CONCLUSION—BIBLIOGRAPHY 309
INDEX 317
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Fouché _Frontispiece_
Henri Le Caron _To face page_ 40
The Duchess of Portsmouth " " 128
Frederick the Great " " 162
The Chevalier d'Eon " " 256
I
THE ETHOS OF THE SPY
The worldly philosophy of the current age bears the name of Pragmatism,
the principles of which, so far as they are susceptible of being
weighed, constitute a more or less modified view of the doctrine that
the end justifies the means, a teaching which has become familiar to
us through the pages of Nietzsche and Stendhal, and which is based
mainly on the idea that might is the proper measure of right. Taking
it, then, that pragmatical notions of this sort have become almost
an implicit condition of individual progress, it would seem to serve
little purpose seriously to go into the question of the wrongfulness
or the rightfulness of spying as a factor in the struggle for complete
self-expression—itself the real aim of all ordered and prearranged
lives. It is sufficient for us to reflect that the successful spy
flourishes to-day, as he has flourished since the beginnings of
recorded time, and as in all probability he will continue to flourish
till the day of doom. Indeed, it is not an unreasonable presumption
that in the very earliest ages of the world, espionage must have been
an entirely necessary condition of the struggle for existence among the
infra-men who then peopled the caves of the earth and who succeeded in
successfully surviving only by virtue of predatory acts and excursions
in which the spoils and the plunder went to the strongest, who had
also made themselves the best-informed as to sources of supply. Bible
history, too, has told us about the Spy. The story of Joshua, the
leader of Israel's hosts and the excellent organisation of informers
which he controlled, remain like other tales of common human interest
in the Scriptures among those that linger always in the minds of the
least Biblical of students. Babylon, we are told, was overrun with
informers of all kinds, Memphis and Thebes in their turn became what
Alexandria proved to be in the time of Tiberius, and what the great
capitals of our own day have become—namely, recruiting centres for
criminal adventurers of all types, nationalities and classes, and
consequently happy hunting-grounds for all in rapid quest of the agents
of intrigue, iniquity and maleficence. Those, too, who have read the
classical writers will remember that great leaders like Alexander,
Mithridates, Scipio, Hannibal, Pompey and Cæsar, laid the foundations
of successful campaigns and political achievement upon information
previously supplied them by commissioned spies.
According to the Roman idea, spying was accounted a fair stratagem in
both war and politics and was, in theory at least, distinguishable
from treachery. Between the two acts there is, of course, a real
difference, although in works dealing with international law the terms
are often confused, some writers treating them as interchangeable,
whilst others but loosely differentiate between the act of spying and
that of betrayal, the presumption always remaining that the man who
is capable of being a successful and voluntary spy also possesses
talents which are common to the elemental traitor. The penalty of
death, says Bluntschli, should be such as to terrify all spies, and it
is the custom accordingly to execute them ignominiously by hanging.
Technically the spy has been defined as one who clandestinely goes in
quest of information, whilst a traitor is one who spies within his
own community and to its undoing. Although most authorities agree
in considering espionage as lawful among the ruses of warfare, all,
with one exception, concur in determining that death remains the
only logical desert of the man who has possessed himself of secrets
upon which the common safety depends. Certain international jurists
have objected to the employment, in any cause, of spies, as being
immoral, or as condoning acts which are of themselves immoral, and
the French writer Morin looks upon espionage with particular horror
on the ground that it is "usually malice aforethought and is never
voluntary," a peculiar enough view. It is especially blameable, he
holds, because a premium is placed upon essentially dishonest dealing,
although he admits, with some inconsistency, that it may sometimes
become lawful—when it is unsoiled by perfidy, as he puts it. Only the
last emergency can at all justify it, says Morin, who is singular
in declaring that a spy should not be put to death unless caught in
the act. Napoleon himself displayed an unexpected leniency wherever
possible towards captured spies, and this on the ground, as he said,
that the spy is, by his nature, a base character. In the opinion of
the great soldier the best spy is the half-breed who is a natural
cosmopolitan and is consequently unaffected by ideas of patriotism. His
greatest spy, Schulmeister, was a man of decidedly mongrel antecedents
and began life as a smuggler. Pedlars he also declared to be invaluable
in espionage, and for the reason that they are naturally disposed to
vagabondage, itself a trait of degeneracy. It is well known that he
would only employ in such work men whose past had been soiled by some
act of a disgraceful or criminal kind, and like the great Frederick,
it was his custom to propose to actually convicted criminals their
enlargement as the reward of a successful piece of spying.
Modern spies of the professional type, more especially those employed
by Germany, fully meet the specifications of Napoleon's idea of the
race. The accomplished spy of to-day is invariably a man of at least
quasi-criminal proclivities, a being entirely lacking in a moral
sense, a degenerate briefly; and indeed experts in the secret history
of the German special-information departments all agree in declaring
that a "white man," to use an Americanism, is worse than useless to
the experts at the chief bureau of the Berlin Secret Service. As a
consequence, their _corps d'élite_ is mostly made up of men who, if
they have not known the inside of prisons, have at least earned an
unequivocal right to such knowledge. One of the profoundest technicians
in the business of organising spy campaigns, the late Karl Stieber,
has stated that the most valuable spy is your born aristocrat with
a bad record and a worse reputation. Proof of the soundness of this
view would seem to have been fully advanced by the noble interveners
in the Dreyfus case, and, in any event, it is known that among the
names of the organising staff of Berlin's school for spies, a large
number are those who bear the names of famous families, while the
remainder, if not all gentlemen by birth, are at least gentlemen by act
of parliament, as the saying is. Courage, _aplomb_, the possession of
what Americans so aptly term "a good front," easy manners and a genial
temperament—of any or all of these qualifications, a man of good birth
is only in rare cases devoid. Heredity alone has given him many of the
psychic requirements that go to make up the most valuable of actors in
a desperate situation, including, perhaps, that philosophy of absolute
_insouciance_ which makes of him the most sinister and cold-blooded of
all criminal agents.
It would be unfair, however, to accuse the Germans of monopolising
all those vicious characteristics which go to form the complete spy.
Indeed, it would probably be nearer the mark to declare that it is only
because of the elaborate excellence of the German organisation that
the Teuton has signalised himself so prominently these later times in
espionage. For, in truth, the Teutonic mind is fundamentally lacking,
it is well known, in those qualities of craft and imagination which
produce the best kind of secret service agent. Perseverance and the
philosophy which knows how to wait on circumstances, these conventional
enough qualities he undoubtedly possesses in a marked degree above his
fellows. Nevertheless, they are not the most important requirements of
the master-spy, whose base diplomacy and its results must depend to
a great extent upon the exercise of constructive imagination and the
forcing of circumstances to suit his particular strategy. The German
has excelled his congeners at the business in the opinion of modern men
solely for the reason that among the Germans the trade of the spy is
not accounted more dishonourable than any other. In all probability,
however, the Italian, the Greek, the Kelt, given a highly systematised
school and an equal ethical standpoint, would prove abler executants
in any mission which called for the employment of deep-set guile, the
power of divining motives and the ability to calculate the effect of
moves. The essential arts of the diplomatist—has not an ambassador
been described as an official spy?—underlie, in respect of the mental
operations required, the work of your successful secret service agent,
and although men like Bismarck, whose mentality was not of a positively
Teutonic cast, may be cited in disproof of the statement, it is
certain that the German mind is less adapted and less adaptable to the
fine processes of the arts of political negotiation than that of either
the Kelt or the Italian.
Women, it is interesting to learn, from high authorities on the arts
of espionage, are rarely effective or satisfactory agents in secret
service. Not, it must be understood, that woman is incapable of the
requisite baseness that is, in the successful spy, an indispensable
quality. Far from it. Goethe, who was a competent judge of the sex,
has placed on record his view that woman, when intent on turpitude, is
capable of sounding lower depths than the vilest of the male species.
German experts are, however, unanimous in eliminating to a minimum
point the services of women as spies, and that too on the ground that
they are rarely to be relied upon if once romantic sentiment becomes
engaged in their operations—an ever-present possibility. "Any woman
but a German woman" was a common cry of Karl Stieber who may be
trusted to have well understood the character of his fair compatriot,
for whom love and romance—the purer the better—constitute the only
things worth living for in this drab enough world. Indeed, the famous
Salic Law is said to have owed its first enacting mainly to the fact
that German women were as a rule found to be unreliable, shall we
say? where their intimate feelings were apt to become involved, and
those who have resided in Germany will not require to be told that
a handsome face and a brave air, added to a romantic bent, go very
much further with women in the land of beer, love and song than with
their sisters in perhaps any other country in the world. The work
of the efficient spy involves, it is clear, a peculiar but none the
less specific proportioning of analytical and synthetical qualities
of brain-work, and while the feminine mind, which works mainly on its
intuitions, may be described as wholly of a synthetic calibre, it has,
except in the rarest cases, of analytical faculties—the ability for
properly appraising and forecasting causes and effects—the very poorest
provision.
The elaborate calculations of your Schulmeisters and Stiebers may be
said, in nearly all cases, to have worked out with the smoothness of
algebraic equations, and it is extremely rare that women display either
the self-restraint or the reasoning power which carry to successful
solution dragging intrigues with anything like the patient routine
and regularity which a series of really unromantic situations calls
for. Obviously, the work of the spy, no matter how dramatic it may
appear in its co-ordinated whole, must, in respect of its various
separate acts and phases, be bared of all dramatic or arresting
incident. Were the opposite the case, woman, a natural actor, would
find herself in the most congenial of elements. Anything more sordid,
however, or more commonplace than the general phase-work of the spy,
it would be difficult to imagine, and it is precisely for this reason
that woman as a rule fails as a secret service agent. In matters of
love or revenge, where her deepest feelings are concerned, she is
capable of a sustained effort calling for the application of whatever
analytical powers she may possess, but seldom in other cases; for an
appeal to, say, her patriotism leaves her almost invariably cold and
unenthusiastic, since love of country is a quality which depends too
largely on an essentially platonic and impersonal principle to attract
and hold for long her undivided interest and attention.
On the whole, a study of the spy, however interesting it may prove in
respect of the undoubted variety of its actors and dramatic aspects,
must be held to be a criminological study. Even in the cases of Hale
and André, whose careers owe much of the halo which invests them to
their tragic fate, one is suspicious of fanaticism in the former and
pronounced megalomania in the latter, both symptoms of unsoundness
of mind. However much the spy may plead disinterestedness in the
pecuniary sense, or point to present poverty as a token of his claim
to have worked for an implicit moral principle, one is conscious in
studying the life of any one of the species in more modern times, that
he contained within him all the necessary elements which go to make
up the character and personality of that class of degenerate who is
prepared to travel any path provided he be given the means to play
a more or less spectacular rôle. He is invariably to be found among
that type of men who advance the peculiar claim that "the world owes
every wight a living," strangely forgetful of the historic retort in
point. The application of this principle to all the length to which it
is capable of being extended would, of course, justify the struggle
for existence of the summer burglar, the swell mobsman, the sand-bag
artist and the lead-pipe assassin, to mention but a few members of the
big brotherhood which lives by crime. It is undoubtedly true that many
successful spies lay claim to be scions of splendid families, and,
as we have said, German authorities will not employ men on important
missions in espionage who have not at least had the education of
gentlemen. The boastful claim of pedigree—obviously untenable in the
majority of cases—provides for the writer, at any rate, something of
a key to the psychology of the spy. Pride of mythical ancestry is
undoubtedly a capital symptom of megalomania, among the conditions of
which is the obsession of self-importance, and this would seem to be
a widely prevalent disease among the sons of men. The desire to be
near important people, to be engaged in no matter how lowly a capacity
with men who direct important affairs, to associate in more or less
familiar fashion with celebrities, or people highly placed, to count
for even an infinitesimal part in the conduct of big events, to have
the tips of one's fingers in the particular pie of the moment, to have
been "not altogether out of it," as the cant phrase goes, in any given
episode, but above all to be known to integral outsiders as having
played the rôle of a fractional insider in any cause—this is an acute
mania with a larger part of the human race than is commonly suspected.
Megalomania of this kind goes a far way to explain the reason why men
fitted for success in the unspectacular and prosaic careers of life
will deliberately devote themselves to what must ever be considered as
among the most disreputable of trades.
It may be objected that at least it is a business which requires
courage and that all successful exponents of the metier of spying have
been men of undoubted courage. While admitting the boldness of men like
Le Caron and Schulmeister, it may be said that they displayed audacity
rather than courage, and the two qualities spring from entirely
distinct motives. Often the audacity which passes for courage arises
either from a lack of imagination, or else from a blind fatalism, and
in neither case is there any display of real courage. Duty, presumably,
is the fundamental motive of courage, and until your spy can be shown
to have engaged in the perilous business of espionage out of purely
conscientious devotion to task and principle—Le Caron, it is only
right to say, claims all of this—he must be classed with that type of
individual who enters into the business of unrighteousness "for all
there is in it," to use an American phrase, and well knowing the tolls
and penalties which failure will inevitably exact. It is impossible, in
perusing the private correspondence of the loud and boastful Stieber,
not to divine the presence of a spirit of active maleficence, the
measure of whose humanity is to be found in the number of cold-blooded
executions for which he was responsible in his capacity as an agent
of Bismarck's lust for conquest. And Stieber's congeners were as a
rule no worse and no better than himself, the only difference being
that the German held a larger stage on which to enact his rôle and had
correspondingly greater opportunities. The most charitable argument
that one can employ to excuse the existence of the spy is that by
which Napoleon sought to explain his leniency towards them: They are a
species of humanity which is by nature base, and to that extent only
are not responsible for their characteristics.
II
THE SPY THROUGH THE AGES
The spy, as we have seen, has been given mention in the Old Testament,
Joshua, David and Absalom having employed their services, and most of
us remember that passage in Genesis in which his brothers answer Joseph
saying: "We are true men, thy servants are not spies." The protracted
peregrinations of the Israelites necessarily called for the employment
of emissaries who should learn the qualities and dispositions of the
many peoples whom they encountered on their way to the Promised Land,
and your anthropologist might possibly not be far wrong in concluding
that it was the experience gained in the course of his ever-perilous
wanderings which made the Jew so apt an exponent of the arts of spying
as he most certainly proved himself to be in the days of consular and
early imperial Rome. In the New Testament, too, we hear of the spy
when the high priests, having Christ under suspicion, sent forth spies
who should feign friendship with Him for the purposes of extracting
information. Every commander of antiquity was accustomed to employ the
services of spies, as the Greek historian Polyænus tells us in the
course of that marvellous compilation of his in which he gives details
of some nine hundred stratagems, serviceable, it is noteworthy, not
only in war, but also in civil and political life. If we are to judge
by what the Romans say of themselves, their character was incapable of
stooping to the baseness of common spying or studied treachery of any
sort. The view is, of course, open to criticism, and when we reflect
upon the treatment which triumphing generals were wont to accord to
their most illustrious captives, not easily acceptable. One of the most
formidable spirits of antiquity, Mithridates, King of Pontus, a prince
regarding whose exploits writers have been strangely neglectful, was
himself the chief spy of his army, and for the purposes of this work
had made himself master, Pliny tells, of some five and twenty languages
and dialects, by means of which, as well as fitting disguises, he was
enabled to penetrate every region of Asia Minor. It is written that
from the time of his succession to the throne of Pontus at the age of
fourteen, he spent seven years wandering through and spying out the
countries which he eventually conquered, and for the possession of
which he waged a lifelong war against the power of Rome.
In the course of a work entitled _Stratagems_, Frontinus, a military
writer in the time of Vespasian, records how Cornelius Lelius, having
been sent by Scipio Africanus in the capacity of envoy to Syphax, King
of Numidia, but in reality for the purposes of espionage, took with
him several officers of high rank in the Roman army, all disguised. A
general in the camp of Syphax, recognising one of these companions,
Manlius, as having studied with him at Corinth, and well knowing him
to be an officer in the Roman army, began to put awkward questions.
Thereupon Lelius fell upon Manlius and thrashed him, declaring the
fellow to be a pushful valet and nothing better. On the same occasion,
the envoy allowed a high-spirited and richly caparisoned horse to
escape from his suite in order to be given the opportunity of going
through the camp to recover it. Again there was Tarquin the Proud
who, failing to capture the city of Gabii to which he was laying
siege, had his son flogged till the blood ran from his body and then
sent him a refugee into the midst of the enemy, with instructions
to procure by bribery the surrender of the place, all of which the
youth accomplished. Polyænus tells how Sertorius, the Roman general
in Spain, was the owner of a white fawn that he had trained to follow
him everywhere, even to the steps of the tribunal which the animal had
been taught, at a given signal, to approach as Sertorius was about to
deliver sentence in judicial cases. The commander allowed it to be
made known that he derived much information from this fawn. Meanwhile
his spies were very active all over the country and the tribes all
marvelled at the knowledge of the general, who attributed it to the
little beast for which he claimed supernatural powers.
Polyænus also teaches the necessity of "psychologising"—a term not
unknown to American experts in that form of police torture which is
known as the Third Degree—the leader to whom one may be opposed.
"One must exert oneself," says the Greek, "to find out the character
of one's enemy as well as his disposition; whether he is impetuous
and spirited at the first shock, or patient and apt to await the
onslaught." Every general should know all there is to be known about
the business of opponents, and he goes on to tell the tale in point,
showing that what we know to-day as the Black Cabinet—that is, the
spying of private correspondence in the post—was practised by Alexander
the Great who lived some three hundred years before Christ. "Being
in Carmania, he was informed that the Macedonians and Greeks in his
army were speaking badly about him. Alexander thereupon assembled his
friends and told them that as he intended writing home they should do
likewise. Accordingly, they all wrote home and Alexander saw to it
that the couriers were recalled with the mails before they had gone
very far on their journey." Recurring to the same authority, we learn
that cipher was well known to the Greeks under the name _skutate_ and
to the Romans as _scutula_, meaning a wooden cylinder around which an
inscribed papyrus was rolled. He also records the story of Histiæus, a
tyrant of Miletus who wished to incite Ionia to rebel against Darius;
fearing however to send letters to the Ionians in those perilous times,
he thought out the ruse of having the head of a trusted slave clean
shaved and a message written on the scalp, addressed to Aristagoras in
the simple words: "Rouse Ionia to revolt." The slave was then sent on
his way to Ionia, and, his hair having grown over the fateful message
by the time hostile camps were reached, he passed safely through to
Aristagoras, who had the poll shaved once more and so learned his
general's design. Altogether it would seem that during antiquity, ruse
rather than real ability was the cause of many loud-famed successes
and victories. Frontinus tells how the Consul Hirtius used to send
carrier-pigeons to his friend Decimus Brutus, and Justus Lipsius is
responsible for the statement that swallows were trained for purposes
of military and other espionage, the same authority informing us that
it was the custom among Eastern nations for birds to be trained as
long-distance messengers, more especially between lovers. It may be
certain, too, that postal communications were not all entrusted to the
famous relay runners, regarding whose marvellous stamina the Roman
records tell us.
Hannibal, it is certain, could never have performed that wondrous march
from the edge of Andalusia right up through Spain, over the Pyrenees,
across France and beyond the Alps into the plains of Piedmont, where he
fought his most artistic battle in 218 B.C., at the Trebia, had it not
been for an organisation of spies and informers who prepared the way
by ruse and diplomacy for the advance of his hordes. Of him Polybius
writes: "For years before he undertook his campaign against Rome, he
had sent his agents into Italy and they were observing everyone and
everything. He charged them with transmitting to him exact and positive
information regarding the fertility of the trans-Alpine plains and
the valley of the Po, their populations, their military spirit and
preparations and, above all, their disposition towards the government
at Rome. There was nothing too large in promises that the Carthaginian
was not ready to make in return for their support against the hated
City." Cæsar too employed spies to the undoing of his adversaries in
Egypt, in Gaul and also in Britain, and although in his Commentaries
he records his employment of emissaries of this kind, history remains
generally blank as to special details, leaving us to conclude that,
like Napoleon, he relied mainly on the exigencies of the moment to
produce the required information through the bribery of individuals in
the opposite camp. In his early political career, especially during his
tenure of the office of Pontifex Maximus, it seems clear that he then
laid the leading lines, through the employment of many informers, of
that vast political network of which he subsequently became the master,
while his later association with Marcus Crassus, who mainly owed both
wealth and power to the army of spies which he controlled, was in every
way to Cæsar's advantage in respect of the means of procuring important
information. Had he employed the services of a spy system on his
attainment to supreme power, it is unlikely that he would have come to
his destruction at the hands of a group of the best-known men in Rome,
the fact leaving us to infer that he had ceased to use a secret service
after the Civil War.
On the passing of Constantine to the Bosporus in the fourth century,
Rome, in the process of the ages, became the centre of a vast
ecclesiastical power. The work of the spy then reached the honours of
a kind of consecration. Writers like Lachesnaie and Deville emphasise
the view that ecclesiastics are especially fitted for the business
of spying. Fouché and Talleyrand had been clerics in their early
days and certainly both were masters in the business of organising
special-information corps. In his works, too, the Prussian General,
Karl von Decker, declares that "a secret which cannot be penetrated
by a woman or a priest will never be penetrated." To tell the story
of Church espionage would exhaust the capacity of a large library,
and in this connection it may be said that adversaries of the Church
of Rome have ever held that the Confessional was a purely political
invention, the object of which was to spy upon the community. Whether
this be so or not, it is fortunately not our business to decide; it
is fair, however, to mention the prevalence of the view. In any case,
clerics have ever proved themselves apt for the work of espionage, and
in a collection of ordinances issued and signed by Louis XIV. in 1652,
a certain Father Berthoud, "although an ecclesiastic, is authorised
to disguise himself in any way he likes in Paris, Bordeaux, Blaye and
elsewhere," for the purposes of spy work among the political and
social enemies of the Crown. Cardinal Richelieu and his understudy,
Père Joseph, practically inaugurated in France the system of opening
private communications, a practice which was carried to its extreme
under Napoleon, of whose daily budget of private letters, his fourth
secretary, Fain, has told us much.
That the system of espionage persists to our own day in Continental
colleges and convents under the control of congregational clerics, is
a fact which is well known. Each division of a school is invariably
placed under the chronic vigilance of a "surveillant," or watcher,
who in his turn employs his own corps of spies, privileged boys
moving among the masses of their congeners, marking their intentions,
noting the relations of the younger boys with the older, getting
information as to unlawful programmes to be carried out, ferreting
out secret testimony as to the habits of suspect characters and, if
possible, intercepting amorous billets which pass between elder boys
in other divisions and the younger fry. In regard to these unwholesome
_liaisons_ the vigilance of the spies is certainly justified; but the
system goes much deeper than this in foreign schools, its objects
being to inquire into the most intimate details regarding the private
character of a boy—heaven only knows why, if it is not for the pure
love of finding out. Indeed, it must be allowed that the baser
tendencies which are to be noted in the case of all spies, here display
themselves in the form of a pruriency which often touches the indecent
and always the unwholesome.
The real founder of the business of organised spying in modern times
was Frederick the Great, who was wont to boast that his spies exceeded
his cooks in the proportion of a hundred to one. It is impossible
closely to read the story of Frederick, or even to study minutely his
face as pictured, say, by Meyn, without becoming conscious of the
fact that here was a being who realised in his personality the claim
of the psychologists that great ability and criminal tendencies are
often closely affiliated. Apart from what we know of his perverse
eccentricities, it is certain that his deliberate elimination of all
the higher ideals of humanity from a place in his political philosophy
had the effect of making him as impersonal as an automaton where his
material ambitions were concerned, and he knew no other. Like the true
pragmatist he was, Frederick considered all things good in themselves
which served his ends, and his policies were invariably conceived on
his pet principle: "If honesty fails us, we have always dishonesty to
fall back upon." He it was who laid the foundations of that policy
of Prussianisation of which our story of Stieber tells in its turn,
and in which no measure was to be considered too extreme or base, nor
turpitude too abhorrent, provided it advanced the interests of his
House and furthered its ambition to play in Europe that rôle which had
passed to the Habsburgs by inheritance from the Cæsars. For Prussia
Frederick sought a permanent predominance in Europe equal to all which
Louis XIV. had exercised between 1661 and 1715. An understanding of
these facts is really the condition of grasping the significance of the
elaborate Prussian spy system of our own time.
Lastly comes the age of Napoleon, in which we find that, for all the
essential militarism of the imperial regime, the spy really played a
more prominent rôle in the social and political drama than in that of
the camp, the great soldier, except in extraordinary cases of long-laid
plans, as in the Austerlitz campaign, relying mainly on human cupidity
touched by the magic of his gold, to find, as the occasion demanded,
willing perverts to provide him with the information necessary to the
success of his combinations.
III
LE CARON
Away back in the later eighties, when Ireland was in the throes of her
penultimate fight for the principle of self-government, all true sons
of Erin had marked out for their particular obloquy two individuals who
have since become notorious—namely, Piggott, the forger, and Major Le
Caron, the spy. Those whose memories travel back easily to the famous
_Times_ Commission will recollect how offensively both names stunk
in the nostrils of all who supported the late Irish leader. Among
Nationalists, it will be remembered, the spy was invariably spoken of
under the name "Le Carrion," and even those who gave him the benefit
of a proper pronunciation of his pseudonym were wont to utter it
with that peculiarly hissing emphasis with which Irishmen, among all
men, seem able to invest the names of those who run counter to their
political bias. The positive venom which certain eloquent Nationalists
seem actually to instil into the pronunciation of names like "Dublin
Castle," "Major Trant," "Lord Clanricarde" lingers long afterwards in
the memory of English listeners, just as the rattle of certain snakes
is said ever afterwards to linger in the ears of those who have escaped
them in the jungle. To hear the late Mr Biggar, for instance, utter
the _nom de guerre_ of the famous British spy was a real lesson in the
onomatopœic art, and on his lips the name, otherwise inoffensive and,
indeed, on English tongues a liquid enough quantity, was made to attain
a sibilancy which was truly weird in its effect.
[Illustration: Henri Le Caron
_By permission of Mr. William Heinemann_]
How came the Major by his adopted name, and was it really meant to
portend anything? It was humorously said at the time that the spy had
taken his pseudonym from the French form of the name of that mythical
boatman of classic memory who was wont for a few halfpence to ferry the
souls of the damned across the river Styx, Charon, to wit. Le Caron
is, however, a common enough French name, and the Major had lived some
years in France previously to migrating to the United States, in which
country Thomas Beach first became Henri Le Caron. Born at Colchester,
Essex, in 1841, Beach belonged to a type of family which was clearly
of old-fashioned puritanical stock, and the point is important enough
in view of his later claim to have acted the rôle of traitor purely
on the ground of moral principle. In his autobiography he tells how
from his earliest days he had been brought up to cherish the Bible
and to loathe all forms and quantities of alcoholic liquor. His home
life was altogether not a very bright one and dull domestic repression
soon began to exert its own particular reaction on a character which
was already bursting with the spirit of adventure and derring-do. He
records it that the routine of his existence grew too monotonous
for the larger soul within him, and how he ran away from home and a
Quaker's shop at least three times before his sixteenth year, breaking
his apprentice bonds and travelling far and wide, yet managing, at
whatever town he made a halt, to earn what he calls a respectable
living. Like most characters of his obviously crude and untutored kind,
in whom the spirit of romance is a considerable, if a somewhat jumbled,
equation, there was not a little of the megalomaniac in the boy, and
even in those early days his soul thirsted after the big things of
life. In young Beach, too, there was a bit of artistry of sorts, and
just as it was a chief ambition of Spy Schulmeister to dance like a
marquis of the old regime, and a foible of Spy Stieber to accumulate
pectoral decorations testifying to his honour, so also the youthful Le
Caron discovered a precocious passion for hymns and the music of the
church organ. At Colchester he became a leading and decorous choir lad,
and according to himself it was his love for psalmody rather than any
regard for his puritanical parents which invariably brought about his
return, prodigal-wise, to the paternal roof. One is obliged in that
spirit of fairness which gives the devil all that is due to him, to
insist on what are otherwise prosaic enough details, and all the more
so because, to the man's admirers, his piety provides an argument for
the rôle he afterwards adopted in life.
Having spent some years in Paris, where he worked as an agent for that
now-extinct old worthy, John Arthur, earning a living which enabled
him to present a highly respectable figure, he clearly felt a call,
he tells us, to join the North in 1861, when the kindling American
Civil War made the States a kind of promised land for all sorts of
adventurous spirits, most of whom, it may be supposed, were still
feeling the influences of the comparatively fresh Napoleonic legend.
Taking out a passport in the name of Henri Le Caron, young Beach
shipped on the _Great Eastern_, then about to take her maiden trip
across the Atlantic, and landed duly in New York, where the military
authorities enlisted him as a private in the Pennsylvania Reserves. Le
Caron—he was never after 1861 known by the name of Beach—passes over
his military career with unexpected haste in his autobiography, it must
be said. He was present, he tells, at important engagements during
the course of the war, first as an infantry soldier, subsequently as
a cavalryman, receiving promotion and being especially detailed for
scouting operations. In 1864 he was gazetted second lieutenant and by
1865 had attained the rank of regimental adjutant with the title of
Major—a rank which became, it may be said in passing, at the close of
the war, so common throughout the States, that humorists were wont
to tell how in 1866 it was impossible to throw a brick in any given
direction where men happened to assemble without hitting an officer of
that standing.
Le Caron, it is interesting to note, records his act of religious faith
in the following words:—"We are impelled by some unknown force to carry
out, not of our own volition or possible design, the work of this life,
indicated by a combination of circumstances to which unconsciously
we adapt ourselves." This, it may be remembered, was the religion of
the late Prince Bismarck, and it must be allowed that it is a highly
convenient and elastic hypothesis of life. It goes far to explain how
he came to be associated with Fenianism. Le Caron declares, however,
that he was far from having gone in search of the Fenians; on the
contrary, he insists, the Fenians came in search of Le Caron. The Major
disappoints us rather badly, nevertheless, by failing to show how it
was that the Irish in America, even in those days a powerful community,
should have sought out the psalmodical soldier who abhorred alcohol in
all its forms and possible quantities, and why he, a Briton, of all
men, should have been singled out to put life into the Irish-American
movement for the emancipation of the Sister Isle. At the head of that
movement in 1865 was James Stephens, who directed the organisation both
in Ireland and America, while his agents on American soil included
some of the shrewdest Irishmen of that age and, indeed, some of the
most prosperous. Le Caron explains briefly how he first entered the
movement as a spy. A fellow-officer had informed him quite casually
that the main object of the Irish-American agitation of that date
was the invasion of Canada. This startling bit of news proved more
than sufficient to call out the fires of the old puritanical moralist
dormant in the Major, who proceeds to inform us in the language of
tragic passion which one applies to a tailor who has omitted a minor
detail, that he "felt quite indignant at learning what was being done
against the interests of my native country." Accordingly, and in order
to unload his chest of the perilous secret, he addressed a letter
to his father, a local tradesman, at Colchester, informing the sire
that an attack was contemplated on the Dominion by a group of bold
bad Irishmen. Evidently there was in the Beach tribe a congenital
incapacity for holding a secret, for no sooner had the old man read his
son's letter than, "startled and dismayed at the tidings it conveyed,
he, true Briton that he was," made over the letter to the then sitting
member for Colchester, a Mr Rebow. It was this gentleman who was
instrumental in procuring Le Caron his salaried commission to act in
America as a spy for the British police authorities.
In 1867, Major Le Caron, freed from military service, was looking
around him for the means of maintaining his family, and in the course
of a visit to England, was instructed by the British Government to
ally himself with the Fenian organisation in America, "in order," as
he frankly admits, "to play the rôle of spy in the rebel ranks." His
adventurous nature welcomed the work as congenial, he says, while his
British instincts made him a willing worker from a sense of right.
Accordingly, on his return to America, he offered his services as a
military man to General O'Neill, who was to lead the anti-British
forces in the event of another uprising. On his cordial acceptance by
O'Neill, as well as initiation, on his solemn oath, into the Fenian
Brotherhood under that soldier's sponsorship, Le Caron returned to his
Western home and lost no time "in commencing to lead my double life,"
as he puts it. At Lockport, Illinois, he set about the organisation of
a Fenian "circle" in which he took the position officially known by the
title of "center," or commander, a post which entitled him to receive
all official reports and communications issued by O'Neill. These
reports were duly transmitted to London by the Major and one pauses
here to reflect that in this supplementary office Le Caron might not
inappropriately have borne the subsidiary title of "scenter." The soul
of the Major was clearly one of no ordinary beauty and versatility, for
in order to supplement his gains as a secret-service agent, he accepted
about this time a comfortable post as hospital steward in a vast gaol
in Illinois. Here, he naïvely admits, he felt at home, because, as
he writes, "in such a vast assembly of criminals, there were many
whose characters and careers formed subjects for very interesting
study to me. I was fortunate in being connected with the prison at a
time when some more than usually clever and facile scoundrels were
temporarily resident there." O'Neill was, however, on the look-out for
energetic agents, and Le Caron was not suffered to remain long in
the comparatively inactive life of an Illinois gaol. In response to
a telegram from headquarters, he proceeded hurriedly—and apparently
without giving due notice to his employers—to New York, where he was
engaged as "major and military organiser of the Irish Republican Army,"
at a salary equivalent to £650 a year, a rare exchange for the few
pounds he was being paid weekly as a prison official in Illinois. With
his commission he received instructions to proceed on an organising
tour, in the course of which, the Major learned, to his deep disgust,
that he was expected to address public meetings as a sworn advocate of
the Irish cause. He knew nothing whatever about Irish politics and was
well aware that ignorance of Irish aspirations meant, in the opinion
of most Irishmen, wholesale indifference, which was hardly worse than
active hostility itself. Once, indeed, he found himself in a tight
fix which called for all the undoubted nerve the spy possessed. The
occasion was a Convention of the Fenian Brotherhood at Williamsburg.
The Major tells the story in the course of his autobiography in the
following words:—
"The evening came and with it our trip to Williamsburg. On arrival
there in the company of O'Neill and some brother officers, I found
several thousands of persons assembled. We were greeted with the
greatest enthusiasm and given the seats of honour to the right and
left of the chairman. My position was a very unhappy one. I was in a
state of excessive excitement, for I feared greatly what was coming.
Seated as I was next to O'Neill, I could hear him tell the chairman on
whom to call and how to describe the speakers; and as each pause took
place between the speeches, I hung with nervous dread on O'Neill's
words, fearing my name would be next. The meeting proceeded apace,
some four or five of my companions had already spoken and I was
beginning to think that after all the evil was postponed and that for
this night at least I was safe. Not so, however. All but O'Neill and
myself had spoken when to my painful surprise I heard the General call
upon the chairman to announce Major Le Caron. The moment was fraught
with danger; my pulses throbbed with a maddening sensation; my heart
seemed to stop its beating; my brain was on fire and failure stared me
in the face. With an almost superhuman effort, I collected myself, and
as the chairman announced me as Major M'Caron, tickled by the error
into which he had fallen and the vast cheat I was playing on the whole
of them, I rose equal to the occasion, to be received with the most
enthusiastic of plaudits.
"The hour was very late and I took advantage of the circumstance.
Proud and happy as I was at being with them that evening, and taking
part in such a magnificent demonstration, they could not, I said,
expect me to detain them long at so advanced an hour. All had been
said upon the subject nearest and dearest to their hearts. (Applause.)
If what I had experienced that night was indicative of the spirit of
patriotism of the Irish in America (tremendous cheering), then indeed
there could be no fears for the result. (Renewed plaudits.) And now
I would sit down. They were all impatiently waiting, I knew, to hear
the stirring words of the gallant hero of Ridgeway, General O'Neill
(thunders of applause), and I would, in conclusion, simply beg of them
as lovers of liberty and motherland (excited cheering) to place at the
disposal of the General the cash necessary to carry out the great work
on which he was engaged. This work, I was confident, would result in
the success of our holy cause and the liberation of dear old Ireland
from the thraldom of the tyrant's rule which had blighted and ruined
her for seven hundred years. These last words worked my hearers up to
the highest pitch of enthusiasm, and amidst their excited shouts and
cheers I resumed my seat, with the comforting reflection that if it
took so little as this to arouse the Irish people, I could play my
rôle with little difficulty."
Fenian Conventions came and passed; the organisation had grown to
extraordinary proportions, as is shown by the fact that in 1868,
when the Brotherhood made a demonstration at Philadelphia, not fewer
than 6000 armed and uniformed Fenian soldiers paraded the city,
with General O'Neill at their head and Le Caron among the staff.
In the course of his work in the Eastern States, the Major had
already distributed, he tells, 15,000 stands of arms and 3,000,000
rounds of ammunition for the prospective raid which promised shortly
to be undertaken, on the prime condition, however, that the funds
should be forthcoming to finance the adventure. In the spring of
1870 it was decided to make the projected move upon Canada, O'Neill
declaring with a Kelt's enthusiasm that "no power on earth could
stop it." Le Caron, who was, of course, already in active touch with
the Ottawa authorities, met the British agents at Buffalo, giving
them full particulars and details as to the Raid which was about to
take place. On their departure to make complete preparations for all
eventualities, O'Neill arrived at Buffalo, whence, and accompanied by
Le Caron, he left for the Front. "O'Neill," writes the Major, "was
full of enthusiasm and firmly believed that the Canadians would be
taken entirely by surprise, while I myself was laughing at his coming
discomfiture." Arrived at the frontier, O'Neill, who expected to find
at least 1000 Fenians under arms—the nucleus of an army which was to
attract another 500,000 Irishmen from all parts of America—discovered
to his dismay that only 250 men had assembled; this number was swelled
by the arrival of 250 more on the morrow, when the General, fearful
of the effects of hesitation and delay, ordered his force to cross
the border from Vermont into Canadian territory. The simple Irishman
addressed his troops in early-Bonapartian fashion as follows:—
"Soldiers! This is the advance guard of the Irish-American army for
the liberation of Ireland from the yoke of the oppressor. For your own
country's sake you enter that of the enemy. The eyes of your countrymen
are upon you. Forward—March!"
The spy himself, from the crest of a slope, watched the advance of the
little band of invaders as it crossed the border-line into British
territory, some in Fenian uniform of green and gold, others in ordinary
"Sunday" garb. Not a soul was in sight, nor anything like a force
to oppose their progress. Le Caron well knew, however, that behind
the ridge towards which the Fenian army advanced deployed, cheering
wildly and with bayonets fixed, at least 1000 Canadian volunteers were
lying in wait. As the invaders touched the slope, the Canadian rifles
opened fire, the Army of Liberation ceased forthwith to exist, and
the last the Major saw of General O'Neill was that officer's passing
in a hackney-coach seated between the two policemen who had arrested
him. Le Caron of course fled with the rest of the invaders, and
immediately made his way to Ottawa for the purpose, he says somewhat
unconvincingly, of personally "reporting" to the authorities as to the
raid, the result of which had in all probability been telegraphed to
Government House ten minutes after the fiasco. Duly he arrived at the
political capital, where he was, he says, received with the honours
that usually fall to the carriers of military dispatches. Here a
significant enough incident occurred. Wishing to return home at once,
Le Caron prepared for the journey only to find at the last moment
that he was without funds for the ticket; he thereupon applied to a
certain Judge, who wrote him a cheque for the unusually generous sum of
£70—generous seeing that the sum was at least ten times the amount of
his fare supposing him still to have lived in the West, while the fare
from Ottawa to New York State does not exceed fifteen dollars at the
farthest. With his usual dispatch in regard to matters in which one's
curiosity not unnaturally looks for relief, Le Caron passes from the
episode without volunteering any explanation of a satisfactory kind.
In the intervening time between the failure of O'Neill's rising and the
advent of the society of United Irish Brothers, the Clan-na-gael, in
1873, Le Caron spent his time studying medicine. As a practitioner he
claims to have had successes. His taste for spying seems nevertheless
to have exceeded his love for medicine, for in 1873, with the coming
of the Clan, we find him laying his plans to deal with that important
body, which, it may be said, differed from all other Irish-American
societies in the technical excellence of its organisation. Its primary
object was to unite throughout America and the world all Irishmen
who loved their country. Naturally the Major, although supposedly
French, presented himself as a candidate for membership in the new
organisation, and having improvised an Irish grandmother to fortify
his candidacy, was in due course admitted to the Brotherhood on his
sworn oath to be loyal to its covenants. From the very first, however,
he became an object of suspicion to several prominent leaders of the
movement, and it was only after a pressing fight for recognition that
he was eventually appointed to such a position as should enable him
to penetrate the arcana of the society's inner shrines. As with the
Fenian body, he became in the Clan a member of the Military Board.
Every document of value which afforded evidence of the Brotherhood's
dynamite propaganda directed against English cities was, as in the
F.B. days, transmitted to the British Home Office, the correspondence
being actually carried on between Le Caron's wife and another member of
her sex in London. Accordingly, one may readily believe the spy's own
statement that while he was a member of the military councils of the
Clan, he was also shaking hands with danger and discovery at every turn
and only saved his skin by a miracle. In the course of his association
with the Brotherhood Le Caron of course made the acquaintance of some
of the most prominent Irishmen in America's anti-British movements
of the past generation, among them Messrs Egan, O'Donovan Rossa and
the late Patrick Ford. The last of this trio was never, he says, a
member of the Clan nor any other secret society, however much he may
have supported in his early days the physical-force views which were
advocated by extremists of all kinds. Mr Ford owed his prominence, says
the Major, to the wide influence of his paper, _The Irish World_, in
the conduct of which was also associated his brother, Mr Austin Brendan
Ford, as a business director. It was undoubtedly the force which kept
together the various elements of the Irish community in the States;
edited with great ability, it had a vast circulation, which went well
into the hundreds of thousands and had its readers among Irishmen
in every quarter of the globe. Mr Ford, though not a member of the
Brotherhood, allowed himself, says Le Caron, to voice its policies
through his paper.
Some idea of the influence of the Clan may be formed when one realises
that between 1876 and 1880, Russian revolutionary societies were
treating with the American organisation to carry out any part of the
propaganda in which a common co-operation was possible. In return for
Irish-American financial aid, in the event of an Anglo-Russian war, the
Muscovite revolutionaries pledged assistance to the Irish in the cause
of complete emancipation from the English bond. Two extremely wealthy
Irish-Americans were prepared, it was understood, to support this
strange Russo-Irish alliance with many millions of dollars. Included in
a somewhat lengthy programme were the three items, assassination of
Queen Victoria, the kidnapping of the Prince of Wales and the killing
of the Tsar. All of these intentions Le Caron ferreted out, conveying
due information to Scotland Yard. The late Mr Parnell the Major also
met in America, becoming instrumental in "promoting" the Irish leader's
Land League ideas in the States. Of Parnell Le Caron expressed the view
that he was out wholly and solely for what financial rewards there were
to be found in political agitation. Davitt he regarded as a simple
soul, but a born conspirator and one who could not long be induced
to tread a constitutional path. It is clear that Major Le Caron made
the acquaintance of all who were prominently engaged in the Parnell
movement, and it is a remarkable tribute to his powers of deception
that until he returned to England for good and proved his real quality
before the Commission, not one of the actors in the last phase of that
memorable struggle ever suspected him of being a secret-service man.
It is not the purpose of this story to follow the Major throughout
the whole of his career as a spy. His work, which differed but little
in regard to its methods at any time or in any undertaking, cannot at
all be said to have been of a class which required a very high type
of mentality or any diplomacy worthy of that description. For all his
prominence in the profession, it cannot be said that Le Caron, at any
point in his career, ever rose above the status of a common informer.
He himself admits that he owed much of his success to the fact that,
finding himself among a hard-drinking society, he was one of the rare
men who never allowed a taste for fire-water to endanger the operation
of his business. Nor can we suppose that the Clan-na-gael men, whom he
deceived so long, were at all adept in the deeper arts of political
intrigue, or that they possessed any of that finesse which marked
the type of men with whom Schulmeister had on nearly every occasion
to measure his nimble wits. Le Caron claimed to be considered on a
different level from all other spies and for the reason that he adopted
the profession purely in the interests of his patriotism. A close study
of his confessions discloses, however, a positive disposition towards
the mercenary aspect of things and the Major's art—in literature, at
least—is far too feeble to conceal the fact. There is in many of his
reflections upon the parsimony of British secret-service paymasters
the suggestion of a whimper in regard to the small pecuniary rewards
he obtained for services which he himself naturally appraised very
highly, but which really only provided results which were certain to
have been arrived at even if the British Government had never employed
an official spy upon the Irish-American brotherhoods.
Le Caron owed much of that quasi-heroic reputation which grew up around
him and his career to the fact that he appeared on a drab enough stage
as the only figure with melodramatic possibilities inherent in it at
a time when the Americanised type of journalism was creeping into
England and when journalists were being gradually initiated into the
mysteries of writing up what is technically known among newspaper men
as the "human interest" side of all persons and things. In the personal
cast of the Parnell Commission and its long-drawn sessions, there was
nothing of picturesque interest outside the occasional appearance in
the witness-box of Irish peasants who were called upon to bear witness,
in Doric accents, to the truth. Apart from these, the individuals who
gave testimony were a bunch of frock-coated, plug-hatted Philistines
of the most "orn'ery" description, as they say out West, men who used
unfailingly to put the special writers to sleep. In Parnell there was
nothing, externally at least, which could be said to be in any way
picturesque, and Biggar only came up to the specifications of a very
curious picture. Along, then, came Le Caron, a veritable godsend to
the correspondents who were gaping for a bit of decent colour. The
Major may be trusted, as a man who had touched hands with the American
journalist, to have realised and seized his opportunity. The obvious
Napoleon pose, the arms folded across the breast, the sharp sibilant
tones, the Westerner's "yus, yus" and "no, siree," the Machiavellian
suggestion of knowing all there was to be known about mystic shrines
and tangled intrigues, the obvious consciousness of being the apparent
villain of the piece who was finally, he thought, to issue as its real
hero, the glacial fixity of the stare, the pose of long-suffering
righteousness—yes, the spy in the witness-box was exactly what the New
Journalists were looking for, and in making Le Caron they were helping
to make themselves.
IV
SCHULMEISTER
Of all modern spies, Karl Schulmeister, Napoleon's chief secret-service
agent, appears to have possessed mental and temperamental qualities
of so high an order as to justify one's belief that in the business
of _haute politique_ he might have played a prominent rôle, had his
destiny lain that way. As it was, he played in the Napoleonic drama a
part which, although practically unknown even to well-informed students
of history, may be said to have contributed an important quota not only
to the Corsican's achievement of his lofty position in the world, but
also in some measure to its retention. And although Napoleon made his
chief spy a rich man and allowed him to hold in his time many positions
of consideration if not of honour, such as the organisation of the
_corps d'espions_ and the headship of the imperial secret police, it is
a matter of definite record that he consistently and to the end refused
to bestow on Schulmeister any decoration of honour. In what degree and
to what extent the work of the spy was less dignified or honourable
than that of Fouché, the high-placed minister of police, is not
easily apparent and it seems hard to find any real justification for
Napoleon's refusal to Schulmeister of a pectoral certificate of worth
when we reflect on the personal and public character of the heavily
bedizened Duc d'Otranto who, apart from his long career of duplicity
and intrigue, was eventually to prove the agent of the Emperor's final
undoing and betrayal. In view of our expressed opinion that megalomania
largely underlies the psychology of the spy, it is interesting to
note that Schulmeister also laid claim to the honour of lofty birth.
His grandfather, he told the world of his time, had been a Hungarian
refugee noble of the family of Biersky, who settled in Baden, about
1730, where he adopted the profession of schoolmaster, taking at the
same time a name descriptive of his occupation—hence Schulmeister.
What we know for a certainty is that the spy's father was a kind of
unattached or nonconforming Lutheran minister at Neu-Freistett in
1760, and that Karl Schulmeister was born here on 5th August 1770,
when Napoleon was about one year old. The meagre accounts which remain
extant give us the picture of a village boy of respectable position
whose character bore a striking resemblance to that which Robert Clive
earned among the townspeople of Market Drayton in his early years.
Schulmeister, at the age of twelve, was the acknowledged leader of the
local band of youthful marauders and scapegraces—hooligans we would
call them in these days. At the age of seventeen he had already become
known as one of the most accomplished smugglers on the Franco-German
frontier, a business, it is noteworthy, in which he engaged, either
personally or by proxy, to the closing years of his life. At the age of
twenty-two he married an Alsatian maid called Unger, and established
himself in two distinct trades which his considerable smuggling
operations were likely to render lucrative at the time. In after years,
however, when he had become the lord of a château and large pleasance,
and preferred to be known as Monsieur de Meinau, the spy was prone to
overlook the fact that he had at one time kept a provision shop and an
ironmongery at Neu-Freistett. Smuggling he was always willing to admit,
and for the reason that in Revolutionary times, when life was accounted
cheap, it required much courage and resource, he said, to become a
successful smuggler. Undoubtedly the experience he acquired in this
dangerous trade had called for many of the mental qualities which were
to serve him so well in his after-career.
About 1799 he was introduced to Colonel Savary, afterwards to become
the Duc de Rovigo, who was then engaged on a minor commissarial mission
for the Directory in Alsatian countries. Savary was evidently one of
those fortunate individuals on whom the gift of sensing great events
to come appears to be bestowed, and, like all of his kind, he had both
the eye for useful men and the talent for attaching them. An acuminous
judge of character, he was first attracted to Schulmeister by the
latter's cool audacity and splendid resource in the conduct of perilous
smuggling enterprises, though whether, as it is said, Savary was
himself anxious to share in the very liberal profits of the smuggler's
trade, is not so clear. It is certain, however, that the rising soldier
and the prosperous contrabandist continued to meet and to correspond,
so that in 1804, being commissioned to allure a princely _emigré_
across the French frontier, in accordance with Napoleon's resolve to
put a term to conspiracies against his power by sacrificing the blood
of a Bourbon, Savary at once remembered his friend Karl Schulmeister.
The man who had so long and successfully eluded the excise officials at
the frontier would in all probability, he argued, prove easily equal to
the task of trapping a royalist on the wrong side of the international
boundary-line.
Entrusting the conduct of his business operations to his wife,
Schulmeister visited Savary at Besançon early in March 1804. Here
he was definitely instructed by the French General—Savary had been
promoted to this rank in 1803—in the details of the intrigue which was
to bring about the capture of the young Duc d'Enghien, whose murder
had been resolved upon by the authority in Paris, its object being
to strike terror into the royalist camp and clear the way towards a
larger rôle for Bonaparte. Enghien was at that time a young man of
thirty-two resident in the territory of the Grand Duke of Baden close
to the French frontier. Proscribed like all the members of his House,
he was admittedly a man in whom a taste for political intrigue counted
for little, too far removed from possible succession to the throne of
France to be seriously suspected of ambitious designs and, from what
his contemporaries assure us, one who represented the best type of his
royal race. That harshness of lot which was common to the _emigré_ of
every rank in those times did not spare the young Duc, who lived in
very unpretending fashion at Ettenheim, a harmless dependent on the
bounty of England. Historical inquiry into details connected with the
residence of the young Bourbon in Baden has entirely removed from him
all suspicion of having been in any way privy to a conspiracy against
the First Consul. It was the Duc's custom often to visit Strassburg,
where lived a lady friend who was to prove a cruelly unconscious agent
in the intrigue which brought about her lover's destruction.
In accordance with the plans which Schulmeister laid down for the
trapping of Enghien, this lady, to whom the Bourbon was passionately
attached, was taken one morning by emissaries of the spy, conveyed to
Belfort across the French border and interned at a country house near
the frontier, the reasons given for her detention being that she had
become an object of suspicion to the omnipotent French authority. In
the lady's name, a letter was then forged by Schulmeister, purporting
to come from her to Enghien at Ettenheim, retailing the misadventure
and asking her lover to use whatever means he could to procure her
release from the country house. This implicit appeal to his chivalry
was sufficient for the Duc, who, on 14th March, decided to see if by
bribery he could not himself effect the release of his mistress. Acting
just as the astute Schulmeister had foreseen, Enghien left Ettenheim
with two attendants before midnight of the 14th, and it was at a hamlet
in Baden territory close to the frontier and near Lorrach, that the
spy's emissaries, all on the alert and noting the opportunity of an
easy capture, seized upon his person. Thence the prince was conveyed to
Strassburg, from which city he was taken to Vincennes, where, having
undergone a mock-trial, he was executed on 20th March at dawn, his
gaolers forcing him to hold a lantern so that the bullets might find
their mark. It may be remembered that one of Enghien's last requests
was for permission to send a letter to his lady friend, who, as soon as
she had ceased to serve any further purpose, was quickly released by
Schulmeister. This letter, it may be presumed, would have conveyed the
Duc's explanation for the reasons which had prevented him from coming
to his mistress's aid as she had requested. It is said that Savary, for
whom the capture of Enghien meant the certain continuance of Napoleon's
favour, paid the spy blood-money equal to £6000 for his successful
entrapping of the Bourbon prince.
Schulmeister was presented to the notice of Napoleon by his patron
Savary in 1805. "Here is a man who is all brain and no heart, Sire,"
said the General. Our spy has left a short description of Napoleon of
those days, which contains, as far as the writer knows, the only record
of the quality of the great soldier's voice, a more important index
of personality than is generally supposed. According to Schulmeister,
Napoleon's voice was high-pitched, but crisp and with a certain
stridency, while his habit of speaking through the teeth seemed also
to give his utterances a peculiarly hissing sound. For the rest, the
spy does not appear to have carried away a marked impression of the
conqueror's personal appearance. The great soldier seems to have
treated the spy with a playful interest and kindliness, and by the
spring of 1805 we find that Schulmeister had received a commission
from him to report upon the coastal towns of the south of England.
It is also said that the spy visited Ireland, where he made it his
business to become acquainted with the remnants of the rebels of 1798,
who still placed a somewhat simple trust in Napoleon's vague promise,
expressed, if at all, through third parties, that he would some day
consider the question of attacking England through Ireland, granting
her independence to the latter. Whether or not the English and Irish
visits were ever paid, it is certain that Napoleon, in thinking out
the campaign of 1805, especially remembered the existence of Karl
Schulmeister—in itself a rare tribute to the spy's ability from a
master-judge of clever and useful agents. Napoleon, as we gather
from historical writers like Paul Muller, did not place an absolute
confidence in the reliability of non-military spies. "The spy is a
natural traitor" was his expressed view of the species. As a rule the
Emperor trusted to his military intelligence department to supply him
with all that information upon which he based his complex strategic and
tactical calculations. The Austerlitz campaign in view, not so much
of the momentous political contingencies inherent in the whole event,
differed from others, however, as to the character of some of the most
prominent actors engaged. It was on this account that an apparently
insignificant person like Schulmeister came to play, in the stirring
political drama of 1805, a rôle which in its way was almost as helpful
to Napoleon as his own genius in elaborating that memorable episode.
It is well known that the Emperor, more than all other generals, and
true to the maxims of Polyænus, made it invariably his business to
learn all he could about the personality and character of any commander
with whom he was about to measure himself. With Alvinzy, Wurmser,
Beaulieu, the Archduke Charles and Mélas, Napoleon had fought different
types of battles based to a large extent on the personal qualities
and disposition of the general whom he happened to be opposing.
In the early months of 1805, Napoleon, always well served by his
regular diplomatic agents, may be trusted to have known the names and
characters of most of the commanders to whom Austria and Russia were
about to entrust the command of their armies in the campaign which all
Europe knew to be inevitable. As to the attributes of Field-Marshal
Mack, then a man of fifty-three, he can have had but few illusions
and well knew that family influence, rather than the possession of
real ability, had given the Austrian his high position in the military
councils of his country. In Mack was a dull simplicity of mind, unusual
to a man of his class, added to the fatal quality of allowing himself
easily to be influenced by others. Conditions in the Austrian army,
which had within recent years suffered a series of reverses at the
hands of both Bonaparte and Moreau, lent themselves easily to irregular
influences, a fact which had not escaped the penetration of Napoleon.
Mack, again, was anxious to atone for his defeat by the French in 1797
and was prepared to take advantage of any opportunity which should
give him in the conflict a superiority over the conqueror of Italy and
Austria.
In the summer of 1805 that opportunity presented itself in the form of
a letter which was addressed to him from one Karl Schulmeister, who,
like many well-educated Alsatians, spoke and wrote French and German
equally well. The writer in the course of a lengthy communication
informed the Field-Marshal that he had been removed across the French
frontier by Napoleon's orders, on the ground that he was an Austrian
spy. Schulmeister admitted the facts. He had been moved, he wrote, out
of pure love of his country and hatred of Napoleon, to act the spy
through the imperial armies of France, as to the equipment, plans,
intentions and organisation of which he was perfectly well acquainted.
All this information he was willing to give up on the condition of
being allowed to serve on the staff of the Austrian army. Then followed
an account of his Hungarian ancestry and many other details which need
not be particularised here. It is sufficient to say that Mack eagerly
seized the opportunity of possessing himself of the services of a man
who knew all about the French army, and engaged him as secret-service
agent on his own particular account. The spy, who had visited Vienna in
order to meet the Field-Marshal, was furthermore given military rank,
and Mack procured him—on the ground of his noble Hungarian descent,
with forged attestations as to which Napoleon's agents had supplied him
at his own request—membership of some of the most exclusive military
clubs in the Austrian capital. As his supply of money, coming as it did
from Napoleon's long purse, was practically unlimited, Schulmeister,
the ex-smuggler and actual spy, became an easy favourite in some of the
most exclusive circles in the proudest society in Europe.
A description of the chief spy is given by M. de Gassicourt, a
member of the medical suite of Napoleon: "Schulmeister is a man of
rare courage and imperturbable presence of mind. He is made for
great activities, his shoulders being broad, his chest deep, his
body not tall, but capable of sustained exertions. His face is
like an impenetrable mask." A German writer—an anonymous journalist
in the _Courier du Bas-Rhin_, who has written much about the spy's
career—describes Schulmeister as "one who ever seemed to affect the air
of a man on whom the safety of the State depended." While absolutely
incapable of the commonest feelings of humanity where strict business
was concerned, as in the murder of Enghien, the spy appears to have
considered it an indispensable part of his social equipment to waltz
like a gentleman of the old court of Versailles, and with this
momentous object in view employed the services of the most eminent
dancing masters. His manners were said to be excellent by men who were
sufficiently good judges, and, in any case, he must have acquired
considerable polish to have passed muster in Austrian society of that
age. He had not been long in Vienna, at all events, before he had
attached to his own service, and of course for cash considerations,
two well-known military men, who, when Mack took command of his army
in the autumn of 1805, accompanied him to the Front, Schulmeister also
proceeding thither as head of the military intelligence department
attached to Mack's forces. During all this time he successfully
contrived to keep closely in touch with Napoleon, from whom he was
now taking sums of money for necessary expenditure and salary which,
according to documents in the National Archives of France, containing
much of the spy's correspondence, amounted to a sum equal to at least
£20,000 per annum of our own money. Like most of the spy species,
Schulmeister was a high liver, although Napoleon, a hard enough critic
of accounts of all kinds, never laid any complaint to his charge on the
ground of unnecessary extravagance.
Mack, as we have seen, was one of those men who easily surrender their
will-power to bolder spirits. Accordingly, Schulmeister, who possessed
the Austrian's complete confidence and who was well assisted by his
Austrian fellow-spies, Wend and Rulski, acting on the instructions
transmitted to him by Napoleon's headquarters, kept the Field-Marshal,
by means of forged communications purporting to come from traitors
in the French camp, falsely informed as to the movements of the
three advancing imperial armies. As an aristocrat and a convinced
supporter of all feudalistic forms and ideals, Mack was easily led to
believe that the newly established throne of the Corsican received
but half-hearted adherence from the French people. Napoleon even had
newspapers especially printed which were to be shown to Mack in order
to strengthen this impression. According, also, to letters supplied by
the spy, Napoleon, who had left Paris with Vienna as his objective,
had been forced to return with the greater part of his armies in order
to quell a revolution which had broken out against his throne on his
departure from the French capital. Coincident reports, supplied by
Schulmeister's paid collaborants, seemed to point to the truth of the
Alsatian's startling intelligence, and acting upon it, the Austrian
Field-Marshal, with an army of 30,000 men, issued from the city of
Ulm in pursuit of what he thought to be the retreating French armies
only to find himself surrounded by a ring of steel, or what Napoleon
was wont to term his "necklace" manœuvre, Soult, Marmont, Lannes,
Ney, Dupont and Murat closing him in on all sides. The memorable
capitulation of the city, a pivotal point in the set strategy of
Austria's military plans for the campaign of 1805, followed at once,
Mack paying the penalty of what was for long thought to be an act of
treachery, by being deprived of his rank, with a further punishment
of two years in a military fortress. As for Schulmeister himself, his
audacity never showed itself more conspicuously than in the immediate
sequel. Not content with having practically assured to Napoleon the
success of what is known as the Austerlitz campaign, admittedly the
most spectacular of all the Emperor's military exploits, the spy,
after Mack's disgrace, repaired to Vienna, where in the chief military
councils, which were attended by the Emperor Francis and the Emperor
of Russia, he is said to have counselled plans which were sure, he
said, to enable the Allies to offset the disaster of Ulm and redeem
the situation. Strange though it appears, his views, supported as
usual by forged letters of intelligence, were applauded by the
military commanders present, and the result was the shattering of
the Austro-Russian armies at Austerlitz on 2nd December 1805. On the
morrow of that memorable conflict, the spy was arrested at the instance
of highly placed persons in Vienna who had long suspected him. The
timely arrival of the French saved him, however, from a felon's fate,
and it is said that by January 1806 he was back in Paris, boasting to
his friends of the large amounts of money he had accumulated out of
payments made to him not only by the French but also by the—Austrians!
It is impossible to trace Schulmeister in anything like recordful
fashion between 1806 and 1809. His name is occasionally mentioned in
connection with the missions of Savary, who always gave his confidence
to the spy and entrusted him on occasion with rendering military and
political reports in hostile territory, and experts agree in the
opinion that these reports were drawn up with the skill and precision
of an exceptionally well-endowed critic of strategic and diplomatic
values. On Napoleon's second visit to Vienna, the spy was appointed
censor over theatres, publishing houses, religious establishments and
newspapers, and as indicating his possession of a large political
sense, it may be pointed out that he had the works of Voltaire,
Diderot, Helvetius, Montesquieu and Holbach translated and scattered
broadcast among the various races of Austria-Hungary, in furtherance
of the liberal ideas of the Revolution which Napoleon claimed to
represent. All these productions had up till that time been included
on the _Index_, political as well as religious. In 1809, for a short
season, he occupied the important position of commissary-general of the
imperial armies in the field. At Landshut he distinguished himself by
leading a troop of hussars in person and capturing several important
positions. In the same year he reappeared in Strassburg, still under
Savary's orders, and in the course of a revolt which he was called upon
to quell, distinguished himself by blowing out the brains of one of the
most violent agitators, the trouble ceasing forthwith. At Strassburg he
was always at home and to the very end held his popularity among all
classes.
Some years previously he had purchased in the neighbourhood of his old
home the important Château Le Meinau and in 1807 had become also the
proprietor of an estate called De Piple, not far from Paris. In that
year, too, he began to use the territorial distinction—Monsieur de
Meinau. At both mansions people knew him for his lavish hospitalities,
the magnificence of his receptions and routs, his unfailing generosity
to the poor of his districts and, above all, for his love of little
children—this last trait an easily comprehensible transition, it may
be supposed, from the vicious intrigues of his complex trade, to the
confiding simplicity of guileless minds. His property was said in those
years to be worth the equivalent of £200,000, some said much more,
and it is quite certain that Napoleon rewarded him generously for his
undoubted services to the imperial throne.
His last important work in an official capacity was executed also
in 1809 when, through the influence of the ever-obliging Savary,
Schulmeister was appointed by Napoleon to act as chief of the secret
police during that famous Congress of Erfurt to which the Corsican
commanded the presence of nearly all the sovereign princes of
Continental Europe. In the voluminous correspondence which the spy
conducted—his particular Atticus being Savary—Schulmeister, whose
pen was clearly as fluent as his wits were nimble, keeps his patron,
who, it will be remembered, afterwards succeeded Fouché as head of
the French ministry of police, in full touch with the intrigues of
that historic gathering of European celebrities. None was too low or
unweighty, nor any too highly placed to escape the often hypercritical
and always interesting comments of the all-observing spy. The result is
that apart from details bearing on the political significance of the
Congress we are also regaled with tittle-tattle concerning the often
far from dignified relations of the Tsar Alexander, as well as other
august personages, with the subsidiary grand army of _demi-mondaines_
who had taken advantage of the opportunity afforded them by the afflux
of wealthy princes and nobles from every capital, to accumulate
profit during the process of the congressional sun. The Corsican,
with his omnivorous sense of intrigue, laid particular emphasis on
the necessity of closely watching the movements of Russia's Emperor,
whose taste in venal characters of the _hetaira_ type was often in the
inverse ratio of his exalted station. Napoleon, indeed, found himself
more than once under the necessity of reproving the Imperial Muscovite
whose attentions to a celebrated French actress with whom the Corsican
himself had once been on the best of terms, very much perturbed him.
"Visit that woman," he said, with the coarseness of the soldier, "and
to-morrow all Europe will know what your physical proportions are from
the ground up." Schulmeister had even explicit orders to note the
movements of the fair Queen Louise of Prussia, her personal attractions
for the Tsar also providing a source of much soul-burning to the
French Emperor, who, whether he were well informed or not, allowed no
opportunity to escape him of aspersing the much-humiliated Queen to
Alexander. Goethe himself, despite all the admiration the Corsican
professed for the Sage of Weimar, was not sacred from Napoleon's
agent. The insistent "ce Monsieur de Goet'—qui voit-il?" was hardly
less frequent on imperial lips than that other demand: "Et l'Empereur
Alexandre—où a-t-il passé la nuit dernière?" These were types of
implicit instructions which were daily issued to his spy by the
sometimes least dignified of sovereigns.
Readers of the Imperial legend will remember well the young General
Lasalle, Napoleon's most famous leader of light cavalry. This soldier
was also the possessor of many of those characteristics which we are
accustomed to associate with that harmless enough social type which is
described by the term, "funny man." The General's peculiar aptitude
for cutting strange and grotesque figures, his talent for distorting
his features into the most singular of grimaces, his capacity for
assimilating strong drinks, as well as his unfailing geniality with all
sorts of men, were traits as well known to the Army as the theatrical
dress-manias of Murat, or the boastfulness of General Rapp. It is not
surprising to learn, therefore, that Schulmeister, between 1800 and
1809—Lasalle was killed at Wagram, in the latter year—was on terms of
great intimacy with the young General. Well aware of the high favour
with which Napoleon regarded his cavalry leader, Schulmeister confided
to the latter the secret of his great ambition. He had riches, he
said, far beyond his needs and everything, indeed, which was capable
of satisfying the heart of ambitious man. He lacked, however, the one
especial decoration on which his aspirations were set. That was—of
all things—the Legion of Honour! The bestowal of that distinction
would, he declared, cap his noblest and most honourable ambitions.
Would Lasalle use his undoubted influence with the Emperor to procure
him that supreme testimony of Imperial good will? The General,
accordingly, informed Napoleon of his chief spy's aspiration only (a
writer says) to draw from the great soldier what was probably the only
horse-laugh in which the conqueror had ever indulged. "Schulmeister,"
said the Emperor, "may have all the money he wants, but the Legion of
Honour—never!" With the Emperor himself the spy was, nevertheless, on
terms which were cordial enough. It was Napoleon's custom to address
him by his Christian name "Karl," and, in the presence of others
particularly, to twit him, often in the most cruel terms, on the
despicable nature of his trade. The Emperor's refusal to include him
among the wearers of the famous Order which he founded is not to be
explained on very logical grounds, seeing that the decoration was worn
by soldiers like Radet, whose chief business in the Army seemed to be
the execution of, frankly, dirty jobs, from the performance of which
the far from squeamish officers of the Corsican shrank with wholesome
aversion. Such, for example, was the invasion of the Vatican and the
arrest of a harmless old Bishop like Pius VII., or the supervision of
the incarcerated Black Cardinals who had refused in 1810, on religious
grounds, to attend the church ceremony which gave Napoleon a second
wife in the person of Marie Louise.
On the advent of this Austrian Archduchess to share the Imperial
throne, Viennese influence at the Court of Napoleon began to count in
Paris as an important enough factor. Sufficiently important, at any
rate, to put a term to the activities of the man who had been to a
great extent responsible for the debâcle of Austria's military and
political schemes in 1805. Schulmeister accordingly disappeared from
Paris, selling his estate near Paris and retiring to his splendid
property at Meinau, where his popularity with the Alsatians was so
great as to justify the belief that the spy was generously endowed with
many qualities other than those which had led him to adopt the trade
of espionage. "He is a spy," his countrymen used to say, "but surely
also a gallant man." In 1814, during the invasion of France, a regiment
of Austrian artillery was especially detailed to demolish his mansion
and to destroy as much of his personal property as possible. The spy
returned to Paris during the Hundred Days, only to be arrested when
Napoleon left for Belgium. He was released on paying over so large a
ransom that his fortune was permanently crippled. On the return of
the Bourbons, all his attempts to play a social rôle were severely
frowned down by the friends of his prosperous days, and with the small
remnants of a fortune which unfortunate speculations had now reduced
to the vanishing point, he returned to Alsace, there to live a life of
lean days and pathetic obscurity. As late as 1840 he was the keeper of
a _bureau de tabac_, one of those tobacco stalls which are given to
Frenchmen as a solatium for public services in the lower grades. He
was alive in 1850 when the Prince-President toured through Alsace, but
refused to bring himself to the notice of the nephew of Napoleon. The
President called on him, however, vouchsafing him an honour which he
had never received from the great Captain—namely, a handshake. He died
in 1853 and was buried near his wife and parents in the cemetery of
Saint Urbain in Strassburg.
V
NATHAN HALE
On studying the career of Nathan Hale, who, with Major André, owes his
historicity to the American War of Independence, one is conscious of
being in touch with a character at once dangerous and difficult, to
quote the words in which an eminent English statesman has described
the mystic who is at the same time a practical man. In Hale, as his
private correspondence clearly shows, there was every indication that
an otherwise reasonable and lovable disposition was supplemented by a
deep-running current of that hard fanaticism which has ever marked your
descendant of the Pilgrim Fathers. Like his fellow-spy André, Hale was
a man whose social and intellectual gifts were of an important order,
while the admitted excellence of the man's private character, as well
as his high sense of personal honour, go a long way to justify the
opinion generally held by Americans regarding the motives which induced
Hale to enter into the business of spying—according to that view, a
pure love of the principle of liberty, which prompted him to risk his
life in the service of his country. "Spies," says Vattel, "are usually
condemned to capital punishment and not unjustly, there being hardly
any other way of preventing the mischief which they do. For this
reason a man of honour who would not expose himself to die by the hand
of a common executioner, ever declines serving as a spy. He considers
such work disgraceful, as it can seldom be done without some kind of
treachery." Hale himself gave recorded expression, however, to his view
of the matter when he said that, "every kind of service necessary for
the public good becomes honourable by being necessary"—a view which
is quite in keeping with that mysticism which ever characterises the
fanatic who claims the support of spiritual principles for his acts.
Again, Hale declared: "I wish to be useful. If the exigencies of my
country demand a peculiar service, its claims to the performance of
that service are imperious." André, on the other hand, stated that
in the ill-starred enterprise into which he threw himself, he was
mainly "actuated by a thirst for military glory, the applause of his
countrymen and perhaps a brigadiership"—clearly a true megalomaniac.
Indeed, André's last words gave the key to the large personal vanity
which underlay his undoubtedly interesting character: "I call upon
you all, gentlemen, to bear witness that I die like a brave man."
Hale indicated a purely ethical or religious attachment to the ideas
inherent in Independence doctrines of liberty, when he made his last
utterance: "I only regret that I have but one life to sacrifice for my
country"—the true spirit of the Coliseum martyr. The young American
was willing to give up life itself for his idea of liberty.
The Hale family, originally of the Kentish family of that name, had
been settled since 1635 in various parts of the New England States, the
country of the Puritan settlers. The parents of Richard and Elizabeth
Hale were, it is on record, of the strictest sect of Puritans of their
day. The Bible was to them the speaking voice of the Almighty, says a
friend of the family; their admirable civic virtues were also based
upon the religion that was in them and they respected the Law because
they recognised its divine origin. Records still extant emphasise the
important fact that the domestic life of the Hale family was one in
which practical religion played a leading part. Nathan Hale was born
in 1755, the sixth of twelve children, and from his earliest days was
destined for the ministry. With this object he was entered at Yale
College in 1771, after an uneventful village life in the course of
which he gave evidence of a more than usually studious nature. Of the
famous American University he became a graduate in 1773, leaving there
in that year to take up the profession of teaching. All contemporary
writers agree in attributing to young Hale a singularly engaging
personality as well as a presence which was conspicuous among men
whose physical excellence was of a splendid type. "Six feet high,
perfectly proportioned, in figure and deportment, he was the most
manly man I ever saw," wrote an enthusiastic college friend, who
added the interesting fact that "all the girls in New Haven fell in
love with him and wept tears of real sorrow when they heard of his
sad fate. Ever willing to lend a helping hand to a being in distress,
brute or human, he was overflowing with good humour and the idol of
his acquaintances." During his university days Hale had made a mark
in the debating society and his political speeches were remarkable,
it is recorded, for a strong advocacy of those principles of personal
liberty which had reached America by way of France, then in the final
stage of that academic propaganda which was so soon to precipitate
the catastrophe of the Revolution. Determined to devote his life to
teaching, and with a view to obtaining ultimately a professorship at
his old university, Hale settled down to the prosaic enough life of a
New England schoolmaster, devoting his extra-professional hours to the
study of science, ethics and literature.
The outbreak of the War of Independence with the battle of Lexington,
19th April 1775, upset the philosophic dreams of the Connecticut
teacher. Throughout the New England States, action was at once and
almost unanimously called for, and among those who became earnest
advocates of patriotic endeavour, young Hale began to take a prominent
place. "Let us march at once," he cried, "nor ever lay down our arms
till we have obtained our independence." Hale was, indeed, the first
speaker to voice the popular notion of freedom from the union with
Great Britain. In co-operation with kindred spirits, he set about
the forming of a local regiment for immediate service at the Front.
He himself eventually enlisted in Webb's corps, a kind of territorial
organisation for local defence. In 1775 Hale was present with his
regiment at the siege of Boston, where his conspicuous activities won
him a captaincy. The British were driven from that city in March 1776
and sailed for Halifax, the American forces in their turn moving on New
York. That Hale's patriotism was of a purely disinterested kind would
seem to be shown by the fact that he himself paid for the services of
many of his enlisted men. At New York Hale distinguished himself at
once by capturing a British vessel carrying large supplies, a midnight
raid of much danger which secured for his regiment provisions for a
lengthy subsistence and to himself the notice of General Washington,
by whom he was presently to be entrusted with the carrying out of a
mission the successful results of which must react decisively on the
whole war. The commission entrusted to Hale was nothing less than the
penetration of the enemy's plan of campaign, an absolutely necessary
condition of success for the Revolutionary commanders and for the
following reasons:—
After the various actions which compelled the retreat of the insurgents
from Long Island, the main American army in Manhattan, owing to the
demoralised state of its men, ill-clad, half-starved and unpaid as
they were, seemed to be on the point of dissolution. In a force which
on paper totalled 20,000 men, desertion and disease had discounted
one-third of the numbers. Opposed to them was a British army of 25,000
strong, supported by a powerful naval force. Its soldiers were veterans
who had already tasted success and were magnificently equipped with
artillery, stores and war-munitions of every sort. The military crux
which confronted Washington was the defence or the abandonment of New
York, the strategic key of the existing military situation. Unable,
owing to inaction to which his topographical position as well as the
hesitations of Congress condemned him, to divine the real intentions
of the British, Washington instructed his lieutenants to obtain at all
hazards correct information as to the designs of the enemy's generals.
"Leave no stone unturned," he wrote to General Heath, "nor do not stick
at expense to bring this to pass, as I was never more uneasy than on
account of my want of knowledge on this score." The vital matter was
to find out at which point, if at all, the British intended to attack
New York. Such being the situation, it was decided to send a competent
observer in disguise into the British lines on Long Island, in order
to penetrate the momentous secret, and Nathan Hale volunteered for the
execution of the perilous undertaking.
It is recorded that when Colonel Knowlton, on calling the insurgent
officers together, suggested that one of them should volunteer his
services for what was undoubtedly the work of a spy, a murmur of
indignation went round the room. Many of the officers in bitter terms
reproached the Colonel for having dared to carry such a suggestion to
men of honour, even from Washington himself. Knowlton replied that he
was only carrying out his General's instructions, but nevertheless
managed to insinuate in his reply that the reward in the way of
promotion for the successful achievement of the mission would be
proportioned to the danger with which it was undoubtedly fraught. His
fellow-officers, to whom Hale's high spirit and probity were well-known
characteristics, little expected that the Captain would prove the very
first to undertake the work of a common spy. Nevertheless Hale was
the only man, among a band of men of undoubted courage, who could be
found to respond to the suggestion. His friends, in no way deterred,
indeed, rather encouraged, by the presence of Knowlton, whose proposal
they considered as an insult, used all the arts of persuasion at their
command to turn him from his purpose, but without success. Hale in
accepting the perilous commission addressed them as follows:—
"Gentlemen, I think I owe to my country the accomplishment of an object
so important and so much desired by the commander of her armies,
and I know no mode of obtaining the information but by assuming a
disguise and passing into the enemy's camp. I am fully sensible of
the consequences of discovery and capture in such a situation. But
for a year I have been attached to the Army and have not rendered
any material service while receiving a compensation for which I make
no return. Yet am I not influenced by any expectation of promotion
or pecuniary reward. I wish to be useful, and every kind of service
necessary for the public good becomes honourable by being necessary. If
the exigencies of my country demand a peculiar service its claims to
the performance of that service become imperious."
On the same afternoon Hale met Washington for the second time,
receiving from the General instructions with regard to the perilous
task he had undertaken. He was also given a general order addressed to
American shipmasters to convey Captain Hale to any part of Long Island
on which he might desire to land. Sundown already saw him on his way,
accompanied by a sergeant and a boatman, to a point fifty miles north
of New York, Norwalk, where there was a safe crossing of the Sound into
territory occupied by British forces. Dismissing his companions at
dawn on 15th September, and exchanging into the brown civilian dress
and Quaker hat common to that period, Hale ferried across the narrow
water, instructing his retainers at the last moment to await him at
the same spot with a boat on 20th September. Reaching Huntington Bay
on the other side, he assumed the character of a schoolmaster who,
disgusted with the course of the Revolutionary cause, had come to
pursue his profession in surroundings more congenial to his political
and social tastes. His appearance and speech both carried conviction
to all with whom he conversed; he was made free of the British lines,
visited all the camps on Long Island, making observations openly
and drawing up memoranda, written in Latin, as well as plans, in
the privacy of his room. In the meantime, the British had invaded
Manhattan and captured New York, so that as far as the penetration of
the designs of English commanders was concerned, Hale had really made
his excursion to little purpose beyond what he had achieved in the
gathering of military information on Long Island. Having heard of the
British success, he retraced his steps in the direction of Norwalk, and
on 18th September, at sundown, found himself again at Huntington Bay,
where he had first landed on his mission. Wearing coarse shoes with
loose inner soles, under which he was able comfortably to conceal his
drawings and memoranda, and still in the plain dress of a middle-class
citizen, he felt secure in the disguise which had already carried him
so happily through the perils of many British camps. Accordingly he
entered a famous tavern "The Cedars" and asked for a night's lodging.
At his entrance, a number of persons were in the lounge, and one of
them, a man whose face he seemed to recollect, suddenly rose and left
the place. Hale spent the night at the hostelry and at dawn left for
the waterside in quest of the boat which he had ordered to be ready.
Agreeably surprised to find his supposed boatman so punctual, he gaily
saluted an approaching skiff which was carrying several men. Hastening
to the beach in expectation of meeting his friends, he discovered to
his dismay that the boat was manned by British marines. Flight was
impossible; he was seized, taken aboard and conveyed to the British
guard-ship _Halifax_. His capture, it is said, had been brought about
by the stranger whom he had recognised the previous night at "The
Cedars," a distant cousin of disreputable habits, who had betrayed him
to the British. Proper warrant is, however, lacking for this part of
the story. Inevitably his captors found full proofs of the purport of
his adventure and he was conveyed to the headquarters of General Howe
who, on the evidence of the concealed papers, summarily condemned him
to death by hanging.
In the presence of Howe Hale frankly admitted his rank and mission. "I
was present," wrote a British officer who was an eye-witness of the
closing scenes, "and observed that the frankness, the manly bearing and
the evidently disinterested patriotism of the handsome young prisoner
sensibly touched a tender chord of General Howe's nature; but the stern
rule of war concerning such offences would not allow him to exercise
even pity."
As might be expected from such a man, Hale met his doom with the iron
firmness of one who is convinced of the righteousness of his purpose.
His last requests to Cunningham, the provost-marshal who supervised the
execution, were refused, and even his poor, hurriedly written letters
to his mother, his sisters and his youthful betrothed, Alice Adams,
were ruthlessly destroyed before his face. There was, indeed, a real
nobility about the whole person and demeanour of Hale which, as is
commonly enough the case, called forth the brutality and coarseness of
the completely opposite nature of Cunningham, who jeeringly requested
the doomed youth to make his dying speech. And Hale replied, in words
which still ring in the spirit of the Independence Fathers:
"I only regret that I have but one life to give to my country."
VI
MACK AND THE MOLLY MAGUIRES
James M'Parlan, a North-of-Ireland man, must be ranked among the most
successful spies in modern times and for the good reason that he was
mainly instrumental in breaking up one of the most lawless and terrible
conspiracies against public order and private liberty which any state
has yet been called upon to suppress. Its home was Pennsylvania, its
name the "Molly Maguires," and to find a parallel to its iniquitous
arts and methods one must go to the Klux Klan, the Corsican Vendetta or
the White Veil society of the Middle Ages in Italy. As the discovery
of gold in Australia and California in the middle of the nineteenth
century led to the commission of a vast amount of crime by reason of
the peculiar character of the masses of adventurers who soon overran
the gold-bearing regions, so also the discovery of anthracite coal in
Pennsylvania led to the assembling of great camps of speculators and
prospectors, wealthy capitalists and common labourers for whom the
word Law meant next to nothing at all. The comparatively unorganised
condition of new towns which had sprung up as if by magic in the
anthracite zones made Pennsylvania in those days a likely jumping-off
ground for any man who possessed good physique, a brutal bearing, a
disregard of private rights and the ability to impose his ideas upon
a band of men of his own kind and kidney. Knowing what we know of
the enterprising courage of many types of Irishmen and their talent
for the business of pioneering, it is not difficult to imagine that
they swarmed to the valuable coal regions of the Quaker State in
legions proportionate to the vast immigrant hordes of their countrymen
that were then flowing into every port of the United States. Great
settlements consisting only of Irishmen sprang up at once in the
mining districts of Pennsylvania and this new Irish colony separated
automatically into as many divisions as there were counties in Ireland
itself, each section carrying with it all the local pride, prejudice
and other characteristics which had marked it within its geographical
bounds in the old home. In fact a New Ireland sprang up in Quaker State
hardly differentiable from the Old.
Most people who have read the story of Ireland divested of that halo
of cloistral romance, sentiment and song, which presents Erin in the
mellow light of a land of untroubled repose, are well aware that in
all its recorded ages, paying due credit to its title to religiosity,
it has been a country which for inter-racial animosities and political
divisions is comparable only with that aggregation of states which
until historical research and record had presented them as they truly
were, once bore the half-sacred name of Greece. In Ireland the man
of the North differs from the man of the South and rarely likes him,
the people of the West do not understand the masses of the East and do
not want to; we have the stout Men of Munster who scorn the Scottish
Huguenots of the North as alien intruders, while the Gentleman of
Leinster affects to despise his hard-working and thrifty countryman
from Connaught. In a land like this it is not hard to imagine that
those who possess a talent for prospering by the promotion of political
intrigue and secret societies find themselves at once in an element
which is entirely congenial to themselves and their schemes, as well as
fruitful of profit in every sense of the word. Their objects, too, are
made all the more easily attainable by reason of that peculiar trait
in the Irishman's temper which makes him regard an act of treachery
to the covenants of any secret organisation, no matter what its
objects, as the most hateful of all traitorous acts. It has been well
said, indeed, that in Ireland "to inform of a crime is nearly always
considered as bad as the crime itself, and to such an extent has this
feeling developed that it has become a part of the Irish character
and is universal in its application." In a large measure owing to
this contempt of the informer by Irishmen, all manner of crime has
at all times and in all places gone undetected in every part of the
world where Irishmen have developed large Irish settlements, and it
was precisely for the foregoing reasons that the great Molly Maguire
Conspiracy was, in the first place, able to come into existence and,
in the second, able by the black secrecy attending upon its criminal
operations, to mystify the authorities of a great State of the Union
for more than a generation. The long series of murders committed by
this infamous body in the Pennsylvania coal regions were revolting
and brutal to the most cold-blooded degree, were entirely without
the barest elements of justification, and for the most part were
perpetrated for grievances of a wholly childish and imaginary kind,
based mainly on mere personal dislike or other trivial reasons of the
sort.
The iniquitous exploits of "Boycott" propagandism in Land League days,
which possessed at least a semblance of political motive underlying
them, were respectable when compared with the foul and wanton killings
of the Molly Maguires in America—a body, it may here be said, which
derived its peculiar name from the fact that to every warning its
agents addressed to an intended victim there was invariably attached
the generic signature "Molly Maguire." An unfriendly attitude towards
the Mollies, the least suspicion of being anxious to uproot them,
common race feeling, and, as we have said, simple personal dislike
were each and all sufficient to bring upon any man visitation from
the band in the form of a card bearing the fateful name. Private and
public denunciation and the dispatch of threatening letters invariably
preceded the killing which was not only not to be denounced, but which
was to be treated by all who knew of its commission as if it had never
taken place. The mangled Molly Maguire corpse came, accordingly, to
rank in a class by itself among all other corpses, enshrouded as it
usually was with a general and sacrosanct mystery regarding the manner
in which life had come to leave it. Murders were commonly committed
during the dinner-hour of the miners who, so frequent was a crime,
would go on calmly eating their meal while a fellow-man was being
dispatched to a happier world than this not fifty yards away; and if
his bloody passing called up a feeling of pity in the breast of one
of the diners, it was only to be squelched at once with the chorus
"Shure wasn't the man war-rned"—meaning that a man might be warned of
possessing too ambitious a wife, or the fact that he was "putting on
th'airs iv a jintleman," or that he may have been trying to ingratiate
himself into the favour of a capitalist who happened not to be in
sympathy with Irishmen, or, indeed, perhaps that he had been seen "iv
a Sunda' wearin' peg-top throusers, no less." On receipt of a card
bearing the signature of doom, if the recipient did not desist from
"anny of the said coorses," he had only himself to blame if a band
of Mollies visited him one fine night and bludgeoned his body into
releasing the soul.
One of the chief shareholders of a great coal-bearing area, Franklin
Goven by name, decided, to his lasting credit and with the support
of all right-minded Irishmen in America, to subsidise from his own
pocket a movement to destroy this band of chartered assassins. Acting
in concert with important public men in Philadelphia, he applied to
the famous Pinkerton Detective Agency for the assistance of an expert
in tracking the organisation to its original sources and destroying
it for good and all. After full preliminary inquiries, the Agency
decided that the ramifications of the secret organisation were so
complex and so comprehensive that the real truth as to the operation
of its methods could only be reached by planting a spy amidst the
very band itself. To this end were enlisted the services of M'Parlan,
who under the name of M'Kenna set about the destruction of one of
the foulest criminal societies yet known to the world. Mack, as he
became known ever afterwards, accordingly began, in 1873, his almost
hopeless task of tracing the source of the perpetration of some hundred
murders which had taken place within a few years preceding, to make
no mention of hundreds of maimings, mutilations and other horrors
which were to be attributed to the same propagandism. From the outset
it was discovered by Mack, in the course of preliminary goings and
comings in the coal country, that connected with the Ancient Order
of Hibernians, a well-established benefit society chartered by the
Legislature of the State, there was an inner movement composed of
members of the Hibernians who were subsidising a criminal organisation
of wide-reaching power and influence, not unlike the Italian Black
Hand society of our own day. It was clear that at the head of the
society was an open and properly constituted body, and connected with
it was a secret and criminal movement. Mack began his subsequent sleuth
work in approved Irish fashion by becoming a regular customer at one of
those low-class Pennsylvania coal-town drinking shops—"speak-easies"
they are called by the police, who are well aware that many men who
visit them are not the sort loudly to advertise the methods by which
they make their living. Here he entered on friendly terms with the
landlord, Patrick Dormer by name. Mack, it was certain, was a gifted
soul and in every sense what your American so expressively terms "a
good mixer"; could sing a rowdy song, foot it to the moving music and
"cough up" the ready yarn when it came to his turn. Moreover, he could
"keep his end up" when it meant replenishing the convivial glasses,
while his passion for what is known as being in the thick of a purely
personal mix-up soon made him the most popular Irishman in the coal
zones. Most important of all, in view of his especial business, he was
what is known among Americans as "a cold soak"—that is to say, he could
saturate his system with fire-water and still command his intellect.
While his boon companions washed their sodden brains publicly in their
beer, Mack, always affecting to be easily susceptible to the effects of
Old Crow, was quietly taking mental notes. Accordingly it was not long
before he discovered that his friends, when under the influence of
Bacchus, were apt to give up certain secret pass-words. Having listened
to one of these several times, he carefully learned the exact phrase,
and soon after, finding the landlord alone, he invited him to take a
drink. Leaning mysteriously over the counter he repeated the mystic
pass-word.
"What," cried the astonished landlord, "are _you_ one of them
things?"—meaning a Molly Maguire.
"Troth, that's what they call me," replied the North-of-Ireland man.
Dormer unsuspectingly began from that day to treat Mack as one of the
insiders, taking his word that he had been in the Hibernian Order at
Buffalo, but had been obliged to leave on account of a serious crime.
He was now, he confessed, in hiding, and consequently became an object
of sympathy and solicitude to the Irishmen. When it came, however, to
introducing Mack to genuine Hibernians, matters advanced less smoothly,
since the self-styled Molly did not understand the "grip" and had
only one single pass-word to back his claim. And so it happened that
on the occasion of his being presented to one Cooney, a Molly of note
and standing, the latter, having made certain signs which remained
unanswered, jumped from his toady-chair declaring that Mack was an
elemental liar. The spy brazened the matter out, boldly called the bar
for drinks and pretending to have drunk too deeply fell in a stupor
to the floor. His enemy thereupon proposed to disintegrate the spy
by jumping on him, but the "bunch" vetoed this proposal, Mack being
admittedly a good fellow. Again Cooney took up the frenzied word,
crying:
"I wouldn't take his oath to it acrast his mother's corp. No—not till
he brung me a card from his body-master."
To Mack, still prone upon his vertebræ, this was good enough
information. He was getting into it by degrees. The Mollies, then, had
grips, pass-words, toasts, likewise body-masters; and as he snored, he
also registered the facts. Cooney then "quit," and strangely enough
Mack, so far from being molested by anyone, was actually taken to the
hearts of the Mollies as one of themselves. Thereafter there remained
but the inner ring to conquer and Mack, plentifully supplied with
money—the result, he pretended, of nefarious tradings and misdoings—set
about improving his position. By violent and reckless talk he soon won
the confidence of his fellows and as he boasted of having borne a hand
in crimes which had actually been perpetrated in years gone by, and
of which, as a detective, he must have known the details, the local
Mollies began to reflect that in Mack they possessed a "hunch"—that is
to say, a man over whom they held a sword and who was at the same time
in intelligence, intrepidity and means incomparably above his fellows.
He was described about this time: five feet eight inches high, broad
forehead, chestnut hair and of very genial aspect. Accordingly Mack
was chosen to be an active Molly. Subsequently and in the course of
the judicial proceedings which finally broke up the Brotherhood, Mack
was able to show that he had never once engaged in the commission of a
planned crime and that by cipher and especially prearranged telegrams
he was able in many cases to prevent the further commission of murders
in the coal regions.
That the double-dealing duties which fell to Mack were of a perilous
nature may be realised from the fact that after a few months in
residence among the Mollies all his hair had fallen off, he had lost
his eyebrows and his sight had become impaired. During this time his
duties compelled him to make unwilling love—the lady was _exigeante_,
worse luck—to the sister of a high-placed Molly in order to extract
special information. And as for the quantities of vile whisky he had
found himself forced to swallow round the low bars he frequented,
Mack, commonly a sober soul, declared afterwards that this was in many
ways the hardest part of his business. A period came, however, when
suspicion began to throw its red eye upon him and his death, on general
principles and as a possible spy, was finally decided upon. Other men
might have excusably enough fled the place, but this was too brave a
man to fail his employers just as he was on the point of penetrating to
the mystic shrine of the organisation and finding out where "killing
orders" came from. One Kehoe, it was, who suspecting Mack for a spy,
called a number of Mollies together and advocated the summary murder of
the man. Evidently Kehoe knew something, for at this meeting he adjured
his brethren to take rapid action. "For God's sake," he cried, "have
him killed this very night that ever was, or half the countryside will
hang."