War's Dark Frame/Tragic Secrets
CHAPTER XX
TRAGIC SECRETS
THE stealthy watchfulness that makes such hauls possible is continually with one in Europe these days. Intelligence has very special phases for the French and for the British in France. In the beginning spies actually moved through the ranks of both armies. The siege war of the trenches has made that game impractical. Under these conditions the problem of getting information through is increasingly difficult. Code letter-writing through neutral countries, while comparatively sure, is a very slow expedient. Often intelligence is demanded in a hurry, must be had at any cost. For a time carrier pigeons were used with success. They cried, however, their own warning. There aren't many carrier pigeons in the conquered provinces now. To be found with one on your property amounts to a condemnation to death. I was surprised to learn that Germany and France both experiment with them still. I was told that an airman not long before had come across the lines at night and dropped a basket full of pigeons in a lonely spot. The conspirator behind the lines was supposed to find the basket, fasten duplicates of his message to each bird, and release them all. The innocent-appearing empty basket would be the only evidence left.
The aeroplane has revolutionised spying as completely as it has scouting. It's a risky business. It's even unpopular among the air corps—as courageous a body of youngsters as war has ever produced. I have shown them to you, sailing through bursting shrapnel, photographing and observing with impudent indifference. In an air battle they will take suicidal chances, but they don't like these quiet rides through the night to lonely places.
It isn't that they are physically afraid. They shrink from the work because it threatens the spy's penalty. The airman, like his passenger, is tried, condemned, and executed as a spy. And these boys, who know less than the quiet, worried men in London, Paris, and Petrograd, or in Vienna and Berlin, have a horror of the spy's work and the spy's death. Still they do it. It amounts to this: Among the British and the French the belief in this war is so general that to ask for volunteers for any task is practically to take your pick of the entire army. This particular stratagem, moreover, must be seen through in the face of an enemy intelligence system that from the filmiest hint unravels conspiracy and caps it with black tragedy. One pitiful case comes instantly to mind. It's about the boastful indiscretion of an airman, who didn't want a spy's death, nearly got it, then, through his escape, unwittingly condemned the man who had saved him.
After crossing the lines and safely landing his passenger he arose with a sigh of relief and started to return. Through one of those accidents no man can guard against, his engine went bad, and from a great height dropped swiftly through the night. He failed to right his machine. He fell, evidently unobserved, in a field at the edge of town. But a native living in a house on the outskirts, had heard enough to draw him to the field. He found the unconscious airman, This native was an old man. Alone he couldn't lift the airman. He returned to the house where he lived with his daughter.
“There's a man out there in the field," he whispered, for they've learned that even the walls have ears in the conquered provinces. "If we don't hide him," he went on, the Germans will find him at daylight, and he can't help himself because he's injured. He may die. Shall we let a friend die or be taken? You must help me carry him here." "That," the girl whispered back, "may mean death for all of us, will probably mean death—"
"A friend!" the old man said.
The girl arose, and went to the field with her father, and helped him carry the man to the house where they hid him. They both knew the risks of that journey even in those quiet hours before the dawn. When they had completed it they glanced at each other and smiled.
"God is with us," the old man said.
And through the weeks that followed they seemed miraculously protected. The presence of the man was never suspected. They nursed him back to his former ability. They started him on his road back. For there is a road back, out of the conquered provinces, out of the hands of the Germans. The execution of Edith Cavell didn't close it. Innumerable other executions haven't closed it, because that is something the Germans can't do. In every war that conquers peoples such a road persists. It penetrates even the vaunted barrier across the Dutch frontier. So the recovered airman was passed from guide to guide on that road until finally he slipped from the grasp of the Germans and reported himself ready for duty to his own people.
His exaltation demanded expression. He wanted to shout out his contempt of the German intelligence system which he had so easily mocked. In broad daylight he flew high over the lines and dropped into the town, where he had been concealed, a jibing letter which stated the exact period he had waited beneath the noses of the Germans for the moment of his escape. Of course he didn't think. His pride had overcome his judgment. He had underestimated the Teutonic skill. The sequel slipped to him as more important intelligence slips from beyond the German trenches. That man has lost his exultation. He wonders that his life should have been given back to him. For from the single clue of the note the German agents found their way to the house on the edge of the town. The gossip of the cafés, shrewd guesses, a painstaking process of elimination were their mileposts, and when they knocked at the door and drew the old man roughly from his house they He stared at them, trying to shake off their hands, with a great surprise, because it had been so long, because he had forgotten to be afraid.
At that moment an acquaintance brushed against the daughter in the market place. She was directed to a friend's house where she was told that her father had been taken. So she, too, was placed upon that underground road of sympathy and patriotism, and during the dawn of her escape were sure. the old man was made to stand, blind-folded, against a wall. While he still marvelled over the miracle of his success in saving the airman he was sent abruptly to probe the greater miracle.
In the early days when there was retreating and advancing, before the neutral zone had narrowed itself to the few sinister yards of No-Man's Land, the aeroplane gathered its intelligence well in advance of the troops. At night, pilots and observers were frequently condemned to strange lodgings, filled with apprehension, where sleep was uneasy. Sometimes they came back with shaken nerves.
I was told of such an experience. A machine was caught ahead of its division by the sudden approach of a storm at nightfall. The darkness possessed a resistive power. The first rain made it like a soggy, smothering garment. The machine descended in a country still smoking from the devastation of war. To struggle back to the blackness and the rising wind would be an invitation to disaster, and with their own eyes the pilot and the observer had seen the enemy retreat beyond this point.
"At least," the pilot said, we can't sleep in the fields."
The observer indicated a tiny gleam of light not far ahead, evidently the light of a candle diffused through windows. They walked towards the light and found a small farm house. It surprised them first of all because war seemed to have passed it by. They knocked at the door. A French woman with a pleasant, middle-aged face opened for them. Inimediately both men experienced a sense of something out of the way. There was a queerness, not at all definable, about the pleasant face. It frightened them, made them want to go where its stare could no longer include them. But they couldn't go. The storm had become violent. They were exhausted by a day of labour and perpetual risk. They told the woman they must spend the night in her house. She continued to stare. At last she shook her head with a mechanical determination.
Were there no men? The men were all at the war.
Her voice had the quality of her face, pleasant, determined—staring They explained that they understood that her house was small, but surely it contained two rooms. They called her attention to the storm.
“You must see that it is necessary for us to spend the night here."
Again her head moved mechanically.
You cannot spend the night here." "You must tell us why."
"You cannot spend the night here. I tell you you cannot. It is quite impossible."
They glanced at each other. They looked again at the woman who stood in the light of the candle just within the doorway.
"Queer!" the pilot whispered.
The observer drew him aside. While the woman continued to stare at them without any apparent interest they consulted about her.
"Looks dangerous," the observer said.
“Loyal French are never inhospitable. This woman speaks the language all right, but we're not so far from the frontier.
Perhaps she is hiding some one—a German, wounded, more than likely. We know they retreated through here to-day."
The pilot shivered in the rising storm.
"You're probably right, and the danger's for the German and not for us. We'll stay in spite of this woman, who doesn't get angry, who doesn't plead, who offers no excuses, who simply forbids us. Naturally we will protect ourselves. We must search the house."
So they went back to the woman and told her that they intended to enter and search as a preliminary to spending the night whether she wanted them or not. You cannot spend the night here," she repeated with her mechanical dulness.
But she didn't resist when they pushed past her. She only turned to stare after them with her pleasant, determined eyes.
There were, as they had guessed, two bedrooms, opening from opposite sides of the hall. They głanced in the one on the left which was clearly occupied by the woman as her clothes lay about in some confusion. They opened the door of the other, evidently a spare room, for the bed was larger and it had a canopy and curtains. They passed on to the kitchen. That, too, offered no signs of life. The fire in the stove was out.
They glanced back, startled, for the woman was at their heels, moving with the precise awkwardness of an automaton, while her strange eyes stared at them.
We're getting close," the pilot whispered.
“In a moment she'll break down."
He questioned her.
"You've had no dinner?'
She shook her head.
"If we light the fire you will prepare our dinner?”
Again she shook her head.
"You cannot eat in this house."
The pilot made a gesture of impatience. "What is the matter with this house that we can't sleep or eat in it? We will find out. You are sailing pretty close to the wind. That, I suppose, is the door to the cellar."
He opened the door. With revolvers drawn the two men went down the stone steps, their hearts in their throats, while the woman stood perfectly still in the middle of the room, staring after them.
In the cellar they went carefully. They heard nothing
“Come out!” they demanded while they held their revolvers ready.
They struck matches and searched the corners.
Except for themselves the cellar was empty.
Queer! Queer!" they muttered.
More afraid than if they had found something, they climbed the steps and looked at the woman who still stood in the centre of the floor, staring at them.
“Clearly," the pilot said, "we are getting a case of nerves. There is no danger here—nothing at all, except this woman who stares and stares and tells us we can't spend the night. I'm tired. I've a biscuit or two and some chocolate. We'll disturb her as little as possible. We'll sleep in the spare room, and, if you think it wise, watch, turn and turn about." They entered the room and lighted a sconce of candles on a bureau. The woman, who had followed them mutely, stood in the doorway. Now she spoke with that mechanical intonation which possessed a certain vagueness.
You can't spend the night here."
This time they laughed at the reiteration of those words which seemed to possess no meaning. Still there was something uncomfortable about their laugh. It did not last long. They munched their biscuits and chocolate.
The pilot brushed the crumbs from his hand.
He lighted a caporal and strolled to the bed to make it ready.
"We'll tumble in here.—"
He drew back the faded red plush curtains which shook a little, as the candles shook, in the wind from the door. The woman had come closer. She spread her hands helplessly, as one who is suddenly justified. About the gesture, however, was something of despair.
The pilot bent over the bed. Then he shrank away. The observer advanced. The woman did not move.
Her hands remained extended in that gesture of justification.
During many minutes the three stared at the young girl outstretched on the bed. There were stains, now nearly black, across the simple clothing and straying to the edge of the coverlet. For the young girl's throat had been laid open by a sabre. But the stains and the agony hadn't driven from the pretty face a vague and helpless determination, very like the mother's.
“You see," the woman was saying, with a mechanical hoarseness, you cannot spend the night here."
With awkward and sympathetic gestures they slipped past her and quietly left that house. In the turbulence of the storm they read a welcome.
Like hotel espionage, the use of one's own people behind the enemy's line has two sides. During that visit to Rheims, I heard something there that made me ponder pretty uncomfortably. I knew there must be some explanation of the systematic destruction beyond the fact that the Germans had, for a short time, occupied the town. I remember questioning the cheerful little staff officer. He looked away.
"The bombardment," he said, is directed from within. Some of the Boches have remained. They direct the bombardment of their neighbours' homes. There have been many and there still are some Boche spies in Rheims. You see great quantities of Boches lived and worked here before the war." Then I remembered that the Germans had always been active in the champagne industry, that many had been employed in the vineyards and the factories of Rheims. Still it seemed beyond belief.
"This ruined city was their home," I said.
"These houses must have belonged to their friends."
He nodded.
"It is hard to handle them," he said. "They are very clever at reporting damage and offering ranges.
It will continue to be so until there is not one of these people left in Rheims. Yesterday two of them were shot."
The sound of guns was very loud. He gestured sadly at the ruins.
"Still the bombardment goes on."
And I recalled the authoritative statement of the intelligence officer in London that every German, no matter where he lived, believed himself a divinely appointed agent of his government. And I looked at the ruins, wondering.
During my trip to the war zone of Lorraine I found this give and take of intelligence more pronounced than anywhere else. I have written of the material agony. In addition I was arrested by a mental distress, born of a situation not unlike 
The Church at M Had Been Blasted by Great
Shells Sent from Guns Many Miles Away
that which made our own Civil War so terrible. In these border provinces the population is very much mixed. On the German side there are many men who through forty years of enemy rule have never lost their true nationality. On the French side one hears many German names, sees many Teutonic faces. Here naturally was an opportunity which during all these years the Wilhelmstrasse wasn't likely to neglect. Who is to draw the line? Who is to say that this Teutonic type is a loyal Frenchman or a German spy? And on the other side of the trenches the Germans ask themselves precisely the reverse of that question.
It is a dreadful thing to suspect one's neighbours, to search for guilt behind the eyes of those who, before the war, were one's friends. And no spy could expect mercy from these people. The wantonness of the destruction rankles in the border provinces as it never has in any other war, and when you have wandered through the devastated districts, as the Quaker and I did, you understand why. The church at M— brought it home. It had no military value since a line of hills rolled between it and the enemy. Yet it had been blasted by great shells sent from guns many miles away, and the neighbouring houses, mere skeletons now, had been blasted with it. Its bronze bells, distorted and silent, lay in a pool of mud at the entrance. I saw it on a Sunday morning. The officer who accompanied me said:
“Now let us look at the real church."
He led me to a house comparatively whole. He opened a door. Within were gathered two or three bent old men, many women, and a host of little children. They sat on rough chairs arranged before an improvised altar whose boards had been draped with white cloths. One had a feeling that the simplicity of their worship concealed a desire for the only justice they could understand an eye for an eye. They glanced at us with that desire in their faces, and with pride and suspicion. I was glad not to stand there unconducted. I should hate to enter the border provinces at all without iron-bound credentials. It was, I fancy, pride more than habit that had held these people to the vicinity of their desolate homes. There would have been, their stolid faces seemed to say, a special degradation in seeking comfort and whole houses and unsoiled churches at the command of Germany's destructive voice. They seemed trying to tell me that Germany had had nothing to do with this, that they were making the best of matters after a bad fire or a levelling tempest.
I was glad to have seen that, for it offered a solution I had been seeking ever since my arrival in France. I hadn't been able to understand how the French could develop, largely within two years, their amazingly successful intelligence system. It had seemed miraculous that at the same time they should have brought to so little the German system of many decades' growth. In these faces the answer lay. One saw there an infinite capacity for sacrifice. One read also that alert watchfulness, that greed for justice. And the entire country is to some extent like that, because there are few who haven't suffered personally from this war with its new and intolerable methods. Every man and woman is a potential trapper of spies.
Moreover, as I looked, it seemed to me that on the simple altar before which these determined people worshipped, the supernal and France had become inextricably tangled.