"IRISH FOOLS!"Have you forgotten that England is your only enemy?"Have you forgotten, Kathleen, that you are willing to shed your blood to win England's battles?"Have you lost your wits that you believe all the ridiculous lies published against the Germans in the Jingo papers?"Have you forgotten how the English treated the Boers?"Have you forgotten Ninety-Eight?"Have you forgotten the Manchester Martyrs?"Have you forgotten the K.O.S.B. murders?"Have you forgotten that the Future lies in your hands?"Have you forgotten that England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity?"God Save Ireland."
"IRISH FOOLS!
"Have you forgotten that England is your only enemy?
"Have you forgotten, Kathleen, that you are willing to shed your blood to win England's battles?
"Have you lost your wits that you believe all the ridiculous lies published against the Germans in the Jingo papers?
"Have you forgotten how the English treated the Boers?
"Have you forgotten Ninety-Eight?
"Have you forgotten the Manchester Martyrs?
"Have you forgotten the K.O.S.B. murders?
"Have you forgotten that the Future lies in your hands?
"Have you forgotten that England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity?
"God Save Ireland."
It is hardly necessary to say that so obviously crude and inartistic an appeal had no effect upon an essentially acute and artistic race; and its positive inartisticity bears the hall-mark of your Prussian's incapacity for entering into the more intimate feelings of men of other nations, a point which need hardly be laboured, having in view recent and current bovine misconceptions on the part of German diplomatic agents both in Europe and America.
A more serious attempt to "revolutionise" French railway systems was made in 1893 some few months after the granting of £4000 from the secret-service funds for the purposes of international pamphleteering. In August of that year the Mesnard pamphlet made its appearance containing an appeal to all workers connected with the railroad systems of France and urging them to take advantage of their country's dependence upon them in order to wring concessions in money from the Government, failing which a general and permanent strike was to be declared having the inevitable result of paralysing the country's energies and exposing it to attack on the part of its traditional enemy. The pamphlet was proved to have been issued from Geneva, a chief centre of the German international secret-service body. It was promptly disavowed bythe labour unions of France, and it was well recognised at that period that its appearance was timed to create an industrial upheaval to coincide with the friction which the Dreyfus Affair was then causing between French and German diplomatists. During the course of several general strikes which have taken place in France within the past twenty years, it has clearly come to light that the charitable subscriptions made in support of the families of strikers by Frenchmen have been exceeded by contributions coming from German "sympathisers," in the proportion of twenty sovereigns to one. In the famous strike of boot-makers at Amiens in May 1893, for example, local subscriptions amounted to £48. At least £1000 was sent direct from Frankfurt![2]"In the last fifteen years," wrote Lanoir in 1910, "the instigation of strikes in French industries has been raised by the directors of the German Secret Police to the degree of a real principle of government." The same authority states that in 1893 he heard an ultra-Radical parliamentary candidate for the Seine Department declare that a German admirer, whom he did not know, had sent him £100 towards his election expenses. Stieber in his Memoirs affects to believe that this sum iscommonly sent to any French parliamentarian who advocates a policy which is thought to be useful to German imperial interests.
Stieber died in 1892, being honoured with a public funeral at which the highest personages in Berlin were officially represented. His fortune amounted to nearly £100,000 of our money and he possessed both a town residence in Berlin and a villa in the Hartz Range. He had been successful in accumulating throughout his public career twenty-three decorations testifying to hisHonour, and as this would appear to have been his chief ambition in life, there can be little doubt that the sleuth died happy. It is customary to say that Stieber took with him to his grave the essential secrets underlying his organisation of a national system of internal and external espionage. Frankly we think that this can hardly have been the case, since the operations of German espionage have at all times clearly proved themselves traceable to definitely ascertainable objects and plans. Nor do we think that the German system holds anything more in the way of elemental secrets to be revealed, and the excellent systems of counter-espionage adopted by British and French authorities justify us in our belief. Price Collier's pregnant statement that the Germans have organised themselves into an organisation, ahead of which they are incapable of thinking or planning, may well be held to apply to their organised espionage, and Stieber's elaboration of its arts may be taken to have reached the highestpossible point. In bursts of friendly confidence, and presumably as a matter of proving the ineluctable superiority of the Teuton over the poor Anglo-Saxon, German lecturers in English universities have occasionally permitted their patriotic sentiments so far to exceed the bounds of official reticence as to throw a certain amount of light upon this mystic bag-of-tricks which is going to assure to the House of Hohenzollern the overlordship of the five continents and the seven seas. According to one of these German professors whom we well and, indeed, affectionately remember, the high priests of the policy of Prussianisation have thought out the whole matter along lines alleged to have been laid down by the Hebrew Elders in accordance with their policy of recovering the world for the Chosen Race. According to this interesting system of Jewish Eugenics, the racial stock of Sem is to be permanently assured as to its integrity by enforcing the marriage of all male Jews with Jewesses. Result: all-Jewish offspring. The superfluous women of the Hebrew families are to be distributed as far as possible among the Gentile males, especially among those who possess means, with the object of ensuring that the resultant offspring shall possess such an admixture of Jewish blood as to make it at least sympathetic towards Jews and Jewish ideas. And as sympathetic qualities come in the main from the distaff side, the eugenic results must inevitably favour Hebrew propagandism. We might gofurther into this matter and point out that the Jewish rite of circumcision was not meant to be simply hygienic in its effects and reach. We will not labour the point, however, but proceed to indicate the analogy—according to the learned German lecturer.
Prussia, said our authority, had appropriated large sums from the indemnity of £200,000,000 sterling which she had obtained from France in 1870, for the purpose of establishing her "national missionaries" in every quarter of the world. Men were chosen according to their abilities to preside over the destinies of foreign commercial houses, banking institutions, agencies of all kinds, commission and money-lending businesses and contracting corporations. These men were really in the pay of the Berlin authorities who were financing the various firms in question and paying their agents large or small profits in proportion to the turnover of each particular business. It was, however, certain that every German, no matter what his position, was really acting in the interests of Germany, and so the ubiquitous German clerk was enabled to undersell the labour of the British clerk for the good reason that the deficit was offset in his particular case by a quarterly grant from official German sources. The intermarriage of Germans with British women was not only smiled upon, but a premium was actually paid in each case and unknown to the women. The children were, as far as possible, brought up in sympathy with German institutionsand ideas and taught to revere the chief of Hohenzollern as the potential overlord of every country which came within the operations and purview of German ambitions and land-lust. In the event of war and in accordance with this propagandism, "everything went," as the Americans say. In the early days of the conquest of Belgian territories in 1914 we saw how particular attention was paid to the younger unmarried women, as in Louvain, to give but one example. These women were interned in a sort of concentration camp and systematically seduced, making it a last possible hope for many a hapless victim to accept a German husband, who in his own turn was offered either a premium or promotion, whether civil or military, for marrying the lady, as the saying is. It is not necessary to pursue this theme to the extent to which it is capable of being emphasised. It is sufficient for us to reflect that the main principles upon which German ideas of conquest are based are not only vicious and immoral in themselves, but are openly admitted and encouraged by the German civil, military and cultural authorities who have raised their apostolic voices in the cause of Prussian propagandism. Those who possess even an elementary acquaintance with the history of nations do not require to be told that, with the object of forcing "sympathies," methods quite as outrageous as those cited above have more than once been resorted to and, notably, in the early days of Rome's founding. It has beenwell said that Stieberism has had the result of demoralising the entire German nation by putting a premium on treachery and immorality in the pursuit of special information and so has made that trade a career open to the talents of all who care to adopt it. Responsible ministers have declared more than once in the imperial parliament at Berlin their concurrence in the view that "all is justifiable" in the interests of the future of the Fatherland, and in this regard we remember that not so long ago Herr Richter, the leader of the Opposition, raised a protest reflecting on the doubtful character of the secret-service agents of the Government only to receive from Puttkamer the now-stereotyped retort:
"It is the right and duty of the German Imperial Government to employ all possible and necessary methods in order to secure for the State the benefits of useful intelligence, and if the Minister of Police has had success by employing doubtful persons for his purposes, I personally express to him my satisfaction and thanks."
The particular methods to which Richter had taken exception included the bribing of magistrates, politicians and wealthy industrialists to give up information in their possession. Some of the most disreputable night-houses in Berlin were protected by the police for the reason that they had become the fashionable rendezvous of officers and diplomatists who, in their cups, were easily induced to give up information regarding their superiors, which the secret-service sleuthswere anxious to obtain with the object of creating situations that left important public men at their own mercy or else at the mercy of men immeasurably higher up. Much has been written about the "high sense of virtue" which prompted the famous revelations which were made by Harden in his publicationDie Zukunftin 1907. We do not personally question the sense of virtue possessed by the German editor, but it is certain that the opinion was current in Berlin in the succeeding year that reasons of State had required the removal from official life of many of the high social and political personages implicated in the scandals, and that the apparently "private" information possessed by an editor was selected as the easiest means of forcing them irrevocably from public life. Knowing what we do of the exiguous liberties of the Prussian Press, it is quite obvious that the life of an editor who should venture, of his own initiative and authority, to divulge a tenth part of the story which was printed in theZukunft, would not have been worth an hour's purchase in militaristic Berlin. And here we recur to the statement once made by an old servant of Frederick the Great to the famous Count d'Antraigues: "That day on which you begin to imagine your services are indispensable to him will be your last day. He has no heart, and the very thought that you possess a claim on his friendship will suffice to destroy you."
It is essential before passing from Stieber to consider his methods of covering a foreign countrywith a fully organised system of German spies, and all the more so because the work done in modern days by Steinhauer and his congeners is based altogether on the conceptions of Bismarck's sleuth. We have seen that in 1870, when the German armies crossed the frontiers of France, they had already been assured, through the energies and foresight of Stieber, of the co-operation of some 36,000 spies in Northern and Eastern France who were to smooth the way for von Moltke's advancing legions. Indeed, Stieber's work largely discounts that of both Bismarck and von Moltke, if it does not wholly supersede it. In his Memoirs the sleuth tells how Bismarck, when told that Jules Favre was putting out feelers for the surrender of Paris in 1871, sent for his lieutenant, instructing him to keep Favre under the closest possible observation during the course of the negotiations. The Prussian and French statesmen met at Versailles, where Stieber had made all necessary arrangements for lodging the visitor. He selected for this purpose, and unknown, of course, to Favre, the headquarters of the German Secret Police Service—Stieber's own office. The Frenchman was given as valet a man whom the proprietor highly recommended. This valet was Stieber himself, who, during Favre's whole stay at Versailles, acted for the statesman in the most menial capacities, taking care during his master's absence to ransack the latter's luggage and examine all his voluminous correspondence entering from Paris. Stieber boaststhat much of the information he thus obtained formed the basis of the negotiations on which peace terms were concluded. Moritz Busch in his Memoirs makes no especial mention of the sleuth's services in this regard, and we may dismiss Stieber's claim to have counted for much in the peace negotiations as being characteristically overdrawn.
He was, however, active in the remapping of the invasion zones in 1871 for the operations of hiscorps d'espions, the members of which, in regard to all French territories, were from that year chosen mainly from among the French-speaking Swiss. He laid it down as a condition of the "fixed-point" spy's employment that he should be the keeper of a shop of some kind, a public-house, a tobacconist's, an hotel, a grocery of an established character and certain to attract custom from the townspeople. Each spy was to assume the character of an honest peace-loving citizen, anxious to give public service and make himself personally popular. He was to receive in payment some £4 a week besides out-of-pocket expenses to Brussels, or Lausanne, or Geneva where his particular reports were made and whence his salary was paid every month in the form of business remittances. The system of counter-espionage adopted in France during the past five and twenty years has undoubtedly had the effect of neutralising the work of the fixed-point agent. Nevertheless, it is certain that in August 1914 there were some 15,000 of themstill operating throughout France. Paul Lanoir gives a specimen of the remittance letters which pass between the chief spy inspector and his agent, the fixed-point expert. In some cases they are ordinary business letters; but in the larger number they affect to be communications between relatives. Thus:
"My dear George,—I am sending you the interest on your loan. We never can forget your generous act in coming so promptly to our assistance. Things are not going too badly; next year, perhaps, you may have a larger share in our profits, and we are anxious you should have as much as possible. But write more often giving us fuller news. Do not abuse Uncle Charles; he is a very good man who is to be trusted always. We are all well here, but have only just managed to pull through a hard winter. My husband and the children send you our greetings, as also do Charlotte, Charles and Frederick. Your loving sister."
"My dear George,—I am sending you the interest on your loan. We never can forget your generous act in coming so promptly to our assistance. Things are not going too badly; next year, perhaps, you may have a larger share in our profits, and we are anxious you should have as much as possible. But write more often giving us fuller news. Do not abuse Uncle Charles; he is a very good man who is to be trusted always. We are all well here, but have only just managed to pull through a hard winter. My husband and the children send you our greetings, as also do Charlotte, Charles and Frederick. Your loving sister."
Occasionally a man is suspected of being a spy. He is asked to produce his foreign correspondence, and does so, giving some such letter as the above in token of his integrity.
"There!" he is certain to say, "that's the sort of spyIam—a kind and loving brother who has lent money to his relatives to keep them out of the poorhouse. And this is a letter which encloses me the interest on my loan." And then, of course,the fixed-point agent gives way to tears. Nevertheless, the above apparently harmless message is well understood by our spy who reads it as follows:—
"I enclose your salary for the past month. Your reports of last month are not bad. On the whole your work is satisfactory and next year you may get a better salary. Nevertheless, your reports are too few in number; work harder, send more. Don't trouble about Uncle Charles; we have all the information we require. We got through the last inspection without loss of salary. Keep up your relations with your correspondents."
"I enclose your salary for the past month. Your reports of last month are not bad. On the whole your work is satisfactory and next year you may get a better salary. Nevertheless, your reports are too few in number; work harder, send more. Don't trouble about Uncle Charles; we have all the information we require. We got through the last inspection without loss of salary. Keep up your relations with your correspondents."
It is obvious that our residential spy is not allowed to select his place of business at random. His location is at some strategical point in the line of military advance, mapped out some years ahead. Thus, our agent can spy upon the local garrison, upon a military post, a railway depot, a terminal, and at any critical moment he has his own corps of agents—some of them, alas, unconscious traitors—ready, for a few francs, to do his bidding, among them, perhaps, a poor charwoman or an unemployed labourer. In country towns in France it is not hard for a prosperous man of business to make friends with the officers of the garrison. Sooner or later and after a series of visits to the billiard-table, or the hotel bar, he discovers among his military acquaintances needyyoung officers who are in debt, who have lost heavily on the race-courses, and it is not long before he begins to talk of his large winnings on the turf. The way is quickly opened to a loan, and then the German Secret Service begins to find out things. Naturally our residential spy keeps his book of expenses and is duly recouped for his outlays on drinks, dinners, race-course visits and loans, with interest at 5 per cent. And if the spy is unable to make headway with a young officer, there is always a possibility of his being able to bribe the officer's wife or mistress, and his allowance of earnest-money is practically unlimited. So that, when we consider how our agent is a man of leisure who fishes the local streams, and has plumbed their various depths; how he keeps horses and knows the average amount of forage available in his town at any given moment; how he has shot over the outlying country and knows the lie of the land for miles around; how he is on visiting terms with every local farmer and knows his resources—why, it is not surprising that when German armies are moved across the frontiers, they should know every step of the country much better than the inhabitants themselves are likely ever to know it. And so with Belgium and England, where there is not a farmhouse, a strategic copse or upland, the depth of a river, or military capacity of a given road, which is not as well known to the headquarters staff in Berlin as to our own ordnance-surveyors.
The strategic ideas laid down more than two thousand years ago by Polyænus, of whom we have spoken in an earlier chapter, and to whom Napoleon admitted some indebtedness, are evidently rated high among the military authorities of the Berlin military academies. It is therefore not surprising to learn that in accordance with the Greek's teachings every foreign general or superior officer of note who is considered likely ever to play a prominent rôle in European wars, is in each case as well known to the German military authorities as he is to his own military superiors. His personal character, disposition, virtues, vices and foibles, once an officer reaches to high rank and acquires a reputation as a possible commander, all form the subject of one of thosedossierswith which the Dreyfus case made us so familiar. It is a main part of the duty of our fixed-point agent to collect all sorts of information regarding the chief garrison officers at the town in which they are established and transmit the resulting data to their inspectors by whom, when verified, they are forwarded to military headquarters. The especial categories whichclaim the attention of the German authorities are the following:—
(a) Generals and officers of superior rank and high repute.
(b) The staff-college professors at Saint-Cyr, the École Polytechnique and Saint-Maixent, the disciplinarians, bursars and superior employés of these institutions.
(c) The managers of all arsenals and military establishments.
(d) All aides-de-camp and staff-officers.
(e) All superior employés in the department of the Ministers of War and the Navy.
(f) Special information as to the financial and domestic conditions and relations of all those officers mentioned in the above categories who are known or thought to be "unsettled" in their mode of life.
It is also stated that promising cadets from the military and naval academies are at once registered at Berlin and honoured with their respectivedossiers. Lanoir is the chief authority for the above-mentioned details, and as a trained journalist, he gives an instance of the working of the spy in a case which came directly under his notice. The fixed-point agent in question had found it somewhat difficult to penetrate into the society of the superior officers at a garrison town. He therefore decided to find out all he required through certain subaltern officers who were accustomed to frequent his place of business—an hotel, as it happened. Accordingly he called inthe services of an occasional visitor at the house—a commercial traveller who was also a spy in German pay. Possessed of all those gifts of the genial man of the world, the supposed commercial traveller found no difficulty whatever in winning the confidence of junior officers whose social talents were far in excess of their means and who were quite willing to overlook the inferior rank of their new acquaintance when they discovered that with him the spending of money was altogether a small consideration. It was not long before one of the subalterns had confessed that inability to keep up his position had necessitated sending in his resignation, which had been duly forwarded to the authorities. Expressing sympathy in a fatherly way, the traveller requested the young officer to inspect his own military papers. "You will see that I, too, have done my duty to France," he said, handing over some forged certificates attesting military service, for the manufacture of which Berlin has a special department. "Knowing me for a good Frenchman, perhaps you will treat me with more confidence." The commercial man goes on to propose that the subaltern shall enable him to do business with the officers of the garrison. His particular line of goods is hosiery, which he is willing to sell to officers, since he is an ex-soldier himself, at almost cost price. The subaltern is naturally interested, but declares that he knows nothing about business. The tempter then tells his young friend that in reality he is travelling for his ownfirm and can make a profit on the goods even if he allows the subaltern 50 per cent. on everything sold. "For every £4 worth of hosiery I sell, you shall have a cheque for £2. As for the difficulty of introductions—just say I am your cousin; it is done every day and all over France. It will be worth £250 a year to you." The poor subaltern is not long in falling, and by the end of the next month the commercial traveller has wormed his way into the officers' quarters, has learned all there is to be known about the ammunition and ordnance stores, together with personal details about superior officers, which he could never have obtained in any other way. German money is making up the deficit on hosiery sold at cost price, but in return Germany is getting far more than her money's worth in military intelligence.
Lanoir also gives an instance in which one of the most promising French officers of his generation was, less than a score of years ago, paid £8000 by a supposed man of wealth, a casual garrison-town acquaintance, in order to rescue his father from bankruptcy. The information had come to the ears of the German tutor of a French General to whom our young officer was acting as aide-de-camp; the tutor forthwith informed the German fixed-point agent, with the result that the offer of £8000 was subsequently made and accepted, the young officer in question ultimately transferring his services to thedossierbureau attached to the Secret Police in Berlin.Another officer is said to have been given a sufficient fortune by the German War Office to make him an eligiblepartiin the eyes of the daughter of a well-known French General who was said to possess especial knowledge regarding mobilisation plans and arsenal material. The officer, whose heart was elsewhere, as they say, accepted the commission from Berlin, paid half-hearted court to the lady in question, but was seen sufficiently often in her company to justify the local agent's belief in the young man's assertion that things were going on famously. On his promise to supply Berlin with copies of documents belonging to hisfiancée'sfather, they consented to advance £10,000. He thereupon drew up plans of mobilisation of his own, as well as details regarding artillery, which he had himself thought out. Eventually the price was paid in full, our officer promising to reveal much more when the wedding was over. Then he went off with the other lady, and Berlin was badly beaten, though not, it is certain, for the first time. Within the past ten years it is well known that large sums of money have been on several occasions paid for intelligence regarding French and Russian fortifications, the plans and specifications having been drawn up by individuals who had deliberately devoted themselves to military studies in order scientifically to produce the "information" in question. Such a set of plans was sold to Germany in 1909 by a Pole, for a sum exceeding £4000. It is, however, not often that the German military experts arecaught nodding, their sources of primary information being as a rule excellent. They take few risks, but then there is no source of possible information which they overlook. This being so, the extravagant wife of an army man is always an object of interest to them, and many an officer has fallen, owing to his desire to shield a venal wife, blackmail, in such a case, being invariably the method of coercing the husband.
If ever a nation has proved to the world that she is devoid of essential military genius, that nation is Germany. Her successful campaign of 1870 was almost entirely due, as we have seen, to the preparations and plans laid down by Stieber and his co-adjutors as well as the fact that France had relied too much upon the traditional ability of the French armies to cope successfully with those of Germany. The same may be said of Germany's "marvellous advance" towards Paris in 1914, which was really a triumph for organised espionage and by no means a proof that military genius was inspiring the movements of the Kaiser's hosts. This organised system of espionage has for some years been in the hands of Major Steinhauer, the present chief of the Berlin Secret Service, and evidently a worthy successor to Stieber. Belgium, as all know who have studied German methods in what has been long known as the "penetration area" of the Netherlands, was so completely in the hands of German spies at the outbreak of the war, that it was only the failure, by a rare miscalculation, of the Berlin militaryauthorities to have forwarded adequate siege-guns to Liège which prevented the Imperial armies marching through the country in a week and reaching France sooner. The entry into the Belgian capital of 700,000 men, without confusion or mishap, has been credited to the military genius of von Kluck and his lieutenants, the fact being entirely overlooked that in view of the inevitable war which Berlin expected to take place before 1915 (as a well-known German newspaper-proprietor told American and Canadian reporters in 1910) the German Secret Service authorities had made an especial appropriation from their funds for the purpose of placing some 8000 spies on the various routes of march between Aix-la-Chapelle and Saint-Quentin. As a result, the very quarters of the various regiments of German invading forces had been marked out for occupation by the Berlin authorities at least two years ahead, while for the purposes of lodging important personages, special hotel managers had been installed several months before August 1914. In Brussels as well as in Paris the city had been so well mapped out that, as American correspondents reported, distinguished officers arriving by rail at the Gare du Nord or the Gare de l'Est gave their instructions as couriers might have done, without doubt or hesitation, to the cabmen at the stations. All these preparations had been made by German fixed agents whose various residences throughout the line of advance bore the familiar caricature of "Kluck's cow." As the eventproved in Belgium, such fixed spies had become, from lengthy and normal residence in the various cities, so familiar to Belgian inhabitants that these last supposed them to be either the victims of the German billeting process, or else compulsory agents under the terms of martial law. In Paris matters had been prepared so far in advance that it had been decided to give a representation of Sudermann'sHeimathat the Comédie Française, at which the Kaiser and his Staff were to be present. That chronically disappointed potentate was to reside, the German papers of the time declared, at the Élysée, the President's abode, while the procuresses of Paris, mostly Germans, felt, in view of the commissions already distributed in advance among them, emphatically assured that their financial millennium was to arrive with the German Staff. It had even been arranged, by way of a spectacularrevanche, that the so-called War Lord was to visit the Invalides, where Napoleon's body reposes, and there possess himself of the great soldier's sword, as the Corsican had, in 1806, possessed himself of the sword of Frederick the Great, saying as he took it, "Ceci est à moi"—this is mine. The military set-back was in all probability the least which the Emperor William suffered by his failure to "hit" Paris as a Westerner might put it, seeing that the Kaiser can hardly be called a military man in any practical sense of the term.
In regard to the fixed spies in Belgium, it has to be noted that they were not all, as far as isknown, natives. Competent Belgian journalists declared at the outbreak of the present war that, at the defeat of France in the war of 1870, Germany had already laid down plans for eventually overrunning and annexing both Belgium and Holland. With a view to carrying out her plans, she made in 1872 definite appropriations for the covering of both countries with a system of what was known at Berlin as "Germanising influences." It was based on a principle of giving to deserving minor tradesmen in the Rhineland districts sums of money sufficient to set them up in business in the so-called Belgian "penetration area." Preference was given to couples with young children who had been born on German soil. The people of the Rhineland and Westphalia are for the most part Catholics; large numbers of them speak both French and Flemish, or at least "Plat-Deutsch," while from a mental point of view, there is very little difference between them and the populations of Liège and Limburg. Once settled on Belgian soil, it was easy for them to adapt themselves to the people and bring up their children as Belgians. It was part of the agreement, however, that the children, after attaining a certain age, should return to the Fatherland, there to undergo a process of re-Germanisation, at the close of which, having resided with close relatives and passed through German schools, they returned to Belgium ostensibly pro-Germans. In the meantime their parents were being helped to enrich themselves by acting as commission-agentsfor large industrial houses on the German side. It was supposed that this scheme—an invention of Bismarck—would prove the key to the conquest of the Netherlands, for the plans were also put into operation in Holland. As a matter of fact, the results of the scheme were far from coming up to expectations, and if any proof were wanting to demonstrate the elemental incapacity of the German for assimilating another race, here it was. The Belgian and the Dutchman both proved their capacity (and at the same time their racial superiority) for assimilating the Germans to the point at which the latter became anti-German—even as is the case with the German-Americans of to-day, who are Americans first and Germans last of all. By the mid-nineties it was hoped that a large nucleus of Germanophile Belgians and Dutch would be preparing for the easy (and perhaps peaceful) conquest of the Low Countries. Bismarck had realised, however, by 1890 that "the German is not by nature or disposition a good coloniser," whatever virtues he may possess as a colonist, and for that reason was opposed to his new Kaiser's ambition to push the frontiers of the Fatherland farther than they had already gone. At all events, the organised system of the Germanising influences proved, to a large extent, a failure in the Low Countries. It is precisely because it had not proved so to the whole extent that Belgium fell so easy a victim to the German aggressive advance, once Liège had fallen, in 1914. For as a result of the system of 1872 and onward,it was hard for Belgians themselves to know who was in 1914 an agent for Germany and who was not. In this connection, and as the analogy holds in some degree, it may be stated that the main objection to the Oxford Scholarships founded by the late Mr Rhodes was based on an argument advanced by observant German professors who had seen Britain's system at work—namely, that the German citizen was too easily assimilable by stronger and superior types to allow of his passing three or four years at the intellectual hub of the British Empire without detriment to his German patriotism.
While discussing Belgium we are reminded of the fact that at the University of Louvain many theological students from Germany were in residence before the war and were, therefore, enabled to keep their correspondents in Germany in touch with matters of importance as to the feeling of Belgian professors and the Belgian hierarchy generally towards Germany and German aspirations in Belgium. It is not so commonly known, however, that every German army includes in its ranks a number of renegade priests, or priests in minor orders, who are sufficiently well acquainted with religious matters to be able to impose upon villagers, or local parish priests and nuns. The non-Catholic forces which arrived at Louvain in September 1914, when they came into conflict with the Catholic Bavarian troops, were entirely to blame for the mutilation of the historic city, since reprisals on the part ofthe inhabitants—if any serious reprisals ever took place—were said by American and Australian correspondents to have probably been due to the fact that many of these ex-priests had been given clerical attire from the military clothing department and sent to visit the local religious houses, not as soldiers, but in their clerical capacity. The result was a series of outrages both at convents and colleges, the recital of which has already been officially given to the world by Belgian authorities. Stieber placed much reliance on this peculiar class of spy in the Austrian campaign of 1866 and again in that of 1870. The German authorities continue to employ them and they are ever willing to serve, since as a rule they belong to a class whose poverty and rakishness are known throughout Germany. They are not, it may be said, confined to any particular religion, and in the present war their functions have been exercised mainly in ministering to the wounded, from whom they are successful enough in extracting information as to the movements of opposing forces. Readers do not require to be told at this juncture of the unscrupulous use which German armies have made of the Red Cross ambulances in the war of 1914. Not only have they clothed the most notorious creatures of German towns in nuns' attire, but in many cases youthful soldiers have been dressed as Red Cross Sisters and have thus been enabled to pass through the enemy's lines, ostensibly on errands of mercy, but in reality in order to spy out the situation. That Germancommanders have little regard for the lives of their men is better known, perhaps, than a common ruse to which they resort when looking for artillery range. At nightfall two recruits are invariably asked to volunteer for duty with the wire-coil. They advance towards the enemy's lines which they are instructed to inspect, paying out the coil of wire as they advance. Naturally they are shot as they approach the other camp; their officer's object has, however, been accomplished, and when his end of the coil ceases to "pay out" he is in possession of the range.
The present war, experts assure us, has not developed anything new in the way of cipher messages, and it is now generally admitted that man has yet to devise a cipher which, given time to solve its principle, will continue long to remain a puzzle to inquiring minds. Napoleon adopted a cipher with which he communicated on many occasions with his chief-of-staff, Berthier, whose only recorded witticism is that the Emperor's handwriting was the hardest cipher he knew. By Napoleon's directions, a certain pamphlet was to be employed according to the day of the week or the date. The names of these were of course known beforehand. The instructions ran: "The first figure will give the number of the page; the second figure will give the line; the third number will serve as index to the required word, or letter, and give its position in the line indicated by the second figure; if the figure denotes a whole word, it will explain itself; if itonly means a letter the fact will be shown." The whole system was found, however, to be too slow for the most impatient of commanders, and as a result was rarely called for by the Emperor. The Great War has disclosed the fact that old Indian tricks of conveying information over long distances have been resorted to, particularly the Red Man's signals by smoke which ascends at various points along a given line and the different readings of which are settled by agreement in advance among those sending and receiving the signals. It is now known that information as to "range," which, at the opening of the war, German artillerists were able to discover with a rapidity and a precision which were not less than miraculous, was being transmitted to the enemy by fixed spies in towns behind the French and British positions by means of smoking fires built upon upland territory according to indications previously agreed upon and based mainly on the number and arrangement of the different volumes of smoke. The ruse was quickly penetrated however, and thereafter German gunners proved less expert in judging distances. We also heard much at the beginning of the war, both on the Continent and in England, of the "window-light" and the "window-blind" system of communicating intelligence to the enemy on land as well as on the coastline. All these tricks have been discovered, and as a result of the most stringent exercise of precautions, as well as the insistence upon martial-law regulations at nightfall in the fightingareas, military spies have been forced to rely more largely on personal adventure and its risks, than was the case in the earlier phases of the conflict. Spies sent in advance of an army, disguised as peasants of the countryside, can keep their friends informed of the movements of the enemy by various signals also drawn from the Red Man's code, such as the breaking of trees or branches, cutting up squares of turf and disposing them in a certain order near trees, by chalk-marks not very dissimilar to the "marks" used by English and American tramps or by the placing of stones at certain distances—all signs which can be read according to previous arrangement. In regard to these ruses it may confidently be said that modern man is far behind primitive or uncivilised man in the effective employment of them, and, in any case, there were few of those now recently in use which were not commonly practised by Napoleon and his commanders.
The man who now occupies the chair at the headquarters of the Berlin Secret Police is called Steinhauer. For the past two decades he has been one of the most important officials connected with the bureau and was responsible for the commissions given to Turr, Windell, Graves, Lody, Ernst and a host of experts, the majority of whom have engaged in espionage both in France and England and unfortunately remained uncaptured. Steinhauer's contribution to the German system of spying has been connected mainly with the adoption to its ends of modern scientific inventions. At the outbreak of the War of 1914, for instance, it is certain that in Paris alone, his agents were manipulating a round dozen of wireless apparatus concealed, in several cases, on the roofs of hotels which were, of course, under German management, and in other cases in private houses, as well as on private yachts on the coasts of France. Much of Steinhauer's money has also passed into the hands of British manufacturers of automobiles and makers of British military uniforms who were, all unconsciously, selling their goods to the Berlin sleuth's emissaries in Britain and France,to be used for the purposes of espionage in time of war. A writer in thePetit Parisienhas stated that the Berlin military authorities possess uniforms of all grades capable of clothing an army corps composed of all the different types of soldiers in Europe, while their batteries of foreign-made automobiles can only be numbered in terms of hundreds. Steinhauer is a firm believer in the arts of "demoralising" by scares the non-combatant population of an enemy country. Those notorious but substantial rumours, which occasionally ran through England, of Zeppelin raids upon Newcastle and Colchester, and which were subsequently proved to be groundless, all emanated from servants of the chief of the Berlin Secret Police operating in Britain. The French writer, Elme Caro, has drawn the attention of his countrymen to this form of espionage in the following words:—
"There is above all one especial ruse in which our enemy excels, and that is in spreading false reports and rumours. We are forced to believe that this characteristic must have its roots deep down in the traditions of Germans and the institutions of their race, since it called forth the especial indignation of Immanuel Kant. Their methods of applying treachery and bad faith to the arts of war are peculiarly a Prussian talent and one which in the war of 1870 cost us more than one bloody defeat. What is the process? We are given just that particular brand of news which is likely to please us andlull us into a fancied security, such news being, if necessary, invented for the purpose. These experts in the arts of deceit and trickery are past-masters in demoralising the enemy by conveying to him news which suggests the idea that peace is close at hand. During such lulls, one's courage begins to weaken, the soul of a great city begins to find itself growing unaccustomed to the idea of war, our firm resolutions are soon forgotten and we go back to the old routine of life with relieved minds and hearts. Our will-power is broken and the enemy then seizes his opportunity to attack us with many chances in his favour. To prevent us from getting good news, to convey to us the worst, to invent it if necessary—this is the policy of the leaders of German armies and diplomacy. Bismarck possessed all this talent and carried it out with the prescience of a master in the art of judging and estimating the weaknesses of common human kind."
Steinhauer was also responsible for the rumours of 1909 and 1910 in regard to the alleged nocturnal visits of aircraft to the east coast of England, and his henchmen in the Press go so far as to declare that in 1911 a Zeppelin visited the London area on more than one occasion for the purpose of "taking time-distances," so that in the day of war any given airship would know by the time schedule where to drop its bombs, in such a way as to destroy buildings which had been previously marked out for attack. By this method, it is said, a Zeppelin can act independently of fog, andindeed, would be enabled to carry out its work more effectively because of fog, provided it was favoured by fair winds—a view supported by Mr Graves, who also maintains that Zeppelins have already in peace-time "stood over" London. "A mysterious sky-monster," says Graves, "which carried a complement of five-and-twenty men and twelve tons of explosives, sailed across the North Sea, circled over London and returned to Germany. This new dreadnought of Germany's flying navy was aloft ninety-six hours and maintained a speed of thirty-eight miles an hour in the face of a storm-pressure of almost eighty-three metres." The German Press, in November 1914, declared that its airship fleet was three times as large as that which already existed in 1910, and through its confidential writers in the Dutch papers, it asserted that the German General Staff had produced Zeppelins which were "75 per cent. more air-worthy and safe" than the passenger-Zeppelins which travelled over Germany in 1909—all of which claims are purely "scare-work" of the Steinhauer bureau, for obviously enough, Berlin's military authorities would long ago have acted against Paris and London had they been able to do so, time being such a tremendous factor in their campaign. We pass over the cases of Schultz and Ernst as being still fresh in public memory to take up that of Lieutenant Turr, one of the most important spies who has operated in Europe since Steinhauer has been connected with the Berlin Secret Police.In regard to the man Ernst, the Islington hairdresser, who received at first £1, and subsequently £1, 10s. a month from Berlin, it is certain that the Berlin authorities showed themselves, in modern times, as inept in their naval and military espionage, as they proved to be in their diplomacy, for all the information they obtained through the instrumentality of their North London barber collaborant. Indeed, at this writing, it is rumoured that Dr Steinhauer has been disrated in his Berlin office and is about to take the road into retirement with many more of the Kaiser's incompetent servants.
Hermann Turr was a subaltern in a regiment of the Prussian Hussars who, owing to perversity of character and disposition, was removed by the Kaiser's orders from the Army List about ten years ago. At the suggestion of the then head of the Prussian Secret Service, who urged the man's bad character as a point in favour of his being employed as a spy, Turr was given employment by the secret police in Berlin, his first duty being the watching of other spies in the same department—an employment, it may be said, which is only given to a man whose social and financial condition is in the desperate stage. It was in respect of what we will call the "Sans Souci" correspondence—it was really nameless—that Turr came into prominence, not only in Germany, but in every country in the world. The "Sans Souci" correspondence was published, without name or title, in Germany and containedaccusations of the most serious kind laid to the account of the Hohenzollern family as well as to that of the highest official and court personages of Berlin. The present Emperor, suspecting a member of his entourage whom he had been forced to exile, called in the services of Turr, promising him a large sum for proofs as to the identity of the author of the letters. These appeared in 1905 in pamphlet form and were immediately suppressed, severe penalties being threatened, as in the equally notorious "Hotzé" letters of a previous generation, to all who should be proved to have sold them. Turr proved his zeal within a month of receiving his commission by giving alleged proofs that the letters had been written at the instigation of a well-known French politician whose Germanophobia is only exceeded by his remarkable talents in diplomacy. It is certain that about this time, 1906, Germany was on the verge of declaring war against France, and it was only when full proofs were forthcoming that Turr's "evidence" was based mainly on forgeries, that Franco-German diplomacy weathered the storm which threatened its relations. Turr, it is understood, was imprisoned, but secured his release on a personal appeal to the Emperor, promising to reveal the real authorship of the forgeries in question. In accordance with his story, the forged evidence had really been handed to him in Paris by persons acting in the interests of the Berlin war-party which was already anxious for a trial of strength with France andwhich chose this means as likely to precipitate events, Turr being really the dupe of their agents who were acting in conjunction with the Berlin Secret Police in order to force the Emperor's hand. Another man who also served the bureau over which Steinhauer now presides was Windell, who once tended the French General de Boisdeffre as valet in Paris and was taken by that officer all through France on his tours of inspection of the military districts and fortresses, Windell, an educated man and a trained engineer, supplying Berlin with plans and memoranda of all and everything which might serve the interests of the General Staff.
In a large measure also to Steinhauer must be attributed the rigorous methods which govern the production of the modern first-class German spy. A full possession of those personal gifts which characterise the man of the world is insisted upon by the authorities at "Number Seventy, Berlin," as the headquarters in Kœnigergratzerstrasse in that capital are invariably known to employees. A candidate for service is not only expected to "look the part," as they say, he is also expected to be able to act it. He is therefore required to be a man who has had the advantage of good home training of a really superior class, one who possesses social breeding besides decent scholarship, a combination which is less common in Germany than in either France or England. Apart, however, from the mere matter of scholarship and address, the rule holds here as in everyother business of life, that it is after all character which really counts. A man is looked for, indeed, very much similar, as to his mental capacities, to the really high-class newspaper correspondent of our own day—one who is at home in all capitals, who can talk intelligently and intelligibly on current topics and has a good repertoire of languages at his tongue's disposal, who is unquestionably master of his own language and who can associate with men placed above his own condition without displaying the servility of the flunkey, or the assurance of the man whose loudness is invariably the measure of his own uncertainty of his social worth and standing. As far as Prussia produces men of presentability, the Berlin bureau has always succeeded in enlisting excellent agents for its purposes, and, in any case, we have seen that it generally looks for them among decadent members of the territorial families, or among officers who have made false steps in the course of their careers, but who are still sufficiently attached to life to be content to serve under the double flag of thecorps d'espionnage, despised by all who pretend to imposing standards of honour, yet certain of a good living if they perform their duties. The number and scope of the studies to which they have to devote themselves, once they are entered on the books of the bureau, will surprise men who recall the years they spent in lecture-rooms studying for army or higher civil-service examinations. Indeed, it is only a well-educated manpossessed of really an advanced kind of knowledge who is competent to engage in the curriculum which goes to form the German spy of our own time. The average Sandhurst or Woolwich cadet on "passing out" would only just about hold his own with the men who "coach" in Espionage for the examination set by Dr Steinhauer and his board of professors.
Once accepted as a member of the Secret Service of the higher grade, the agent is entered on the pay-sheet at a fixed salary commencing at £200 a year, with an added ten shillings a day for personal expenses whether on active service or not. For each "job"—neatly executed, to be sure—he is promised a bonus with an increase of personal out-of-pocket allowance up to £2 daily. He is notified, however, that 33 per cent. of all moneys coming to him will be kept back and banked for him at 5 per cent., the object of this measure being to assure the Service a hold upon its agents in case they should be inclined to leave without giving due notice. The salaries are paid monthly in advance. Personal instructions are given verbally to each accepted agent, on his initiation: he must report daily when not on active service at Number Seventy; should he be on active service, he must telegraph a certain number to indicate that he is alive and accessible; he must observe absolute silence in respect of his missions, nor converse even with high officials under whom he is not acting; he shall carry no memoranda and no documents,but must trust to memory; he is to avoid fellow-agents, is forbidden to drink, or associate with women; he must never sign his name, but always his number; he is provided with a separate cipher which he must always use for cabling and telegraphing. It is only at this point, however, that the real "grind" begins for your German Secret Service agent, who, whatever may be his moral shortcomings, is certainly worthy of all respect when considered in regard to his mentality.
His studies of a technical character may be said to be confined to Topography, Trigonometry, Naval Construction, Military Fortification and Drawing. His tutors are invariably taken from the ablest experts in their subjects. Supposing a Secret Service be sent to Antwerp to study the forts and report upon them, he must be in a position to give correct estimates of heights, angles, distances, ground-lay; he must, therefore, be a surveyor the accuracy of whose intuitions must to a large extent cover the work of the theodolite or the transit-compass. In the case of the spy, for instance, who reported to Berlin upon the Forth Bridge, the work had to be performed without arousing the attention or the suspicions of officials; the man in question effected his measurements by pacing, by observing angles and by subsequent triangulation, the result being highly creditable to his training, for he judged the required measurements to within yards and feet in distances and heights, respectively. It may be objected that this was wastedtime, since these facts are available to anyone. The General Staff at Berlin was taking no chances, however. Its object in sending its man to examine the Forth Bridge was solely to find out how many men could be so disposed, in the vicinity of the structure, as to blow it up at a given signal, what was the geological nature of the foundation-shafts, how much dynamite would be required to destroy the bridge. And Berlin wanted toknow.
So too with regard to all matters military and naval, as we shall presently show. There is, indeed, no time for leisure and no laggards are allowed to remain very long upon the roster of the General Staff's Secret Service College. Anything more complete or thorough, it would be hard to imagine, and but for the sinister aims and objects of the whole curriculum, it would be difficult to picture anything more admirable or workmanlike in its organic perfection. The work entitledSecrets of the German War Officewritten by Mr Graves has, as most people are by this time aware, been disavowed by the Berlin authorities as being the work of what Americans call "a good guesser." This, it must be seen, was the only course open to the German Staff, and their disclaimers in no way discount the value of their ex-agent's story when he touches upon purely departmental and organic details connected with the Steinhauer bureau. He tells us himself that he served for twelve years in the German Secret Service which has three distinctbranches—that of the Army, that of the Navy and the Personal Corps. The General Staff of Berlin controls the Secret Service departments dealing with both military and naval affairs, while the Personal department is directed from the Foreign Office and is really under the direct eye and touch of the German Emperor himself. The military and naval sections deal with the procuring of hidden and secret information in regard to armaments, plans, new inventions and codes. The Personal Corps concerns itself with diplomatic affairs, details as to cabinet discussions, royal and princely scandals and includes among its agents men and women who are conducting inquiries on behalf of the Emperor himself. Among its members are to be found princes, dukes, counts and barons, lawyers, clergymen, doctors, actors and actresses,mondainesanddemi-mondaines, journalists, authors, money-lenders, jockeys, trainers, waiters and porters. Mr Graves dismisses the waiters and the porters as being nonentities who are never given commissions except those of the most non-committal kind, and in any case are never entrusted with the reasons underlying the little jobs which they perform at a few shillings each time. After a successful series of missions, men in the higher departments receive salaries from the bureau varying between £600 and £2000 yearly, which sums are invariably supplemented by generous bonuses—£1500 is not uncommon—as a reward for good work in particularly perilous enterprises. The remunerationis, however, mean when compared with the dangers undergone, and since no official countenance is ever given (nor, indeed, expected) on the part of an agent's employers, once a spy falls into the hands of the enemy, the game is far from being worth the worry and strain it entails. Moreover, a time comes in the case of the very successful agent when he has learned so much about the "policies" of his highly placed patrons that his existence becomes a source of anxiety to them, and his removal is often effected by means which recall the time of the Borgias or the days of theoubliette.
We have emphasised the German Spy System to the extent of devoting five chapters to an exposition of its methods and the principles underlying its origin, development and application. Our object has been mainly to show not only to what extent a nation may become demoralised by allowing a system of espionage to assume the proportions of a constitutional principle, but more especially to indicate how ineffective its operations must ultimately prove when opposed, not necessarily by counter-espionage, but by the ordinary legal safeguards which foreign governments can at all times put into force to neutralise such operations. At the outbreak of the War, for instance, the British authorities were able, by the simple process of internment and registration, to destroy in these islands the bulk of effective German influences on which Berlin had long relied for the consummation of its insane dream of "making Britain a German province." Again, the comparative ease with which eleventh-hour systems of counter-espionage have proved themselves capable of defeating the elaborate and far-flung organisations of fifty years of German master-spies must have the result of teachingGermany that a military establishment which puts its first trust in its external spy systems as providing the royal road to warlike successes, really admits its own lack of military genius. Indeed, it is impossible to read the story of Stieber's exploits and not realise that Stieber, rather than von Moltke, won those strategic successes of 1866 and 1870 which laid the foundations of the modern German Empire. And just as Bismarck has had no successor in the business of German diplomacy, so is it certain that Stieber's mantle has fallen upon no modern exponent of German espionage capable of adding to the original system. We have heard much of the triumphs of the Berlin Secret Service; the results of the War must disclose its total failure, though we may even now confidently predict that the blunders of its present directors have not been less glaring than those of Berlin diplomats. Like everything systematised in Germany, its organisation of espionage was systematised to the point at which independent and original action became impossible, so that when faced with conditions which Stieber had not known and provided for, it at once revealed its impotence and ineptitude, as well as the incapacity of its organisers for attaining practical results.
We propose in this present chapter, which concludes our account of Germany's system, to show how complete is the training of agents for the work of military and naval espionage. The German military spy, it must be premised, israrely an officer on the active or retired list, but almost always a civilian who has, of course, had military training. Turr and Windell had both been military officers who had practically been cashiered, while Lody had been a minor officer in the German merchant service. The German military agent must know all units of foreign armies at sight and must also be able to memorise the code words by which such units are indicated in the Berlin bureau. In respect of code words, indeed, his memory must, in all military matters, be of a Napoleonic capacity, and when corresponding with his head office as to the work of any particular pattern of gun on which he is instructed to report, it will go badly with him if he fails to quote his code accurately. Since, by the regulations, he is not permitted to carry documents, his task is obviously not an easy one. And so, again, with classes of explosives and types of shell. Furthermore, he must be so intimate with the science of fortification as to be competent to produce a map of any required fortified place, its maximum content and capacity for resistance. No Woolwich cadet of two years' standing is expected to know half as much as your German military spy, while his periodical examinations are conducted on a scale which would be sufficient to make studious officers of the Staff College doubtful as to their ability to "floor" the papers. Any error transmitted in the way of information as to guns, man-capacity of fortresses, new ideas in strategy and tactics, ballistics, plans andmilitary maps, are dealt with in Berlin on the American plan—that is to say, the offender is never given a chance to offend twice. Nor is the art of generalisation, so common in journalism, ever permitted to pass muster at Number Seventy. Particularisation is insisted upon, for Berlin wants facts first, last, always and everywhere. To ensure complete accuracy, the General Staff will employ, if necessary, a dozen spies on the same mission; they operate unknown to each other, their reports are compared and discrepancies mean the sending out of supplementary agents on the same mission, until by a process of exhaustion, and perhaps after several years of observation, the mathematical truth is finally arrived at. In the meantime, perhaps, the structure of any given fortress has been radically or partly altered; still the process goes on, for Berlin's General Staff never sleeps, is eternally vigilant and alert and possesses the only financial stocking in the Empire which knows no end. All this is in accordance with a rule laid down by the Bismarck-Stieber combination—namely, that the German Intelligence Staff shall know as much about any country in Europe as that country's own Intelligence Department could possibly know. In Austria in 1866 and in France in 1870, events proved that it knew far more. In whatever other way a high-class German secret-service man may fail to please the critics, there can be no question as to the degree of sheer intellectual ability required to enable him to reach his position—and retain it.
In regard to Naval espionage, the course of study and the mental discipline exacted are, if anything, more severe. Fundamentally, of course, the system differs but little from that just dealt with, just as the winning of a battle involves the employment of strategy and tactics which are not fundamentally different from those employed in the taking of a fortress, as Napoleon said. The majority of accepted secret-service agents on entering upon their studies in Berlin, Kiel or Wilhelmshafen, rarely know enough about naval matters to be able to distinguish a torpedo from a torpedo-boat destroyer. After a course with the instructors the agent not only distinguishes easily between the large variety of types of torpedoes, submarines, mines, he can also tell by the peculiar whistle it makes whether a torpedo when being discharged is a Whitehead or a Brennan, as the case may be. Then his work in naval dockyards and on coastal defences has practically no limit. Naval construction he must be as fully versed in as the best informed of naval commanders. All sorts of naval war-craft are set before him for the purposes of study, and the candidate for advancement is required, before he passes out with a certificate, to be able to tell at a glance, and from their silhouettes, all known war-craft in existence, big and little. After months of study, a quick learner will be able to say at once the type of any given war-vessel shown him and what its nationality. Add to this a perfectly accurate acquaintance with flag-signalsand codes, the different ranking officers ofallthe navies of the world, the personnel of warships of the heavier classes, the various uniforms, the ability to talk about any or all parts of a gun, a torpedo, a tube, a mine, whether assembled or unassembled, and it will be freely admitted that the German naval spy must be a ready man in the fullest sense of Bacon's term. And yet on another page we have said that German espionage is a doomed failure. We still maintain it, and for the reason that the foregoing studies only result, after all is said, in naval theory. As a maker of theories, your German of all kinds and conditions, is the first man in the world; it is when he comes to their practical application that he fails so badly and disappoints his admirers so painfully. The end of German naval espionage is of course the invasion and conquest of Britain, and until German armies defeat us and our Allies on land and her Navy has beaten us at sea, we may feel justified in holding that both her military and naval systems of espionage are respectively not worth the rentals paid for their dingy offices in Berlin. There is a hoary old tale told about an Englishman, a Frenchman, a German and a certain wonderful crocodile which once made its appearance in Orinico waters and made the nations talk about him. The Englishman decided to start at once for Brazil and hunt the creature out; the Frenchman decided on general principles to carve him out in stone, just as he imagined the new animalto be; but the German went to a zoological museum,thought outthe new crocodile from a set of palæozoic bones, and wrote a theory about him. Your German theorist is still far from having passed away and hardly yet realises that there is a large difference between learning the secrets of our naval forces and defeating them at sea. We recognise that German espionage is a danger—a fact which need not, however, blind us to the certainty that Germany has no more Bismarcks or Stiebers to build up new organisations with which to face the conditions of a new world. Germany has certainly no minister in office to-day who could prophesy so far ahead the course of events as Bismarck prophesied them to an Austrian lady, the Countess Hohenthal, in 1866. We recall the anecdote:
"Tell me, Count," said the Austrian to the famous Chancellor at a dinner-party in Berlin. "I have two homes in Europe, one in Bohemia, the other at Knautheim, near Leipsic. My countrymen are all talking about the possibility of Prussia invading us in the near future, and you might set my mind at rest if you would advise me where to remain for the rest of the year—in Bohemia, or in Saxony?"
"Countess," replied the Chancellor, "if I were you, I should remain in Saxony. It is not on a military route." The lady's Bohemian Castle was not, as it happened, very far from—Sadowa.
As to the financial aspects of the German Spy System, it is a matter of public record that theReichstag makes a yearly appropriation of about £1,000,000 sterling for the purposes and objects of the Imperial Secret Service. It is obvious, however, that the total expenditure must be far in excess of this sum, since, to use a memorable phrase, "every dirty little lieutenant" who has taken a holiday within the past ten years and has consented to spend his time in England, has done so at the expense of the Secret Service of Berlin. In these cases the young officers are "invited" to inspect the counties through which they travel, and in order to facilitate their movements, they are each supplied with sectional maps which are more perfect in every particular than the cyclists' hand-books with which we are so familiar in these days. There is no lane, bridle-path, road, farmhouse, pot-house, or farrier's which is not clearly marked in these sectional maps. The prospective tourist—who is most frequently a minor departmental official—is handed one or more of them on the understanding that if he can improve upon their topographical value in the smallest particulars, he will benefit to the extent of a hundred marks or so. The result is that official Berlin knows England north, south, east and west, far better than any Englishman knows Berlin, and one may depend upon it that if an army corps were to land anywhere in Britain, its commanders would know the road to London, as well as local facilities and capacities for feeding 40,000 men, far better than the majority of Irishmen know the way to Tipperary or even the civic standingof that much-sung city. The gathering of such minute information involves a costly process. One million sterling yearly must be inadequate to cover the expenditure of 500 registered and salaried officials, with "details" numbering at least 500 more of a more or less fixed status, and twice that number of annual tourist candidates looking for German bank-notes.
Before concluding our examination of the German Spy System, we may hear what an American war-correspondent has to say in regard to the precautions which the General Staff takes in order to preclude the operations of spies inside the German lines. The following incident was communicated toThe New York Timesby its special correspondent on 1st December 1914:—