The conversation in the room had turned to spies. Always, everywhere, I found this talk of spies. It appeared that at night a handful of the former inhabitants of the town crept back from the fields to sleep in the cellars of what had been their homes, and some of them were under suspicion.
"Every morning," said Miss C——, "before the German bombardment begins, three small shells are sent over in quick succession. Then there is about fifteen minutes' wait before the real shelling. I am convinced that it is a signal to some one to get out."
The officers pooh-poohed the idea. But Miss C—— stuck to her point.
"They are getting information somehow," she said. "You may laugh if you like. I am sure I am right."
Later on an officer explained to me something about the secret service of the war.
"It is a war of spies," he said. "That is one reason for the deadlock. Every movement is reported to the other side and checkmated almost before it begins. In the eastern field of war the system is still inadequate; that accounts for the great movements that have taken place there."
Perhaps he is right. It sounds reasonable. I do not know with what authority he spoke. But certainly everywhere I found this talk of spies. One of the officers that night told of a recent experience of his.
"I was in a church tower at ——," he said. "There were three of us. We had been looking over toward the German lines. Suddenly I looked down into the street below. Some one with an electric flash was signalling across. It was quite distinct. All of us saw it. There was an answer from the German trenches immediately. While one of us kept watch on the tower the others rushed down into the street. There was no one there. But it is certain that that sort of thing goes on all the time."
A quarter to eleven!
Suddenly the whole thing seemed impossible—that the noise at the foot of the street was really guns; that I should be there; that these two young women should live there day and night in the midst of such horrors. For the whole town is a graveyard. Bodies in numbers have been buried in shell-holes and hastily covered, or float in the stagnant water of the canal. Every heavy rain uncovers shallow graves in the fields, allowing a dead arm, part of a rotting trunk, to show.