"It is not so simple as that. It is a cipher code, and is probably
changed daily."
Nevertheless, the officers in the car watched the signalling closely,
and turning, surveyed the country behind us. In so flat a region, with
trees and shrubbery cut down and houses razed, even a pocket flash can
send a signal to the lines of the enemy. And such signals are sent.
The German spy system is thorough and far-reaching.
I have gone through Flanders near the lines at various times at night.
It is a dead country apparently. There are destroyed houses, sodden
fields, ditches lipful of water. But in the most amazing fashion
lights spring up and disappear. Follow one of these lights and you
find nothing but a deserted farm, or a ruined barn, or perhaps nothing
but a field of sugar beets dying in the ground.
Who are these spies? Are they Belgians and French, driven by the ruin
of everything they possess to selling out to the enemy? I think not.
It is much more probable that they are Germans who slip through the
lines in some uncanny fashion, wading and swimming across the
inundation, crawling flat where necessary, and working, an inch at a
time, toward the openings between the trenches. Frightful work, of
course. Impossible work, too, if the popular idea of the trenches were
correct--that is, that they form one long, communicating ditch from
the North Sea to Switzerland! They do not, of course.
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