The girl led me to a cote camouflaged in the shattered roof of the house where were more than a dozen homing pigeons. I took her then to battalion headquarters. Later at her trial her life was spared, but she was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment.
On several of the transports which brought the original 20,000 Australians to Egypt for training were detected more than a dozen spies. One was caught red-handed tampering with the boiler of one of the transports. A ship’s officer came upon him and there was never a word exchanged between them. The officer sent five bullets crashing into the spy’s head, blowing the top of his head off. Two other spies were suspected, watched, caught and shot. But several others escaped who tampered with the machinery of the ships to an extent that caused great delay and in one instance at least, necessitated the return of a convoy ship to an Australian port for repairs.
At St. Julien I had also direct knowledge of the workings and capture of a spy—a clever one he was. As at St. Elois the Germans seemed possessed of a wizard knowledge of our position and their guns were regularly popping their shells into places within our lines which we regarded as most well-concealed.
But from the church tower of the smashed village behind us, watchful men one night saw the eccentric whirling and flashing of a mere pin-point of light. The village was deemed to have been surely scoured of spies. In fact, most of the inhabitants had been ordered away from the place because at that time spies were so thick, and Belgians and French, supposedly, so often turned out to be of German antecedents or even of German birth, that the commanders had been all but ruthless in sending the people away.
But none had suspected the padre—a small, gentle-voiced little man. I had often seen him and bowed to him. Good Lord, come to think of it, I had often commiserated him on the misfortune of the loss of his entire flock!
An officer and a dozen men, the instant the information was reported of the flashing tower light, were despatched to the church. They met the good little padre serenely stepping out of its portal. He was asked if there was any method of access to the tower. He smiled deprecatingly.
“It is no more than a false tower—a poor ornament on a poor church. There was never a place for a bell in it,” he answered. “Nobody, gentlemen, could gain access to that tower but a monkey or,” he laughed in a quiet way, “an aëroplane and the good English seem to have driven all the Boche aëroplanes away.”
“But the light flashing in the steeple, padre?” insisted the British officer.
“There are little colored panes of glass in the tower,” he answered readily enough, “put there to be of ornament when the light of sunrise and sunset should rest upon them. Might not the flares of your guns have flashed reflections from the panes?”
The officer considered. He said to me afterward that he was quite convinced of the padre’s honesty, but thought that German spies might have made their way by rope ladders or some other fashion to the tower. He declared that it was more by force of habit than design that he asked the padre to remain until he and two of his men had investigated the matter.