The German spy system, as established in England, may be classified under various heads—military, naval, diplomatic, and also the agents provocateurs, those hirelings of Germany who have, of late, been so diligent in stirring up sedition in Ireland, and who, since the war began, have endeavoured, though not successfully, to engineer a strike of seamen at Liverpool and a coal strike. First, every German resident in this country may be classed as a spy, for he is, at all times, ready to assist in the work of the official secret-agents of the Fatherland.
The military spy is usually a man who has received thorough instruction in sketching, photography, and in the drafting of reports, and on arrival here, has probably set up in business in a small garrison town. The trade of jeweller and watchmaker is one of the most favoured disguises, for the spy can rent a small shop, and though he cannot repair watches himself, he can engage an unsuspecting assistant to do so. Therefore, to all intents and purposes, his business is a legitimate one. If he is a devout church or[Pg 67] chapel-goer, and subscribes modestly to the local charities, he will soon become known, and will quickly number among his friends some military men from whom he can obtain information regarding movements of troops, and a-thousand-and-one military details, all of which he notes carefully in his reports, the latter being collected by a "traveller in jewellery," who visits him at regular intervals, and who makes payment in exchange.
Every report going out of Great Britain is carefully tabulated and indexed by a marvellous system in Berlin. These, in turn, are compared, analysed and checked by experts, so that, at last, the information received is passed as accurate, and is then indexed for reference.
Now the military spy also keeps his eyes and ears open regarding the officers of the garrison. If an officer is in financial difficulties, the fact is sent forward, and some money-lender in London will most certainly come to his assistance and thus ingratiate himself as his "friend." Again, there are wives of officers who are sometimes a little indiscreet, and in more than one known case blackmail has been levied upon the unfortunate woman, and then, suddenly, an easy way out of it all has been craftily revealed to her by a blackguard in German pay.
From the wide-spread secret-service of Germany, nothing is sacred. The German General Staff laughs at our apathy, and boasts that it knows all about us, the military and civil[Pg 68] population alike. In the archives of its Intelligence Department there are thousands upon thousands of detailed reports—furnished constantly throughout the past ten years—regarding the lives and means of prominent persons in England, with descriptions of their homes wherein, one day, the enemy hope to billet their troops.
These unscrupulous men who act as "fixed-posts"—and it is no exaggeration to say that there are still hundreds in England alone, notwithstanding all official assurances to the contrary—have all gone through an elaborate system of training in signalling, in reducing messages to code, and in decoding them, in map-making, in the use of carrier-pigeons, and, in some cases, in the use of secret wireless.
The naval spy works in a somewhat similar manner to his military colleague. At every naval port in Great Britain it is quite safe to assume that there are spies actively carrying on their work, though it is quite true that one or two, who have long been under suspicion, have now found it wise to disappear into oblivion. A favourite guise of the spy in a naval port is, it seems, to pose as a hairdresser, for in pursuance of that humble and most honourable calling, the secret agent has many opportunities to chat with his customers, and thus learn a good deal of what is in progress in both port and dockyard: what ships are putting to sea, and the strength and dispositions of various divisions[Pg 69] of our navy. Cases in recent years of spies at Portsmouth, Chatham, and Plymouth have revealed how active Germany has been in this direction.
In one case, at Plymouth, a salary of ￡500 a year was offered to a Mr. Duff for information regarding naval matters, on the pretext that this information was required by a Naval and Military journal in Germany. Mr. Duff, however, communicated with the authorities, who promptly arrested the spy—a man named Schulz, who lived on a yacht on the river Yealm. He was tried at the Devon Assizes and, certain documents being found upon him, he was sentenced to a year and nine months' imprisonment. What, we wonder, would have been his fate if he had been British, and had been arrested in Germany?
Of diplomatic espionage little need be said in these pages. Every nation has its secret service in diplomacy, a service rendered necessary perhaps by the diplomatic juggling of unscrupulous representatives of various nations. Many diplomatic spies are women moving in the best society, and such persons abound in every capital in the world.
The means of communication between the spy and his employers are several. Innocent sketches may be made of woodland scenery, with a picturesque windmill and cottage in the foreground, and woods in the distance. Yet this, when decoded in Berlin—the old windmill representing a lighthouse, the trees[Pg 70] a distant town, and so forth—will be found to be an elaborate plan of a harbour showing the disposition of the mines in its channel!
Again, there are codes in dozens of different forms of letters or figures with various combinations, key-numbers, cross-readings, etc. There is the three-figure code, the five-figure code, and so on, all of which, though difficult, can, if sufficient time be spent upon them, be eventually deciphered by those accustomed to dealing with such problems.
Far more difficult to decipher, however, are communications written as perfectly innocent ordinary correspondence upon trade or other matters, yet, by certain expressions, and by mentioning certain names, objects, or prices, they can be rightly read only by the person with whom those meanings have been prearranged.
From the daring movements of the German Fleet in the North Sea it would appear that, through spies, the enemy are well aware of the limit and position of our mine-fields, while the position of every buoy is certainly known. When the first attack was made upon Yarmouth, the enemy took his range from certain buoys, and the reason the shells fell short was that only the day before those buoys had been moved a mile further out to sea.
Again, for many years—indeed, until I called public attention to the matter—foreign pilots were allowed to ply their profession in the Humber, and by that means we may rest assured that Germany made many surveys of our East Coast.
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The spies of Germany are to be found everywhere, yet the Home Office and the police have shown themselves quite incapable of dealing effectively with them. The War Office, under the excellent administration of Lord Kitchener, has surely been busy enough with military matters, and has had no time to deal with the enemy in our midst. Neither has the Admiralty. Therefore the blame must rest upon the Home Office, who, instead of dealing with the question with a firm and drastic hand, actually issued a communiqué declaring that the spy peril no longer existed!
As an illustration of Germany's subtle preparations in the countries she intends to conquer, and as a warning to us here in Great Britain, surely nothing can be more illuminating than the following, written by a special correspondent of the Times with the French Army near Rheims. That journal—with the Daily Mail—has always been keenly alive to the alien peril in England, and its correspondent wrote:—
"Nowhere else in France have the Germans so thoroughly prepared their invasion as they did in Champagne, which they hoped to make theirs. In the opinion of the inhabitants of épernay, the saving of the town from violent pillage is only due to the desire of the Germans not to ravage a country which they regarded as being already German soil. The wanton bombardment of Rheims is accepted almost with delight, as being a clear indication that the enemy has been awakened by the battle of the Marne from those pleasant dreams of conquest which inflamed the whole German nation with enthusiasm at the outset of the war.
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"The spy system thought out in time of peace in preparation for what is happening to-day has served Germany well, and every day the accuracy of German gunfire pays a tribute to the zeal and efficiency with which these loathsome individuals accomplish a task for which they have sold their honour as Frenchmen. Hardly a week passes without some fresh discovery being made. At the headquarters of the different army corps along this section of the front, hardly a day passes without the arrest and examination of suspect peasants or strangers from other provinces. Elaborate underground telephone installations have been discovered and destroyed.
"One day a gendarme who wished to water his horse approached a well in the garden of an abandoned house. At the bottom of the well there was not truth but treason. Comfortably installed in this disused shaft a German spy was engaged in making his report by telephone to the German Intelligence Department.
"The mentality of the spy can never be explained, for how can one account for the mixture of the fine quality of bravery and the despicable greed of money which will keep a man in a city like Rheims, exposed every hour of the day and night to death from the splinter of a shell fired at the town by his own paymasters? I do not suggest for a moment that of the 20,000 people who still inhabit the town of Rheims and its cellars there is any large proportion of traitorous spies, but to the French Intelligence Department there is no question whatsoever that there is still a very efficient spying organisation at work in the city."
Among us here in Great Britain, I repeat, are men—hundreds of them—who are daily, nay hourly, plotting our downfall, and are awaiting the signal to act as the German General Staff has arranged that they shall[Pg 73] act. To attempt to disguise the fact longer is useless. We have lived in the fool's paradise which the Government prepared for us long enough. We were assured that there would be no war. But war has come, and thousands of the precious lives of our gallant lads have been lost—and thousands more will yet be lost.
We cannot trust the German tradesman who has even lived long among us apparently honourable and highly respected. A case in point is that of a man who, for the past twenty-six years, has carried on a prosperous business in the North of London. At the outbreak of war he registered himself as an alien, and one day asked the police for a permit to travel beyond the regulation five miles in order to attend a concert. He was watched, and it was found that, instead of going to the concert, he had travelled in an opposite direction, where he had met and conferred with a number of his compatriots who were evidently secret agents. This is but one illustration of many known cases in the Metropolis.
Can we still close our eyes to what Germany intends to do? The Government knew the enemy's intentions when, in 1908, there was placed before them the Emperor's speech, which I have already reproduced.
Perhaps it may not be uninteresting if I recount how I myself was approached by the German General Staff—and I believe others must have been approached in a like manner.[Pg 74] The incident only serves to show the "astuteness"—as Lord Haldane has so well put it—of our enemies.
One day, in September, 1910, I received through a mutual friend, a lady, an invitation to dine at the house of a prominent official at the War Office, who, in his note to me, declared that he had greatly admired my patriotism, and asked me to dine en famille one Sunday evening. I accepted the invitation, and went. The official's name, I may here say, figures often in your daily newspapers to-day. To my great surprise, I found among the guests the German Ambassador, the Chancellor of the Embassy, the Military and Naval Attachés with their ladies, and several popular actors and actresses.
In a corner of the drawing-room after dinner, I found myself chatting with a German Attaché, who turned the conversation upon my anti-German writings. By his invitation, I met him at his club next day. He entertained me to an expensive luncheon, and then suddenly laughed at me for what he termed my misguided propaganda.
"There will be no war between your country and mine," he assured me. "You are so very foolish, my dear Mr. Le Queux. You will ruin your reputation by these fixed ideas of yours. Why not change them? We desire no quarrel with Great Britain, but we, of course, realise that you are doing what you consider to be your duty."
"It is my duty," I responded.
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My diplomatic friend sucked at his cigar, and laughed.
"As a literary man you, of course, write to interest the public. But you would interest your public just as easily by writing in favour of Germany—and, I tell you that we should quickly recognise the favour you do us—and recompense you for it."
I rose from my chair.
I confess that I grew angry, and I told him what was in my mind.
I gave him a message to his own Secret Service, in Berlin, which was very terse and to the point, and then I left the room.
But that was not all. I instituted inquiries regarding the official at the War Office who had been the means of introducing us, and within a fortnight that official—whose dealings with the enemy were proved to be suspicious—was relieved of his post.
I give this as one single instance of the cunning manner in which the German Secret Service have endeavoured to nobble and bribe me, so as to close my mouth and thus combat my activity.
Another instance was when the Norddeutscher Lloyd Line, of Bremen, kindly invited me to take a voyage round the world, free of expense, so that I might visit the various German colonies and write some descriptions of them. And, on a third occasion, German diplomats were amazingly kind to me, both in Constantinople and in Belgrade,[Pg 76] and again broadly hinted at their readiness to win me over to their side.
How pitiable, how absolutely criminal our apathy has been!
Do not the souls of a million dead upon the battlefields of France and Belgium rise against the plotters to-day? Does not the onus of the frightful loss of the flower of our dear lads lie, not upon our four-hundred-a-year legislators, but upon some of the golfing, dividend-seeking, pushful men who have ruled our country through the past ten years?
Without politics, as I am, I here wish to pay a tribute—the tribute which the whole nation should pay—to Mr. Lloyd George and his advisers, who came in for so much adverse criticism before the war. I declare as my opinion—an opinion which millions share—that the manner in which the Chancellor of the Exchequer faced and grappled with the financial situation at the outbreak of war, was an illustration of British pluck, of coolness and of readiness that is unequalled in our history. The poor suffered nothing, and to-day—even though we are struggling for our very existence—we hear not a word of that winter-cry "The Unemployed."
I trust, therefore, that the reader will find my outspoken criticisms just, and perfectly without prejudice, for, as I have already stated, my only feeling is one of pure patriotism towards my King and the country that gave me birth.
Though I am beyond the age-limit to serve[Pg 77] in the Army, it is in defence of my King and country, and in order to reveal the naked truth to a public which has so long been pitiably bamboozled and reassured, that I have ventured to pen this plain, serious, and straightforward indictment, which no amount of official juggling can ever disprove.