THE FIRST DAYS
Like most Englishmen, I read of the murder at Sarajevo without a
thought that it was to react upon the destiny of this country. It
seemed to be an ordinary case of Balkan manners, out of which would
proceed diplomatic correspondence, an arrest or two, and a trial
imperfectly reported in our newspapers. It did have the immediate
effect of postponing a ball at Buckingham Palace on account of the
Court mourning, but that was all. During the postponed ball on July 16,
so petty were our preoccupations at this moment that when a message
came in that Mrs. Pankhurst had just been recaptured under the ‘Cat
and Mouse Act,’ I thought it worth while to find the Home Secretary
and repeat it to him. A few days after the murder I met von Kühlmann
at luncheon. He can scarcely at that time have expected a rupture
of relations, for in talking over Dr. Solf, with whom I had been
associated in the Pacific, he said, ‘He has climbed high since you knew
him, and some think that he will go higher still (meaning that he would
become Chancellor). He is coming to London in August, and I shall write
to him to arrange a meeting with you.’
A few days later England began to feel uneasy. I overheard a certain
Under-Secretary remark at luncheon of his constituency, ‘Well, all
I can say is that if this country enters the War there will be a
rebellion in the North of England.’ He left the Ministry when the
moment came, and has now disappeared even from the House of Commons.
I think that we all had at the back of our minds a feeling that a
European War on the great scale was so unthinkable that a way would be
found at the eleventh hour for avoiding it. A staff officer in whose
judgment I believed remarked that if this were so he would emigrate,
because he knew that the day was only postponed until Germany felt
herself better prepared for the inevitable war. There were, in fact, no
illusions at the War Office. Some day the story that will do justice
to the services of Lord Haldane in those very critical weeks will be
written. The plans that had been made during peace time were all ready;
the names and addresses of the known German spies were recorded. We
could only wait for midnight on 4th August. I was actually in the Tube
lift at Gloucester Road on the stroke of midnight, and I remarked to
the liftman that we were now at war. ‘Is that so?’ he replied, with a
yawn.
The credit of the discovery of the German spy organisation before the
War was entirely due to a sub-department of the War Office, directed
by officers of great skill. They had known for some time that one Karl
Gustav Ernst, a barber in the Caledonian Road, who was technically a
British subject because he was born in England, was the collecting
centre for German espionage. All he had to do for his pittance of
£1 a month was to drop the letters he received from Germany ready
stamped with English postage stamps into the nearest pillar-box, and
to transmit to Germany any replies which he received. Altogether, his
correspondents numbered twenty-two. They were scattered all over the
country at naval and military centres, and all of them were German. The
law in peace time was inadequate for dealing with them, and there was
the danger that if our action was precipitate the Germans would hear
of it and send fresh agents about whom we might know nothing: it was
decided to wait until a state of war existed before arresting them. On
5th August the orders went out. Twenty-one out of the twenty-two were
arrested and interned simultaneously; one eluded arrest by embarking
for Germany. Their acts of espionage had been committed in peace time,
and therefore they could not be dealt with on the capital charge.
The result of this sudden action was to drop a curtain over England
at the vital moment of mobilisation. The German Intelligence Service
was paralysed. It could only guess at what was happening behind the
curtain, and it guessed wrong. Ernst was sentenced to seven years’
penal servitude for his share in the business, and, seeing that he was
a British subject, the sentence cannot be called excessive.
The curtain had dropped not only for the enemy but even for ourselves.
How many of us knew during those first few days that trains were
discharging men, horses, and material at the quays of certain southern
ports without any confusion at intervals of ten minutes by day and
night; that an Expeditionary Force of 150,000 men was actually in
the field against the Germans before they knew anything about its
existence? Von Kluck has recorded somewhere his surprise when he
first found British troops in front of him. After the Armistice he is
reported to have told a British officer that in his opinion the finest
military force in history was the first British Army, and that the
greatest military feat in history was the raising of the second British
Army.
Our great dread during that week was that a bridge or a railway arch
might be blown up by the enemy and the smooth running of mobilisation
be dislocated. Most of the railway arches were let to private persons,
of whom some were aliens. On 5th August I went myself to the War Office
to find a General who could be vested with power to turn these people
out. There was a good deal of confusion. Every Head of a branch had
left for the field that morning, and their successors were quite new to
their jobs. At last I found my General, and while I was talking to him
it grew dark and there was a sudden peal of thunder like an explosion.
He said, quite gravely, ‘A Zepp!’ That was the state of mind we were
all in. That same night my telephone became agitated; it reported the
blowing up of a culvert near Aldershot and of a railway bridge in Kent.
I had scarcely repeated the information to the proper authority when
the bell rang again to tell me that both reports were the figments of
some jumpy Reservist patrol.
Who now remembers those first feverish days of the War: the crowds
about the recruiting stations, the recruits marching through the
streets in mufti, the drafts going to the station without bands--the
flower of our manhood, of whom so many were never to return--soldiers
almost camping in Victoria Street, the flaring posters, the foolish
cry ‘Business as Usual’; the unseemly rush to the Stores for food
until, under the lash of the newspapers, people grew ashamed of their
selfishness; the silence in the ’buses, until any loud noise, like
a motor back-fire, started a Zeppelin scare? Who now remembers the
foolish prognostications of experts--how the War would result in
unemployment and a revolution would follow; the assurance of certain
bankers that the War would be over in six months because none of the
belligerents could stand the financial strain for longer? We have even
forgotten the food-hoarding scare that followed the spy scare during
the height of the submarine activity, when elderly gentlemen, who had
taken thought for the morrow, might have been seen burying biscuit tins
in their gardens at midnight for fear that their neighbours should get
wind of their hoard and hale them before the magistrate.
I began to think in those days that war hysteria was a pathological
condition to which persons of mature age and generally normal
intelligence were peculiarly susceptible. War work was evidently not a
predisposing cause, for the readiest victims were those who were doing
nothing in particular. In ante-bellum days there were a few mild cases.
The sufferers would tell you gravely that at a public dinner they had
turned suddenly to their German waiter and asked him what post he had
orders to join when the German invaders arrived, and that he, taken off
his guard, had clicked his heels and replied, ‘Portsmouth’; or they
would whisper of secret visits of German aircraft to South Wales by
night and mysterious rides undertaken by stiff guttural persons with
square heads who would hire horses in the Eastern Counties and display
an unhealthy curiosity about the stable accommodation in every farm
that they passed. But in August 1914 the malady assumed a virulent
epidemic form accompanied by delusions which defied treatment. It
attacked all classes indiscriminately, and seemed even to find its
most fruitful soil in sober, stolid, and otherwise truthful people. I
remember Mr. Asquith saying that, from a legal and evidential point
of view, nothing was ever so completely proved as the arrival of
the Russians. Their landing was described by eyewitnesses at Leith,
Aberdeen, and Glasgow; they stamped the snow out of their boots and
called hoarsely for vodka at Carlisle and Berwick-on-Tweed; they
jammed the penny-in-the-slot machines with a rouble at Durham; four
of them were billeted on a lady at Crewe who herself described the
difficulty of cooking for Slavonic appetites. There was nothing to be
done but to let the delusion burn itself out. I have often wondered
since whether some self-effacing patriot did not circulate this story
in order to put heart into his fellow-countrymen at a time when
depression would have been most disastrous, or whether, as has since
been said, it was merely the rather outlandish-looking equipment and
Gaelic speech of the Lovat Scouts that set the story afloat.
The second phase of the malady attached itself to pigeons. London
is full of pigeons--wood pigeons in the parks, blue rocks about the
churches and public buildings--and a number of amiable people take
pleasure in feeding them. In September 1914, when this phase was at its
height, it was positively dangerous to be seen in conversation with a
pigeon; it was not always safe to be seen in its vicinity. A foreigner
walking in one of the parks was actually arrested and sentenced to
imprisonment because a pigeon was seen to fly from the place where he
was standing and it was supposed that he had liberated it.
During this phase a pigeon was caught in Essex which was actually
carrying a message in the usual little aluminium box clipped to its
leg. Moreover, the message was from Rotterdam, but it was merely to
report the arrival of an innocuous cargo vessel, whose voyage we
afterwards traced.
The delusion about illicit wireless ran the pigeons very hard. The
pronouncement of a thoughtless expert that an aerial might be hidden
in a chimney, and that messages could be received through an open
window even on an iron bedstead, gave a great impetus to this form
of delusion. The high scientific authority of the popular play, _The
Man who Stayed at Home_, where a complete installation was concealed
behind a fireplace, spread the delusion far and wide. It was idle to
assure the sufferers that a Marconi transmitter needed a 4-horse-power
engine to generate the wave, that skilled operators were listening
day and night for the pulsations of unauthorised messages, that the
intermittent tickings they heard from the flat above them were probably
the efforts of an amateur typist: the sufferers knew better. At this
period the disease attacked even naval and military officers and
special constables. If a telegraphist was sent on a motor-cycle to
examine and test the telegraph poles, another cyclist was certain to
be sent by some authority in pursuit. On one occasion the authorities
dispatched to the Eastern Counties a car equipped with a Marconi
apparatus and two skilled operators to intercept any illicit messages
that might be passing over the North Sea. They left London at noon;
at 3 they were under lock and key in Essex. After an exchange of
telegrams they were set free, but at 7 P.M. they telegraphed from the
police cells in another part of the county, imploring help. When again
liberated they refused to move without the escort of a Territorial
officer in uniform, but on the following morning the police of another
county had got hold of them and telegraphed, ‘Three German spies
arrested with car and complete wireless installation, one in uniform of
British officer.’
Next in order was the German governess, also perhaps the product of
_The Man who Stayed at Home_. There were several variants of this
story, but a classic version was that the governess was missing from
the midday meal, and that when the family came to open her trunks they
discovered under a false bottom a store of high explosive bombs. Every
one who told this story knew the woman’s employer; some had even seen
the governess herself in happier days--‘Such a nice quiet person, so
fond of the children; but now one comes to think of it, there was a
something in her face, impossible to describe, but a something.’
During the German advance through Belgium an ingenious war
correspondent gave a new turn to the hysteria. He alleged that the
enamelled iron advertisements for ‘Maggi Soup,’ which were to be seen
attached to every hoarding and telegraph post, were unscrewed by the
German officers in order to read the information about the local
resources, which was painted in German on the back. Screw-driver
parties were formed in the London suburbs, and in destroying this
delusion they removed also many unsightly advertisements. The
hallucination about gun platforms was not dispatched so easily. As soon
as a correspondent had described the gun emplacements laid down by
Germans in the guise of tennis courts at Mauberge there was scarcely
a paved back-garden nor a flat concrete roof in London that did not
come under the suspicion of some spy-maniac. The denunciations were
not confined to Germans. Given a British householder with a concrete
tennis-court and pigeons about the house, and it was certain to be
discovered that he had quite suddenly increased the scale of his
expenditure, that heavy cases had been delivered at the house by night,
that tapping had been overheard, mysterious lights seen in the windows,
and that on the night of the sinking of the _Lusitania_ he had given a
dinner-party to naturalised Germans. When artillery experts assured the
patients that gun emplacements in the heart of London were in the wrong
place, and that even on the high lands of Sydenham or of Hampstead any
tram road would better serve the purpose they wagged their heads. They
were hot upon the scent, and for many weeks denunciations poured in at
the rate of many hundreds a day.
The next delusion was that of the grateful German and the Tubes. The
commonest form of the story was that an English nurse had brought a
German officer back from the door of death, and that in a burst of
gratitude he said at parting, ‘I must not tell you more, but beware
of the Tubes in April (1915).’ As time wore on the date was shifted
forward month by month, to September, when it died of expectation
deferred. We took the trouble to trace this story from mouth to mouth
until we reached the second mistress in a London Board School. She
declared that she had had it from the charwoman who cleaned the school,
but that lady stoutly denied that she had ever told so ridiculous a
story.
A near kin to this was the tale that a German officer of rank had
been seen in the Haymarket by an English friend; that he returned the
salute involuntarily but then changed colour and jumped into a passing
taxi, leaving his friend gaping on the pavement. A good many notable
Prussians, from von Bissing, the Governor of Belgium downwards, figured
in this story; a good many places, from Piccadilly to the Army and
Navy Stores, have been the scene. The best attested version is that of
the English girl who came suddenly upon her fiancé, an officer in the
Prussian Guards, who shook hands with her, but as soon as he recovered
from his surprise the callous ruffian froze her with a look and jumped
into a passing omnibus. Another version was that on recognising her
German fiancé the girl looked appealingly into his countenance and
said, ‘Oh, Fritz!’ whereupon he gave one startled look and jumped into
the nearest vehicle. This, it may be remarked, might have happened
to any Englishman, for who would not, when accosted by a charming
stranger under the name of ‘Fritz,’ have jumped into anything that
happened to be passing? In some of these cases inquiry showed that
at the moment when they were said to have been seen in London these
Germans were serving on the Continent, and it is certain that all were
hallucinations.
With the War, the Tower of London came into its own again. During
the early months it began to be whispered at London tea-tables that
the Crown Prince himself was languishing there (if languishing is
the appropriate term for a person of his temperament). Later, when
it became evident that he could not be in two places at once, the
prisoners of distinction included several British peers and privy
councillors. All these prisoners, who were at the moment adorning their
several offices in free life, had been shot at dawn. These delusions
may be traced to the fact that a few foreign spies were imprisoned in
the Tower before execution.
A new phase of the malady was provoked by the suggestion that
advertisements in the Agony Column of newspapers were being used by
spies to communicate information to Germany. It is uncertain who first
called public attention to this danger, but since refugees did make
use of the Agony Columns for communicating with their friends abroad,
there was nothing inherently improbable in the idea. In order to allay
public alarm it was necessary to check the insertion of apparently
cryptic advertisements. Later in the War a gentleman who had acquired
a considerable reputation as a code expert, and was himself the author
of commercial codes, began to read into these advertisements messages
from German submarines to their base, and _vice versa_. This he did
with the aid of a Dutch-English dictionary on a principle of his own.
As we had satisfied ourselves about the authors of the advertisements
we treated his communications rather lightly. In most cases the
movements he foretold failed to take place, but unfortunately once, by
an accident, there did happen to be an air-raid on the night foretold
by him. We then inserted an advertisement of our own. It was something
like this:
‘Will the lady with the fur boa who entered No. 14 ’bus at Hyde Park
Corner yesterday communicate with box 29,’
and upon this down came our expert hot-foot with the information
that six submarines were under orders to attack the defences at
Dover that very night. When we explained that we were the authors
of the advertisement, all he said was that, by some extraordinary
coincidence, we had hit upon the German code, and that by inserting
the advertisement we had betrayed a military secret. It required a
committee to dispose of this delusion.
The longest-lived of the delusions was that of the night-signalling,
for whenever the scare showed signs of dying down a Zeppelin raid
was sure to give it a fresh start. As far as fixed lights were
concerned, it was the best-founded of all the delusions, because the
Germans might well have inaugurated a system of fixed lights to guide
Zeppelins to their objective, but the sufferers went a great deal
farther than a belief in fixed lights. Morse-signalling from a window
in Bayswater, which could be seen only from a window on the opposite
side of the street, was believed in some way to be conveyed to the
commanders of German submarines in the North Sea, to whom one had to
suppose news from Bayswater was of paramount importance. Sometimes
the watcher--generally a lady--would call in a friend, a noted Morse
expert, who in one case made out the letters ‘P. K.’ among a number
of others that he could not distinguish. This phase of the malady was
the most obstinate of all. It was useless to point out that a more
sure and private method of conveying information across a street would
be to go personally or send a note. It was not safe to ignore any of
these complaints, and all were investigated. In a few cases there were
certainly intermittent flashes, but they proved to be caused by the
flapping of a blind, the waving of branches across a window, persons
passing across a room, and, in two instances, the quick movements of
a girl’s hair-brush in front of the light. The beacons were passage
lights left unshrouded. The Lighting Order did much to allay this phase
of the disease. Out of many thousand denunciations I have been unable
to hear of a single case in which signals to the enemy were made by
lights during the War.
The self-appointed watcher was very apt to develop the delusion of
persecution. She would notice a man in the opposite house whose habits
seemed to be secretive, and decide in her own mind that he was an enemy
spy. A few days later he would chance to leave his house immediately
after she had left hers. Looking round, she would recognise him and
jump to the conclusion that he was following her. Then she would come
down to New Scotland Yard, generally with some officer friend who
would assure me that she was a most unemotional person. One had to
listen quite patiently to all she said, and she could only be cured by
a promise that the police would follow her themselves and detain any
other follower if they encountered one.
Even serving officers were not immune. Near Woolwich a large house
belonging to a naturalised foreigner attracted the attention of a
non-commissioned officer, who began to fill the ears of his superiors
with wonderful stories of lights, of signalling apparatus discovered
in the grounds, and of chasing spies along railway tracks in the best
American film manner, until even his General believed in him. Acting
on my advice the owner wisely offered his house as a hospital, and the
ghost was laid.
Sometimes the disease would attack public officials, who had to be
handled sympathetically. One very worthy gentleman used to embarrass
his colleagues by bringing in stories almost daily of suspicious
persons who had been seen in every part of the country. All of them
were German spies, and the local authorities would do nothing. In order
to calm him they invented a mythical personage named ‘von Burstorph,’
and whenever he brought them a fresh case they would say, ‘So von
Burstorph has got to Arran,’ or to Carlisle, or wherever the locality
might be. He was assured that the whole forces of the Realm were on the
heels of ‘von Burstorph,’ and that when he was caught he would suffer
the extreme penalty in the Tower. That sent him away quite happy since
he knew that the authorities were doing something. The incarnation of
‘von Burstorph’ reminded me of a similar incarnation in the Criminal
Investigation Department many years ago. When one of my predecessors
appeared to be blaming his subordinates for a lack of enterprise in the
case of some undiscovered crime they would shake their heads and say,
‘Yes, I recognise the hand. That is some of Bill the Boatman’s work,’
but ‘Bill the Boatman’ was a most elusive person, and he has not been
arrested to this day.
On one occasion a very staid couple came down to denounce a waiter in
one of the large hotels, and brought documentary evidence with them.
It was a menu with a rough sketch plan in pencil made upon the back.
They believed it to be a plan of Kensington Gardens with the Palace
buildings roughly delineated by an oblong figure. They had seen the
waiter in the act of drawing the plan at an unoccupied table. I sent
for him and found before me a spruce little Swiss with his hair cut
_en brosse_, and a general air of extreme surprise. He gave me a frank
account of all his movements, and then I produced the plan. He gazed
at it a moment, and then burst out laughing. ‘So that is where my plan
went!’ ‘Yes, monsieur, I made it, and then I lost it. You see, I am
new to the hotel and, in order to satisfy the head waiter, I made for
myself privately a plan of the tables, and marked a cross against those
I had to look after.’
The Germans, as we now know, had the spy mania even more acutely. It
became dangerous for Americans in Berlin to speak their own language:
gamekeepers roamed the country armed to deal with spy motor-cars, and
Princess Ratibor and several other innocent persons were shot at and
wounded. Our own anti-German riots in which the shops of bakers with
German names were damaged had their counterpart in the mob attacks upon
the British Embassy in Berlin.