On this same boat was a preacher. The preacher was sure that he as a member of the cloth would have no trouble, and then he had a stack of credentials sky-high. When he was searched more closely than the rest he grew insolent and said things, and as a result he was held up three days until his friends in Germany helped him out.
My mother was nearly held up on the German border when she left Germany. A German lady in Dresden asked her to take some presents to her daughter in America, and among the things were two little bibs worked in a cross stitch design that were to be given to the daughter's child. The officials at Warnemünde seemed to think that the designs meant something, and they studied over them a long time, but finally after half an hour they gave them back to mother but with an air of not being sure what the cross stitch designs really were.
The greatest role for spies in this war is that of Red Cross worker. Here they have much freedom, and they can get very near the front. Then a sick or wounded man will tell things that a well man will not. Also, it is not so hard for them to transmit messages to their fellow conspirators. In every country Red Cross workers are closely watched.
Another kind of spy is the newspaper spy. There was a newspaper spy in Berlin when I was there. He posed as being very deutschfreundlich, and his good cigars and quantities of spending-money got him lots of information. When newspaper men are taken to the front, they have to sign a paper that they will not leave Germany for a month after their return. They also have to sign a paper that they will not hold the German government responsible in case of anything happening to them.
They tell all sorts of spy stories in Germany, and some of them sound very far-fetched. Here is a typical one. In East Prussia a nun was found weeping in a railway station. She had a funeral wreath in her hands. A sympathetic crowd gathered around her and tried to comfort her. Finally, a little boy in the crowd cried, "Oh, look, mother, what big hands she has!" The crowd looked, and sure enough they were big—they were a man's hands. And the nun was found to be a man, a Russian spy.
An American girl I knew was arrested as a spy. She was summering in a little town in the Westphalia district. She was an ardent photographer, and she could not see anything without wanting to snap it. The second day there, she was out walking and discovered what she considered a neat bit—green trees and a factory in the distance. She snapped the picture and just then a voice behind her asked what she was doing. She looked around and there stood a German soldier who told her to come with him. She went. She was taken to a guard house where her pass was examined and the film developed. When the films came out it was found she had a picture of a bridge and two munition factories. They gave the girl two hours to get out of the town. She never dreamed it was verboten.
All the munition factories, granaries, wharves, supply places and flying-places in Germany are guarded night and day, and if any one goes poking around these places he is told to "move on." If any one can spy on any of these locked-up places he must be very clever.
PRISONERS IN GERMANY.
Every thirtieth person in Germany is a war prisoner. Every fifth man is a Russian.
In Germany there are now nearly 2,000,000 prisoners of war. In the summer of 1916 the Central Powers held 2,658,283 prisoners, and of this number 1,647,225 were held in Germany. This was before Roumania fell, and then the number was greatly increased.