Industrial espionage, of which this motor story is a typical example, was practised on a very large scale at Nice. The capital of the Riviera, where the Italian population is very numerous, was regarded by the Germans as one of the best centres for their operations when Italy came into the war on the side of the Entente Powers. Hence the completeness of their spy organization. Their principal meeting-place was at the bookshop of Hohberg, a vender of German "Kultur" in the Rue Maccarani. Hohberg was the publisher of a paper called _Deutsche in Nizza_, which had a circulation of twelve thousand copies weekly and contained articles with such titles as "In the Interests of Germanism." It heartily recommended its readers to patronize the Reichsadler-Apotheke, which masqueraded as an Anglo-Russian pharmacy, or the notorious spy Hübner, a florist of the Rue Masséna. It warmly upheld a campaign in favour of Riviera sanatoriums--run by German or Austrian doctors--such as the ones near Gorbio and Mentone, and which were admirably suitable as hiding-places for German officers, supposed to be convalescing but really spying. It contained a complete list of German doctors, tailors, etc., and frankly invited every Boche to pay a call at the Nice office, which thus served as a central organization for all the spies who, as tourists, naturalists, botanists, _masseuses_, chiropodists, and quacks overran that town and the whole of the beautiful Alpes-Maritimes. "The man's topographical knowledge is extraordinary," said a Nice friend of mine one day, referring to a young Austrian, the tutor to the children of Jellineck-Mercédés, who used to spend every available holiday tramping about the lavender-covered hills near Breil and the Franco-Italian frontier. "Although I've carried my beehives from place to place in these parts during more than twenty years, and pride myself on knowing every inch of the ground, yet he has often astonished me by his references to this or that mountain pathway or little-known landmark. These Austrians and Germans, almost without exception, possess a faculty for geographical surveying, linked with a strange liking for pedestrianism in the neighbourhood of frontiers and forts. Can that be merely a coincidence?" This was some years before the war, and at the time my friend's declaration produced no more than a passing impression. But I have since come to see what an important truth and warning it contained, the very kernel of the thesis which another clear thinker and Alsatian patriot, the Abbé Wetterlé, developed with great skill at the general meeting of the Touring Club de France on December 5th, 1915. IV--HOW EVERY GERMAN TOURIST BECAME A SPY