knowledge that the slightest blunder means loss of liberty, often of
life, is wearing, to say the least.

I have known men and women, courageous to a degree, who have broken
dowm under the strain; sooner or later one is bound to succumb. I
have known of a dozen men and women who have mysteriously disappeared,
"dropped out of sight," caught or killed--_not always by their
opponents_.

To cite but two cases, one of a woman, the other of a man.

Olga Bruder was a spy. She worked for Germany and for the Service
Bureau in Brussels. A few years ago it was announced in the European
newspapers that a woman known as Olga Bruder had committed suicide in
a hotel at Memel on the Russian border. Fraulein Bruder had been sent
after the plans of a Russian fort. In Berlin they learned that she
had obtained them, but becoming involved in a love affair with a
Russian officer was holding them out, planning to restore them to him.
Also, contrary to the service regulations, she knew four foreign
agents well. Later reports from Danzig revealed the fact that she had
become enamored with a sectional chief of the Russian Service and that
she was about to give up everything to him. So Olga Bruder committed
suicide. _She was poisoned_.

As for Lieutenant von Zastrov, an ex-army officer in the German Secret
Service, he was killed in a duel. Zastrov was suspected of flirting
with Russian agents--only suspected. He knew too much to be
imprisoned. He was a civilian and under the German law entitled to a
public hearing. Had he still been a military man, a secret tribunal
would have been possible, but being the scion of an old aristocratic