The Paris papers contained a brief paragraph telling of a young girl, a milliner, in the neighborhood of Grenoble, who had been caught playing the spy for the Germans and sentenced to a long term of imprisonment.
"We don't shoot women spies any more," said a soldier from the Somme front to whom I spoke of the story. "There have been no women shot for a long time. They generally get about twelve years at hard labor."
"Are you as much troubled as ever by spies?" I asked.
He laughed. "As long as there is war there will be spies," he replied. "You can't stamp them out. The only thing you can do is to try to catch them. It was only a few weeks ago that we caught a woman spy on the Somme.
"You remember when we took Bouchavesnes? Well, there was not much left of the village when we got it. Our artillery had knocked it pretty well to pieces, but we found an old woman there. She had remained all through the German occupation, and had even managed to hide and stay behind when all the rest of the civil population had evacuated. She was in a cellar during our bombardment, and when we went into the town she came out to welcome us, the only one of the original French inhabitants of the village remaining. As it was French again, she insisted on remaining. It was her home and she had succeeded in clinging on all the time the Germans were there. She saw no reason why she should go when the French came back into occupation.
"She stayed and did our washing for us. She was busy all the time, and every morning she would take the wet clothes out and spread them on the ground to dry. You could see soldiers' shirts and underwear all around the cellar where she lived, and hanging on all the posts and pieces of wall.
"The old woman pottered around and worked most industriously at her tubs. She always came out when there were troops going through the village and she would talk to the men, find out where they were going, where they came from and how long they expected to be there. And whenever she came out from her tubs she would go to her wash, lying out to dry, examine it, turn it over, rearrange it. She was a wonderful washwoman. It was a mania with her, having everything just right for the French soldiers, who had won back her home for her in France.
"But the Germans seemed to know every concentration of troops we made in that region. Their shells received us every time. We could not make a move that they did not know all about. We set three men to the special duty of finding out how the Germans got their information. The first thing they found out was that there were more air fights over Bouchavesnes than at any other part of the line. There seemed to be always a Boche aeroplane hovering over the ruins. They decided that there must be something about Bouchavesnes which made it a particularly good observation point. As the old woman was the only thing that distinguished the place from any other ruined village, they arrested her.
"At first she denied everything, but the German accuracy in bombarding our concentrations ceased with her arrest. It does not take a long argument to convince a drumhead court-martial, and the old woman saw that the game was up. She then claimed to be French, and said that she had consented to spy for the Germans partly under threats, partly because her life had been spared by them, and partly because they had paid her well, and she had no other way of getting any money to live. Finally, she acknowledged that she was German and had been purposely left behind to spy when the Germans got out. She got twelve years at hard labor."