Chief of Spies

ALL'S FAIR--Captain Henry Landau-- Putnam ($3). "By far the greater majority of those who were employed by the British Secret Service in the occupied territories of Belgium and France, and in Germany, worked directly under me as their immediate Chief in the Field." So says Captain Henry Landau in beginning a detailed but never tedious record of the British spy system operating from Holland. Though no braggart, the author is not given to false modesty, takes honest pride in the achievements of himself and the men and women who risked a firing squad under his orders.

Born in the Transvaal of a Dutch mother, an English father, Henry Landau's first vivid recollections are of the Boer War. Two languages were his by inheritance. German he acquired later as a boy at school in Dresden. In his travels about Europe he improved his French, picked up Flemish. He graduated from Cambridge where "scholastically I was a brilliant success," went in for engineering (Colorado School of Mines, London School of Mines). When the War came he joined an ambulance unit, was transferred to the artillery where he rose to a captaincy. When in 1916 British espionage was practically wiped out by the efficient German counter-espionage service which effected the capture of Edith Cavell, the youthful artillery captain with a knowledge of all the needful languages became the man of the hour. He was sent to Holland, given unlimited authority and funds, so long as he could produce results.

Along the Dutch-Belgian frontier the Germans had stretched an electrified barricade patrolled by sentries. Captain Landau in Holland had to work through that deadly fence to rebuild on the other side a British secret service almost from the ground up.

His primary duty was to establish a spy system which would report accurately all troop movements behind the German lines, plans for an offensive, the formation of new divisions, new types of guns and equipment, new methods of attack. Sensational means had been tried but it was the organization of routine train-watching posts which counted most.

There were three principal ways of getting messages over the Dutch border: 1) On dark nights "passeurs" would go through the wire wearing rubber gloves and rubber socks, dodging the sentries. 2 ) Bargemen from Rotterdam to Antwerp would find means of concealing dispatches. 3) Belgian peasants whose farms touched the frontier were sometimes induced to pick up and transmit papers secretly tossed over the wire at night.

Captain Landau tells many a tale of success and failure:

Old Fritz of the Landsturm was a sentry on the border. A kind old man, he was fond of children, who were fond of him. What worried him was that Marie, aged 14, and her friends played too close to the live wire. Marie used to share delicacies with the old man, welcome relief from a diet of black bread and potatoes. Suddenly Old Fritz, bewildered, was transferred and Marie was arrested and condemned to death. Later her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and after the war this "stocky, wide-eyed Jeanne d'Arc" was awarded a British decoration.

The biggest scoop of the War occurred when a German deserter who had escaped into Holland fetched a bulky packet from under his coat and asked Captain Landau : "What is this worth to you?" Meekly the German accepted -L-100 for the latest edition of the German Field Post Directory, a document for which the British were prepared to pay "a fabulous sum."

"The Dane" was "the greatest of the Allied War-time spies." A marine engineer, traveling in Germany for the Danish shipbuilding industry, the Dane decided to sell his information to the British Se cret Service. Possessed of a phenomenal memory, he carried in his head the me chanical details of new German submarines and Zeppelins. When he first reported on guns big enough to bombard Paris from a distance of 75 miles, nobody would believe him. He made a fortune out of his spying, retired after the War to his native village where he is now a wealthy, highly-respected citizen.

Major Steffen was a South African who came from Luxemburg. With a crate of pigeons strapped to him he bailed out from an airplane over Luxemburg one black night early in 1918. His mission was to discover whether the Germans were concentrating troops in the Grand Duchy for the great March offensive. He landed in a field, badly shaken. Groping in the dark he hid his parachute in a hedge, trudged 20 miles to his father's house, arriving just before dawn. Two of his three pigeons subsequently reached British G.H.Q. The message they bore was, in effect, no German concentration in Luxemburg. Steffen remained in hiding until the armistice when he was awarded the D.S.O.

The War over, Chief Landau hastened from Holland to Belgium, was in time to see the retreat of the German Army. There he met the members of his own little army of Belgian patriots, most of whom he had never seen. A group of Belgian professional men, bankers and the nobility, organized by an engineer and a professor, calling themselves "La Dame Blanche," had been his most valuable assistants. Greeting them was "the most dramatic moment of my life."

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