Telephone lines with double wires are the only ones used now near the front line trenches, and with these it is much simpler to intercept messages. Furthermore, orders were issued that all important communications be transferred in code language. An expert trained ear, and an alert mind, however, can readily unravel the little disguises and stock words used by the troops at the front. For example, it is not very difficult to interpret the significance of the following message overheard on the fifteenth of January by our station at Grave di Poppadopoli:
“Hello—Hello Adler. Who is on the wire?”
“Weiss. Bad day to-day.”
“The katzelmacher has molested us a great deal this morning. It has made a great noise with its rattle and we had three bananas and a few wounded. I beg you to send us by foreign exchange many caramels because those of the Kaiser Stellung are almost finished.”
This Kaiser Stellung was beginning to annoy us. For some time we had heard her mentioned continually in the messages we intercepted and had not been able to discover from the prisoners or others what the enemy referred to by that name. Purposely to keep us ignorant of its designs, the enemy troops opposite us had given special names to every important locality and position, names which differed from those assigned to them on the maps and charts. Finally, after numerous researches, we succeeded in guessing the three different points, each of which had the characteristics which we had noticed mentioned about the Kaiser Stellung. At a fixed hour, our artillery opened fire on all three points which we thought to be the Kaiser Stellung. Shortly after, one of our intercepting stations picked up the message, “Time, 1.15 P. M. The enemy has fired three shots of large caliber near the Kaiser Stellung. No wounded.” The Kaiser Stellung had been discovered!
There are also special observers in the trenches who compile nightly bulletins of every incident or sound which has been seen or heard in the adversary’s trenches. For example the observatory of Case Bressanin communicated on the night of January 13, that an unusual rumbling of carts was heard near the first lines and that all night there were many voices of persons apparently engaged in transporting material. The same night, the noise of pick-axes in use in the trenches was distinctly heard. The enemy was constructing bridgeheads in his trench lines. Periscopes, cunningly hidden in the trees, can examine the level ground of the zones nearby, but observations from them are not very fruitful because the enemy usually refrains from any movement during the daytime.
The most fruitful and interesting of the methods of getting information is the study of the documents found on prisoners and the questioning of prisoners and deserters. Often the prisoners have no desire to talk, and armed with the pride which every soldier should feel before the enemy, they refuse to give any interesting information about their own troops. But sometimes, that which cannot be obtained by frankness, is obtained through deceit.
In the rooms in the concentration camps in which the prisoners are placed, microphones which receive everything said in the room, even if in an undertone, have been installed. At the other end of the wire there is a constant attendant who listens and records everything, and often overhears something of importance.
But often one cannot trust to luck. It is at times necessary to force a conversation from an important prisoner supposedly in possession of many valuable secrets. And for this too, there is a method, if one knows how to be prudent. In the concentration camps there are always several persons, usually deserters from the other side, who have passed to our service. Whenever necessary these persons disguise themselves as prisoners and in this way they often succeed in gaining the confidence of the most reserved and those who have enveloped themselves in the most profound silence whenever questioned. When spoken to by these disguised prisoners they have at times revealed important news, in the belief that they were talking to a comrade.
In this service the Czechs have been especially valuable and have often furnished us with precious information. All these reports when compiled, all these details however insignificant at first sight, when sifted through the intelligence of a man accustomed to collect and co-ordinate, furnish our commanding officers with an exact notion of what is happening in the enemy territory. The news thus gathered is far more valuable than that which could be collected by spies two or three hundred miles inside the enemy lines. For example, let us examine the reports for several days in January: