The Spy Net by Henry Landau Read Free Book Online Page B

each refugee they conducted.
    My object was not only to get military information, however meagre it might be, but also to enrol agents for service in the occupied territory, or to get addresses of people in the interiorwho might be willing to work for us, if we could establish connection with them.
    It took a very courageous and patriotic man to return to Belgium or France after having successfully braved the dangers of the electric wire. Hundreds of photographs which I have seen, and which the Germans purposely circulated, bore eloquent proof of the high mortality among those refugees who ventured to cross alone; corpses burned and scarred by the high voltage were exposed, horrible and terrifying to look at. Besides for those who were caught returning there was the great danger of arrest, which meant certain death by a firing-squad; even for those who were seized in the act of merely escaping into Holland, a long term of imprisonment or dispatch to a civilian concentration camp in Germany was meted out. Added to this was the risk of gossip: once a man had fled to Holland, his neighbours knew it; if he returned, they were quick at surmising that he had come back as a spy, and even though sympathetic, their talk could undo him. Among the civil population, there were also a number of traitors in the pay of the Germans, who spied on their neighbours, and who were sharp to catch any secret service activities on the part of returned citizens.
    Henri van Bergen was our first recruit, a native of Louvain; he had crossed the frontier north of Antwerp by means of a passeur . Within twenty-four hours, I was interrogating him in our office on the Boompjes. The first thing that struck me about him was his bowler hat and his clothes, which he had donned on the previous day, before setting out on his hazardous trip. Immaculately dressed, he looked as if he had just stepped off the boat or train, instead of having come through the electric wire. I foundmyself talking to a man of about forty-five, with dark piercing eyes, a lawyer by profession, keen and alert, who made an excellent impression. Having met with refusals to serve from several other refugees, I was surprised at the ready consent which he gave as soon as I had convinced him that he could render better services to the Allies by returning to Belgium than by proceeding to France to enlist as a soldier.
    Oram was immediately ordered to arrange for a passage at the frontier, while I quickly instructed van Bergen as to the information we required, laying special stress on the mounting of train-watching posts. I explained fully to him the working of the posts and the details of information required – such as the composition of each troop train, the time of its passing. Nothing had to be repeated; his brief sharp nod, his concentrated gaze, showed me that his disciplined brain was already working with me. To avoid incriminating notes, he committed to memory the name and address of a cafe owner in Antwerp to whom he was to hand or send his reports; he himself was to be simply M. 60, a number which was at the same time identification and password. He understood at once the necessity of concealing his actual identity from the Antwerp letter box man. It was with a feeling of satisfaction that I dismissed so intelligent an agent, and yet I felt strangely sad as I said goodbye to him. As a soldier I had seen death in many forms, but in the guise of a civilian in Holland, the sanctity of human life was much more apparent to me. Right to the end, I could never shake off the terrible responsibility I felt in sending these men back into the occupied territory, many of whom I knew were going to their death.
    The moon being favourable, within three days he was onhis way to the frontier near Eindhoven, in the hands of Charles Willekens, who was to prove himself one of our best passeurs . Crawling on their stomachs to the electric wire, in the blackness of night, Willekens took his man through