Another case that has caused no end of discussion concerns a woman known as Fanny La Place. It was said at one time that she was German and her case has been compared with that of Edith Cavell, the British nurse who was put to death at Brussels. But this parallel is denied strenuously by the French, who give out a statement to the contrary. According to this information, her right name was Felice Pfast. She was a French woman born at Nancy in 1890. She went to Metz in 1914 and later received permission to visit her mother in Belgium. While there, it is said, a German official proposed that she gather military information in Paris. She spent three weeks in Paris and then reported the results to Germans, who, she admitted, paid her 5,000 francs to undertake another mission. She was caught in the act of spying at Marseilles and admitted she had been commissioned to gather military information. On July 10 she was unanimously condemned to death by a court-martial.
Another alleged spy in the great war was Captain Otto Feinat of the Russian army. He was well known in Ruman and was in charge of the judicial proceedings following the Jewish massacres at Kishineff in 1903. He held responsible military positions after that, but it was lately claimed that he had been in some compromising correspondence with some friends in Germany. The evidence against him was circumstantial. He protested from the outset that he was loyal to Russia, but in spite of this he was condemned and sent to Siberia for a long term of penal servitude.
Was he guilty? Who can tell? He had the consolation—maybe a poor consolation—of knowing that scores of other Russian officers have lately been sent into banishment on circumstantial evidence.
Then there is the remarkable story of Colonel Miassoyedorff, who was attached to the staff of the Russian Tenth army corps in East Prussia. The Tenth was one of those that met with disastrous defeat in the Mazuirian lake district. It was under the command of General Rennykampf, and in one of these defeats lost 70,000 prisoners. In a second defeat it lost 50,000. The circumstances in each case were similar. The unexpected arrival of a large force of Germans served to defeat the invaders, and caused them to take to their heels, thus transforming an anticipated victory into a most humiliating rout.
WILLIAM J. FLYNN
An investigation was started and all of the circumstances pointed in the direction of Miassoyedorff, an interpreter on the staff of the Tenth army. One soldier said that he recognized Miassoyedorff as a man who had been connected at one time with the German army. It was further alleged that at the outbreak of hostilities he had been the head of the German spy system and one of the highest officers of the political police. Charged with these former connections, he denied them most emphatically.
“I deny the charge,” he cried, “and I defy my enemies to produce the slightest proof of its truth.”
Further charges were made that while he was in command of frontier guards at Verjoblova, only a few miles from the border, he had repeatedly visited the Kaiser and made reports to him. When asked what he had to say to this second charge he merely folded his arms, smiled and said:
“I deny it!”