped on the toe of the duelling captain in a ballroom; the captain retorted by a stinging slap on the face.

"The veiled explanations of my tutor were not needed to complete my understanding," adds von der Goltz. "Franz 1 von Heiden had unwittingly been guilty of an unforgiveable breach of trust. I had unwittingly betrayed him to his superiors. He had paid the penalty. But deeper than my sorrow and my self-abasement was another feeling—dread. Dread was to dog me all the days to come."