THE SPY.

Taihape Daily Times, 16 November 1917, Page 2

THE SPY.

i CUNNING IN FLANDERS In numerous cases the most extraordinary cunning has been displayed by stealthy informers, and it has only been through exercise of abnormal watchfulness that these have been brought to bock at all (says a London writer). It took nearly a month for instance to enmesh a certain low-principled individual whose activities came near to turning a successful British exploit into a costly failure. We were preparing for a little J "push" mid consequently new gun positions were being established

some little distance behind the firing tyne. Everyone knew about these new batteries but as "everyone" comprised battalions of Tommy himself, and a few peasants living in the ' near-by heap of ruins which had been once j there was nothing very danI gerous in the fact; Tommy didn't talk foolishly, and there was no reasj on to suppose that the peasant people were other than friendly towards the British. " As a matter of fact, the ruindwellers were most kind in their modest way to the troops that were billeted in the cellars of the place. One, a little bent old fellow named Jacques who poughed his fields and in the evening opened a little estaminet I for "les Anglais soldat," was especially popular on that account. He could laugh and joke too, this old felloav, and he only smiled good-temper-edly when the British soldiers poked fun at him for wasting time ploughing the shell-pocked fields all day. ' 'Shell-holes do not harm the soil,'' he would explain cheerfully in his broken "The ground was rich before this cruel war. Why not now? But to proceed. No sooner did the British "heavies" cautiously begin ranging' than a sinister thing happened, .making it obvious that all was not correct. The Bodhe guns countered immediately and very nearly "found" one battery. Heavy artillery is too valuable to take any chances with, so the British battery engaged abandoned its "spotted" lair, and moved into other good cover on the fringe of the village. Two days after one of its guns was hit direct after a good deal of shelling by the B'oche. It was more than obvious now that there was a treacherous leakage ofr information but the sternest vigilance failed to produce' the culprit. The source of the German knowledge remained a baffling mystery until an observant British airman alighted on the explanation. Flying low over the country he was struck suddenly by the peculiar manner in which two large fields had been So strange was the design followed that the airman first thought they were tracks and paths. Then suspicion leaping to his brain, he realised that they were actually mapped-out roadways, and that the turned-over soil in the fields below formed a rough map of the district immediately surrounding B easily to be read by anyone familiar with the geography of the place. Moreover, either by intention or by extraordinary coincidence, a brightlycoloured plough was at the moment, of observation marking a recently-con-structed British gun position on the ground map! In a flash, the aviator fathomed the whole nlot. Jacques, the etaminet-kecper, was the owner and cultivator of the fields. He was immediately seized and his seizure revealed the plot of this very clever spy. '—4 •