Part 61

"I should supplement what I have said regarding the condition of Belgium with some reference to Antwerp itself, where the excited Government now sits. It is a wonderful contrast to the rest of the country, and the first impression of the visitor is that there is little change between its life now and in the days of peace. I approached it by water, and in the early morning it rose before me like a fairy city. Its skyline was beautifully broken by the spires and towers of its churches, including the incomparable Gothic Cathedral.

"When I entered its shops were open, its streets crowded, and everywhere there was eager activity. By midday the streets became congested. Early editions of the papers were eagerly bought and great crowds assembled wherever a telegram giving news could be read. This continued until early evening, but by 8 o'clock a most extraordinary change had fallen upon the city.

"Not a light of any kind in house or shop was to be seen. No lamps were lit in the streets and the city was plunged into absolute darkness. Not a soul remained in the streets. To the darkness there was added profound silence. It was as though this amazing city had been suddenly blotted out."

*The Wounded Serb*

VALIEVO, Sept. 25.

Valievo lies at the terminus of a narrow-gauge railway which joins the Belgrade-Salonika line at Mladinovatz. Along this single track of iron road the entire transport of the Servian Army is being effected. Westward come trains packed with food, fodder, munitions, and troops; eastward go long convoys crowded with maimed humanity. At Mladinovatz all this mass of commissariat and suffering must needs be transferred from or to the broad-gauge line. In this situation lies not the least of the problems which beset the Servians in their struggle with the Austrian invaders.

Valievo itself is a picturesque little town which in peace time is famous as the centre of the Servian prune trade. Its cobbled streets are, in the main, spacious and well planned. There still remain a few relics of the Turkish occupation--overhanging eaves, trellised windows, and the like--but these one must needs seek in the by-ways. I picture Valievo under normal conditions as one of the most attractive of Balkan townships.

Nor has the tableau lost anything in the framing, for it is encircled by a molding of verdant hills which run off into a sweep of seeming endless woods. The vista from my hotel window is almost aggravatingly English. Across the red-tiled roofs of intervening cottages rises the hillside--a checkerboard of grassy slopes and patches of woodland intersected by a brown road which runs upward until the summit, surmounted by a whitewashed shrine, amid a cluster of walnut trees, touches the gray sky.

But Valievo is not now to be seen under normal conditions. From the street below rises the sound of clatter and creak as the rude oxen wagons bump over the cobblestones. Morning, noon, and night they rumble along unceasingly, and whenever I look down I see martial figures clad in tattered, muddy, and blood-stained uniforms, with rudely bandaged body or head or foot. Every now and then a woman breaks from the crowd of waiting loiterers and rushes up to a maimed acquaintance. They exchange but a few sentences, and then she turns, buries her head in her apron, and stumbles along the street wailing a bitter lament for some husband, brother, or son who shall return no more. A friend supports and leads her home; but the onlooking soldiers regard the scene with indifference and snap out a rude advice "not to make a fuss." They brook no wailing for Serbs who have died for Servia.

The town itself has been transformed into one huge camp of wounded. All adaptable buildings--halls, cafes, school-rooms--have been rapidly commandeered for hospitals. Sometimes there are beds, more often rudely made straw mattresses, for little Servia, worn out by two hard wars, is ill-equipped to resist the onslaught of a great power. For 16 days a fierce battle has been raging near the frontier, and wounded have been pouring in much more rapidly than accommodation can be found for them.

And in the streets--what misery! The lame, the halt, the maimed. Men with damaged leg or foot hopping along painfully by the aid of a friendly baton; men nursing broken arms or shattered hands; men with bandaged heads; men being carried from operating shops to cafe floors; men with body wounds lying on stretchers--all with ragged, blood-bespattered remnants of what once were uniforms. One sees little of the glory of war in Valievo. The Servian Medical Staff, deprived on this occasion of outside assistance, and short alike of doctors, surgeons, nurses, and material, is striving heroically to cope with its task. Where they have been able to equip hospitals the work has been very creditably done. One building is almost exclusively devoted to cases where amputations have been necessary. It is clean, orderly, and the patients are obviously well cared for. Here, when I entered a ward of some thirty beds in which every man lay with a bandaged stump where his leg should be, I think I saw the Servian spirit at its best. They had been newly operated upon, their sufferings must have been great, and for them all the future is black with forebodings. There is no patriotic fund in little Servia. Yet amid all the pain of body and uncertainty of mind that must have been theirs they did not complain. All they desired to know was whether the Schwaba (Austrians) had been beaten out of Servia.

But it is when one leaves the organized hospitals and wends one's way through the crowds of wounded who block the pavements, and enters a lower-class cafe, that the appalling tragedy of it all fills even the spectator with a sense of hopelessness. There, like cattle upon their bed of straw, lie sufferers from all manner of hurts. They remain mute and uncomplaining, just as they have been dropped down from the incoming oxen transports. Their wounds--three, four, or five days old--have yet received no attention save the primitive first-aid of the battlefield. Blood poisoning is setting in; limbs that prompt dressing would have saved are fast becoming victims for the surgeon's knife. Most of them know the risk they run, for this is their third war--often, too, their third wound--in two short years. Yet the doctors cannot come, because every man of them is already doing more than human energy allows. It is a heartrending sight to look down upon this helpless mass and to realize that many of them have been sentenced to painful death for mere lack of primitive medical attention.

One wonders whether, now that half Europe has been transformed into a vast slaughterhouse, appeals for sympathy can be other than in vain.

*ANOTHER "HAPPY THOUGHT."*

By WINIFRED ARNOLD.

The world is so full Of a number of Kings!-- That's probably what is the Matter with things.

*Spy Organization in England*

*British Home Office Communication, Oct. 9.*

In view of the anxiety naturally felt by the public with regard to the system of espionage on which Germany has placed so much reliance and to which attention has been directed by recent reports from the seat of war, it may be well to state briefly the steps which the Home Office, acting on behalf of the Admiralty and War Office, has taken to deal with the matter in this country. The secrecy which it has hitherto been desirable in the public interest to observe on certain points cannot any longer be maintained owing to the evidence which it is necessary to produce in cases against spies that are now pending.

It was clearly ascertained five or six years ago that the Germans were making great efforts to establish a system of espionage in this country, and in order to trace and thwart these efforts a Special Intelligence Department was established by the Admiralty and the War Office which has ever since acted in the closest co-operation with the Home Office and metropolitan police and the principal provincial police forces. In 1911, by the passing of the Official Secrets act, 1911, the law with regard to espionage, which had hitherto been confused and defective, was put on a clear basis and extended so as to embrace every possible mode of obtaining and conveying to the enemy information which might be useful in war.

The Special Intelligence Department, supported by all the means which could be placed at its disposal by the Home Secretary, was able in three years, from 1911 to 1914, to discover the ramifications of the German Secret Service in England. In spite of enormous efforts and lavish expenditure of money by the enemy, little valuable information passed into their hands. The agents, of whose identity knowledge was obtained by the Special Intelligence Department, were watched and shadowed without, in general, taking any hostile action or allowing them to know that their movements were watched. When, however, any actual step was taken to convey plans or documents of importance from this country to Germany, the spy was arrested, and in such case evidence sufficient to secure his conviction was usually found in his possession. Proceedings under the Official Secrets act were taken by the Director of Public Prosecutions, and in six cases sentences were passed varying from eighteen months to six years' penal servitude. At the same time steps were taken to mark down and keep under observation all the agents known to be engaged in this traffic, so that when any necessity arose the police might lay hands on them at once; and, accordingly, on the 4th of August, before the declaration of war, instructions were given by the Home Secretary for the arrest of twenty known spies, and all were arrested. This figure does not cover a large number--upward of 200--who were noted as under suspicion or to be kept under special observation. The great majority of these were interned at or soon after the declaration of war.

None of the men arrested in pursuance of the orders issued on Aug. 4 has yet been brought to trial, partly because the officers whose evidence would have been required were engaged in urgent duties in the early days of the war, but mainly because the prosecution by disclosing the means adopted to track out the spies and prove their guilt would have hampered the Intelligence Department in its further efforts. They were and still are held as prisoners under the powers given to the Secretary of State by the Aliens Restriction act. One of them, however, who established a claim to British nationality, has now been formally charged; and, the reasons for delay no longer existing, it is a matter for consideration whether the same course should now be taken with regard to some of the other known spies.

Although this action taken on August 4 is believed to have broken up the spy organization which had been established before the war, it is still necessary to take the most rigorous measures to prevent the establishment of any fresh organization and to deal with individual spies who might previously have been working in this country outside the organization, or who might be sent here under the guise of neutrals after the declaration of war. In carrying this out the Home Office and War Office have now the assistance of the cable censorship, and also of the postal censorship, which, established originally to deal with correspondence with Germany and Austria, has been gradually extended (as the necessary staff could be obtained) so as to cover communications with those neutral countries through which correspondence might readily pass to Germany or Austria. The censorship has been extremely effective in stopping secret communications by cable or letter with the enemy, but as its existence was necessarily known to them it has not, except in a few instances, produced materials for the detection of espionage.

On Aug. 5 the Aliens Restriction act was passed, and within an hour of its passing an order in council was made which gave the Home Office and the police stringent powers to deal with aliens, and especially enemy aliens, who under this act could be stopped from entering or leaving the United Kingdom, and were prohibited while residing in this country from having in their possession any wireless or signaling apparatus of any kind, or any carrier or homing pigeons. Under this order all those districts where the Admiralty or War Office considered it undesirable that enemy aliens should reside have been cleared by the police of Germans and Austrians, with the exception of a few persons, chiefly women and children, whose character and antecedents are such that the local Chief Constable, in whose discretion the matter is vested by the order, considered that all ground for suspicion was precluded. At the same time the Post Office, acting under the powers given them by the Wireless Telegraphy acts, dismantled all private wireless stations; and they established a special system of wireless detection by which any station actually used for the transmission of messages from this country could be discovered. The police have co-operated successfully in this matter with the Post Office.

New and still more stringent powers for dealing with espionage were given by the Defense of the Realm act, which was passed by the Home Secretary through the House of Commons and received the Royal Assent on Aug. 8. Orders in council have been made under this act which prohibit, in the widest possible terms, any attempt on the part either of aliens or of British subjects to communicate any information which "is calculated to be or might be directly or indirectly useful to an enemy"; and any person offending against this prohibition is liable to be tried by court-martial and sentenced to penal servitude for life. The effect of these orders is to make espionage a military offense. Power is given both to the police and to the military authorities to arrest without a warrant any person whose behavior is such as to give rise to suspicion, and any person so arrested by the police would be handed over to the military authorities for trial by court-martial. Only in the event of the military authorities holding that there is no prima facie case of espionage or any other offense triable by military law is a prisoner handed back to the civil authorities to consider whether he should be charged with failing to register or with any other offense under the Aliens Restriction act.

The present position is therefore that espionage has been made by statute a military offense triable by court-martial. If tried under the Defense of the Realm act the maximum punishment is penal servitude for life; but if dealt with outside that act as a war crime the punishment of death can be inflicted.

At the present moment one case is pending in which a person charged with attempting to convey information to the enemy is now awaiting his trial by court-martial; but in no other case has any clear trace been discovered of any attempt to convey information to the enemy, and there is good reason to believe that the spy organization crushed at the outbreak of the war has not been re-established.

How completely that system had been suppressed in the early days of the war is clear from the fact disclosed in a German Army order--that on the 21st of August the German military commanders were still ignorant of the dispatch and movements of the British expeditionary force, although these had been known for many days to a large number of people in this country.