Page:Britain's Deadly Peril.djvu/126

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120
BRITAIN'S DEADLY PERIL

land, he cannot change his own nationality. So let us, once and for all, dismiss for ever the hollow farce of naturalisation, for its very act is one of fraud, and only attempted with some ulterior motive.

As regards "unnaturalised" Germans the inquirer may perhaps be permitted to ask why Baron von Ow-Wachendorf, a lieutenant in the Yellow Uhlans of Stuttgart, just under thirty years of age, was permitted to practise running in Hyde Park so as to fit himself for his military duties, and why was he on March 1st allowed to leave Tilbury for Holland to fight against us? Again, has not Mr. Ronald McNeill put rather a delicate problem before the Under-Secretary for War in asking, in the House, whether Count Ergon von Bassewitz and his brother. Count Adalbert von Bassewitz, were brought to England as prisoners of war; whether either was formerly on the Staff of the Germany Embassy in London, and well known in London Society; whether one, and which, of the two brothers was recently set at liberty, and is now at large in London; whether he was released on any and what conditions; and for what reason this German officer, possessing exceptional opportunities for obtaining information likely to be useful to the enemy, is allowed freedom in England at the present time.

The man-in-the-street who has, in the past, laughed at the very idea of spies—and quite justly, because he has been so cleverly misled and bamboozled by official assurances—has now begun to see that they do exist. He has read of a hundred cases abroad where spies have formed a vanguard of the invading German armies, and how no fewer than fifty-seven German spies were arrested and convicted in Switzerland during the month of August, therefore