Evening Star Newspaper, December 29, 1929, Page 79

THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C, DECEMBER 29, 1929. T— “All About the First Day of the Year” _By p. G. Wodehouse This Is One of a Series of Special Articles Written by Such Well Known Humorists as Wodehousey Stephen Leacock, Donald Ogden Stewart, Ellis Parker Butler, Richard Connell and Sam . Hellman. Another Will Appear in The Star’s Magazine Next Sunday. People in the early days were, we read, “ex- Pected to spend New Year day in quiet medita- tion.” How wonderful it is to think of this and then to realize that after all these centuries the custom still prevails. Go ‘round to any of your friends on the morning of January the 1ist, it condition to do so, and see for your- are to 1 that you will find darkened room, with a - 4 his side and a vinegar- ‘round his forehead, quietly I MYSELF have frequently started meditating " quietly on waking up at 2 in the afternoon on January the 1st and kept at it, with the aid of daily visits from the doctor and a generous sup- ply of headache powders, till the evening of January the 3d, when I felt that it would be fudicious to vary the monotony of my hermit life by looking in at a quiet place for a bird and & small bottle. It is curious how several of the old customs Sonnected with the birth of the New Year have The Truth Continued from Third Page demanded, “otherwise it is you who will be eourt-martialed.” An hour later a high espionage officer from headquarters dashed up in a motor car, cursing Joudly. “All the movements of this army depend on the woman’s report,” he shouted at the divi- sional staff. “You should have sent her to us at once. She is more important than your whole diyision.” After the big German offensive was finally halted Anne Marie traveled back and forth between Germany and the allied countries many times, always bringing back important information. One of her most spectacular feats was in the Summer of 1917. By this time the French coun- terespionage had succeeded in smashing the entire German spy organization in France and no news was leaking out. ‘The Kaiser himself sent word that he was anxious to know what Wwas going on in Paris. One day a stupid-looking Norman servant girl, with several good references from alleged former employers, went to No. 3 Rue Francois I, ¥Paris, and asked for a job, ‘This house had all the appearances of being & sort of family hotel. In reality, it was the headquarters of the French counterespionage service. The janitor had never seen such a dumb-looking girl, but he finally ‘gave her a job scrubbing and polishing the floors. There were three charwomen on duty. It was a rule that one must work at night and, as the other two disliked night work, the new girl took on the job and actually seemed to like it. On Sundays a young noncommissioned officer was the only employe on duty. He never paid any notice to the dirty young scrubwoman, but on the fourth Sunday she cleaned up, put on some pretty clothes and took his breath away. He tried to kiss her. She put a wad of cotton :le:h chloroform under his nose and he went to p. Like a flash the new charwoman—Anne Marie—went through the confidential files and extracted a list of all the French spies oper- ating in Germany and other foreign countries. She immediately jumped into a motor car with & confederate, dashed toward Switzerland and €rossed the frontier by a little known mountain “The odds are 100-to 1 that you will find him quietly meditating.” prevailed through the ages. Some, it is true, have lapsed—notably the practice of the ancient Persians of celebrating this festive season by giving presents of eggs. This may have been all right for the ancient Persians, but only million- alres can give away eggs at the current prices. It is all we can do to buy one for ourselves on occasions of special joy, as for instance a day of successful short selling in the Street. There is no more imposing spectacle than that of the modern New Yorker counting his roll to see if it will run to an omelet for the wife and family. But, if the state of the exchequer no longer permits of the continuance of this custom, there are others we still observe—that one, for ex- ample, which flourished in medieval England. In those days it was the practice of the King— I quote the encyclopedia—to “extort gifts from his subjects,” and it is on record that King Henry the Eighth on one occasion got into the ribs of Cardinal Wolsey to the tune of £117 7s 6d —the peculiar figures giving one to suppose that his bluff majesty met Cardinal Wolsey in some dark alley when he was coming back from the route, while all the gendarmes of France were searching fer her. . Again in 1918 the Kaiser wanted some re- liable information from France and Anne Marie suddenly appeared at Barcelona—she had ar- flvedmenwmthMola rich Argentine, She organized a Red Cross delegation of wealthy women from Barcelona to visit the French field hospitals and give pres- ents to the wounded. In this way the spy visited the most important parts of the French front, but in one hospital she was recognized by the Belgian officer who had fallen in love with_her before the war and had to make a mad dash to her motor car, with many French soldiers in pursuit. She got away in the dark- bank and stgod him on his head and lifted the stuff out of his pockets. But Henry was a per- former in a class of his own and, in the year 1533, is related to have been given “by all classes of his subjects many thousands of pounds.” DAY, living in a republic, we no longer celebrate the New Year by bestowing money upon kings, but lavish it instead upon head- waiters, captains, taxi-drivers and hat-check boys. There has always been a good deal of con- fusion in the public mind as to when, exactly, New Year day really i1s. The ancient Egyp- tians, Phoenicians and Persians held that it came at the autumnal equinox, which, as I need scarcely inform my readers, falls on Sep- tember the twenty-first. The Greeks, on the other hand, who were in just as good position to know, bet heavily on December the twenty- first. But in 432 B. C. they got perfectly de- lirfous and would have it that New Year day ness, crossed the front line during a heavy rainstorm and was picked up half dead by a German patrol. At other times “Mademoiselle Docteur” di- rected a spy bureau at Antwerp, where she trained many persons whom she sent into the allied countries. During one visit to Paris, where she went to give the chief agent, M. Coudyanis, direct , she was denounced to the French authorities by M. Coudyanis’ jealous flancee, but escaped. She returned to Paris a few months later and received valuable documents from the Rumanian dancer, Rene Coloscu, which she decided to take to Berlin personally. Shcmstowedttthesfi-bommd was escorted by a soldier. When out of ear- The Kaiser's officers avidly seized the reports of this woman spy and g - unhesitatingly trusted to her accuracy. was June the twenty-first. The ancient Roe mans picked out January the first, but the medieval Christians were solid on the twenty- fifth of March. This sort of conflict of ideas makes it very difficult for a conscientious man to do the right thing. He starts out- simply and straightforwardly enough by sallying forth on the last night of December to his hundred- dollar reserved table, with the laudable intene tion of parading the streets later on with a tin horn or a cowbell and registering appreciation of his blessings by making as much noise as is in his power. But mark the sequel. As March approaches, doubts begin to assail him. “Was I right?” he begins to ask himself. “Those medieval folk were shrewd fellows. Who knows whether they, may not have had the right dope in this im« portant matier of the start of the New Year?” The only way he can square his conscience is by going out and celebrating on the night of March the twenty-fourth. Scarcely, however, has the doctor left his bedside with the statee ment that he is all right now, when he beging to brood on the fact that the ancient Phoenis cians, who were no fools, favored Septembes the twenty-first as New Year day. By this time he is so uncertain that he feels the only safe course is to hunt up all the data and start celebrating every New Year that any, nation or collection of people ever invented, with the result that he has only just time to get in on the festivities on December the thirty- first, the now fashionable date, and join his unthinking fellow citizens in their revels. Many & young man, in the Springtime of life, has wasted a great deal of time simply through reading the New Year article in the encyclo- pedia. As a matter of fact, my own perusal of it has left me with grave doubts, and I had better be closely watched on the eve of Jume the twenty-first, as I am beginning to come round to the later Greek view, No mention is made in the encyclopedia of the modern custom of New Year resolu- -tlons. This is strange, for it surely cannot be a purely twentieth century fashion. Are we to understand that the ancient Romans never vowed that from the start of the year they would keep a diary regularly, and that are . never sobered the New Year eve revels at the Mermaid Tavern with his simple, dignified— “Count me out, comrades, for gadzooks! I have quit ye stuff for keeps!” Surely not. New Year would not be New Year without its reso~ lutions; and, what is far more important, -hu= morous literature could not exist without them. The ancient Phoenicians must have had some sort of comic literature—carved, doubtless, on stone slabs and stacked at your door from a truck. In that case, they must have made New Year resolutions. It would be extremely interesting to have the views of some archeoe logical expert on this important point. I have little more to add. If any word of mine enables my recders to approach New Year eve in a more thoughtful frame of mind; I shall be amply repaid. If, when dancing at your favorite restaurant, you pause for a moe ment to say to yourself, “Even so did the ane clent Egyptians do!” or “I bet Henry the Eighth was & whale at this sort of thing!” and, as you knock over the last remains of crockery amd glassware, you feel a passing pang for the days that are no more, my labors will not have been in vain. I thank you. (Copyright, 1929.) at Last About Germany’s Famous W oman Spys Mo(thesoldler'lmmionlhedre'l revolver and shot the guard dead. The next morning she appeared on the Swiss side and amthgrgulrdm!onnddndltthebordc. A HIGH French officer, who was one of the directors of his country’s counterespionage service, smiled bitterly when I asked him for . his memories of this remarkable woman. “It was like playing a game of chess agatnst an invisible opponent,” the officer explained, “We felt her activity. We realized that on the other side there was a clever, energetic, highly trained woman who was pulling the strings bew hind the scenes, who was playing with her hune dreds of subordinates like a master plays witls his puppets. “In innumerable cases the strings we picked up led directly to her. We could even study;- her methods, her character, her implacable ruthlessness, for when some poor assistant trieq to trick her, had she not literally thrown him - into our hands, as much as to say: ‘Here is a wretch who is no longer of any use to me. E hand him over to you, If you shoot him you Wwill be rendering me a service’ But thesg were exceptions. We knew enough about this mysterious master spy to realize that she was highly dangerous to the allied cause. If we had only been able to identify her, to get an exact description of her, to know where she was stationed, we might have done something about it. You can imagine how hard we tried. But it was futile. She kept herself hidden behind such an impenetrable veil that but for her u:&lvlty we would have doubted her ex« When the armistice finally came the woman was a physical wreck. She had commenced to take narcotics to strengthen her, especially when she was working as a charwoman in the French spy headquarters in Paris, and had never broken herself of the habit. It grew on her until finally she took scarcely any food at all. For four or five years she lived in this crazed state in a small Berlin suburban villa; supported by officers who had worked under her, but finally her condition became so bad that she had to be sent to a private asylum n Switzerland. (Copyright, 1929.) i