The British patrol lies in a slit trench beside its Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost armoured car. The captured spy sits on top of the car's bonnet and is questioned by an interpreter.

I. Newsreel item on the interrogation of a Turkish spy by British troops in Mesopotamia, September 1917.

II. Newsreel item on a British tented camp, with a horse column arriving, set against the background of the Italian Alps, December 1917.

Notes

Production: the Topical Film Company produced, before, during and after the First World War, the TOPICAL BUDGET series of twice-weekly newsreels. In April 1917 the War Office Cinema Committee obtained control of Topical for the British government as a production company and the newsreel was renamed as the WAR OFFICE OFFICIAL TOPICAL BUDGET. A second name-change was made a year later to PICTORIAL NEWS (OFFICIAL). The issue number code given on the subtitle captions (eg 336-1) indicates the release date

Shotsheet: there are no shotsheets as such for most of the TOPICAL BUDGET newsreels, but a file in the Film and Video Archive contains listings of the original English caption titles for most of the issues in the collection, which fulfills much the same function. It is noteworthy that although captions in a foreign language, for overseas release versions of the issues, are generally similar to the English versions, they are rarely exact translations

Summary: see IWM 9 for the spy item. Note that a French language version of this item is IWM 684e

Technical: the references with the prefix IWM of the WAR OFFICE OFFICIAL TOPICAL BUDGET consists chiefly of incomplete issues, two or more to a can. These may be in English or in one of the export languages: Spanish, French, or German (the German language issues, and some of the French, being intended for release in Switzerland). The items are not always in the order in which they appeared on the finished newsreel. See the NTB series for more complete issues of this newsreel. This fragment is currently held on the same reel as IWM 651b and IWM 651c, the can is marked as IWM 651