Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III BEHIND THE LINES HOSE conducting operations in the field kept I in touch with the army opposite and its every move in two ways. By fair, above-board means (as outlined in
The Brain War ) and by the employment of spies. Espionage behind the lines was fundamentally different from that delicate art as practised in the big centres like Paris and London. A spy in France and Flanders was right in the centre of the war; short of being mentally deficient, he or she could not help picking up information of military value of some kind or another every hour, every minute of the day. Supervision however was much stricter in the war zone, and entrance to it from neutral Holland and Switzerland a matter of great difficulty. War-zone spies were few and far between on the Allied side of the line in France, except at Dunkirk and in Lorraine, but behind the German lines, espionage carried out by Belgians developed an unheard of intensity. All their thoroughness availed the Germans little. They shot, and shot and shot, bullied, bullied, bullied, tried tricks, and tricks and tricks, and bribed, and bribed and bribed?but they never checked espionage in Belgium. Broadly this was an Allied system: Belgium was divided up into so many espionage areas, and in each area a trusted professional resident spy, or else a new-found patriot spy above suspicion, was placed in control. It was for this control agent to run things how he liked in his own area. If he chose to seduce a German soldier by bribery, or to turn his own personal charms to account in persuading a pretty estcminet girl to act the eavesdropper?well, he did so. He created his own risks; his was the task of warding off the consequences. The Allied Intelligence knew nothing of him or of the agents he employed under …
