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had a wireless set and an elementary form of cipher, and their orders were to send back information of military importance; they had been given to understand that an invasion of the Kentish coast was imminent. By 5.30 on the same morning both men, although they separated on landing, had been challenged and made prisoner by sentries of a battalion of the Somersetshire Light Infantry.
    This was hardly surprising. The two men were of Dutch nationality. They were completely untrained for their difficult task; their sole qualification for it seems to have lain in the fact that each, having committed some misdemeanour which was known to the Germans, could be blackmailed into undertaking the enterprise. Neither had more than a smattering of English, and one suffered, by virtue of having had a Japanese mother, from the additional hazard of a markedly Oriental appearance; he it was who, when first sighted by an incredulous private of the Somersets in the early dawn, had binoculars and a spare pair of shoes slung round his neck.
    The other pair of spies consisted of a German, who spoke excellentFrench but no English at all, and a man of abstruse origins who claimed to be a Dutchman and who, alone of the four, had a fluent command of English. They landed at Dungeness under cover of darkness on 3 September, and soon after daybreak were suffering acutely from thirst, a fact which lends colour to the theory that on the previous night the whole party had relied on Dutch courage to an unwise extent. The English-speaker, pardonably ignorant of British licensing laws, tried to buy cider at breakfast-time in a public house at Lydd. The landlady pointed out that this transaction could not legally take place until ten o’clock and suggested that meanwhile he should go and look at the church. When he returned (for she was a sensible woman) he was arrested.
    His companion, the only German in the party, was not caught until the following day. He had rigged up an aerial in a tree and had begun to send messages (in French) to his controllers. Copies of three of these messages survived and were used in evidence against him at his trial. They were short and from an operational point of view worthless; the news (for instance) that
“this is exact position yesterday evening six o’clock three messerschmitt fired machine guns in my direction three hundred metres south of water reservoir painted red”
was in no way calculated to facilitate the establishment of a German bridgehead in Kent.
    All four spies were tried, under the Treason Act, 1940, in November. One of the blackmailed Dutchmen was acquitted; the other three men were hanged in Pentonville Prison in the following month. Their trials were conducted
in camera,
but short, factual obituary announcements were published after the executions.
    Two men and a woman, who on the night of 30 September 1940 were landed by a rubber dinghy on the coast of Banffshireafter being flown thither from Norway in a seaplane, had—and, except by virtue of their courage, deserved—no more luck than the agents deposited in Kent. They were arrested within a few hours of their arrival. During those hours their conduct had been such as to attract the maximum of suspicion. This—since both men spoke English with a strong foreign accent and the documents of all three were clumsily forged—they were in no position to dispel; and the first of them to be searched by the police was found to have in his possession,
inter alia:
a wireless set; a loaded Mauser automatic; an electric torch marked “Made in Bohemia”; a list of bomber and fighter stations in East Anglia; £327 in English notes; and a segment of German sausage. Both men—one a German, the other a Swiss—were in due course hanged.
    PETER FLEMING

21. THE SAD FATE OF MAJOR ANDRÉ
    He shares each want, and smiles each grief away;
And to the virtues of a noble heart,
Unites the talents of inventive art;
Since from his swift