Golden Lads | Page 7

pure German and
friend of the invaders. His place now is the nightly resort of German
officers.
In the hotel where I stayed in Ghent the proprietor, after a couple of
days, believing me to be one more neutral American, told me he was a
German. He went on to say what a mistake the Belgians made to
oppose the Germans, who were irresistible. That was his return to the
city and country that had given him his livelihood. A few hours later a
gendarme friend of mine told me to move out quickly, as we were in
the house of a spy.

Three members of our corps in Pervyse had evidence many nights of a
spy within our lines. It was part of the routine for a convoy of motor
trucks to bring ammunition forward to the trenches. The enemy during
the day would get the range of the road over which this train had to
pass. Of course, each night the time of ammunition moving was
changed in an attempt to foil the German fire. But this was of no avail,
for when the train of trucks moved along the road to the trenches a
bright flash of light would go up somewhere within our lines, telling
the enemy that it was time to fire upon the convoy.
Such evidences kept reaching us of German gold at work on the very
country we were occupying. Sometimes the money itself.
My wife, when stationed by the Belgian trenches at Pervyse, asked the
orderly to purchase potatoes, giving him a five-franc piece. He brought
back the potatoes and a handful of change that included a French franc,
a French copper, a Dutch small coin, a Belgian ten-centime bit, and a
German two-mark piece with its imperial eagle. This meant that some
one in the ranks or among the refugees was peddling information to the
enemy.
In early October my wife and I were captured by the Uhlans at Zele.
Our Flemish driver, a Ghent man, began expressing his friendliness for
them in fluent German. After weeks of that sort of thing we became
suspicious of almost every one, so thorough and widespread had been
the bribery of certain of the poorer element. The Germans had sowed
their seed for years against the day when they would release their
troops and have need of traitors scattered through the invaded country.
The thoroughness of this bribery differed at different villages. In one
burned town of 1500 houses we found approximately 100 houses
standing intact, with German script in chalk on their doors; the order of
the officer not to burn. This meant the dwellers had been friendly to the
enemy in certain instances, and in other instances that they were spies
for the Germans. We have the photographs of those chalked houses in
safe-keeping, against such time as there is a direct challenge on the
facts of German methods. But there has come no challenge of facts--we
that have seen have given names, dates and places--only a blanket

denial and counter charges of franc-tireur warfare, as carried on by
babies in arms, white-haired grandmothers and sick women.
In October, 1914, two miles outside Ostend, I was arrested as a spy by
the Belgians and marched through the streets in front of a gun in the
hands of a very young and very nervous soldier. The Etat Major told
me that German officers had been using American passports to enter
the Allied lines and learn the numbers and disposition of troops. They
had to arrest Americans on sight and find out if they were
masqueraders. A little later one of our American ambassadors verified
this by saying to me that American passports had been flagrantly
abused for German purposes.
All this devious inside work, misusing the hospitality of friendly,
trustful nations, this buying up of weak individuals, this laying the traps
on neutral ground--all this treachery in peace times--deserves a second
Bryce report. The atrocities are the product of the treachery. This
patient, insidious spy system, eating away at the vitality of the Allied
powers, results in such horrors as I have witnessed.

THE ATROCITY
When the very terrible accounts of frightfulness visited on peasants by
the invading German army crossed the Channel to London, I believed
that we had one more "formula" story. I was fortified against unproved
allegations by thirteen years of newspaper and magazine investigation
and by professional experience in social work. A few months
previously I had investigated the "poison needle" stories of how a girl,
rendered insensible by a drug, was borne away in a taxicab to a house
of ill fame. The cases proved to be victims of hysteria. At another time,
I had looked up certain incidents of "white slavery," where young and
innocent victims were suddenly