positions were not so frequently spotted. Sometimes
the old Flemish farmers would certainly plough their fields in a
strange fashion but, perhaps, zigzags and swastikas are common patterns
in French fields. It may have been our alarmed ears that fancied the
paper boy played a different tune on his horn every day, but pigeons
did certainly rise from the middle of paddocks contrary to the habits
of these birds.

One of the hardest things I ever did was to arrest a young Belgian girl
nineteen years of age who undoubtedly was the means of the death of
thousands of our boys. It was in this wise. One night I observed a
light a good way behind our trenches go out then come again. I watched
it very carefully, and found it was signalling by the Morse code with
dashes ten seconds long and the dots five. If you were not watching it
very carefully you would never have dreamt it was anything but a
flicker of light. The letters I read were--NRUDTVEAUAOILN, which, when
decoded, gave important information regarding the movement of troops.
I took a line through some trees of the direction from which the light
came and walked toward it. Just off an old drain I found an overturned
wagon with a loophole cut through the backboard. There were footprints
in the drain, and the grass was pressed down where a body had been
lying. For five nights I lay in wait, my hopes keyed up to the highest
point of expectation. At last to me was to fall the good fortune of
capturing a spy--perhaps to end the leakage of information of our plans
that we knew the Germans were getting. But on these five nights
nothing happened. The day afterward, some boys of a battery whom I
asked to watch this drain caught an old farmer in it. This farmer,
however, who lived next door to our brigade headquarters had been
carefully watched, and the information had come from outside the zone
which he never left. Some one must have brought the information to
him. Everybody using those roads had to have a passport issued by the
French intelligence service, and countersigned by the intelligence
officer of the area. Elimination narrowed suspicion to a paper girl
who, it was found, sold out her papers round the batteries and billets
at ten o'clock, and did not return until after three. The excuse she
gave was that she was visiting her brother's grave, but on looking up
her records we found that she had never had a brother. One day I kept
her in sight on the road whi