CURIOUS VISITORS
On 6th January 1916 a Dutch liner called in territorial waters at
Falmouth, and was boarded by naval officers. On the steamer were
Colonel von Papen and Captain Boy-ed, the German military and naval
attachés from Washington. The boarding officer was quite polite, but
he declared his intention of looking through their papers. On this
von Papen protested vigorously that his papers were covered by the
‘safe-conduct’ that had been given by the British Government. It was
pointed out to him that the ‘safe-conduct’ applied to his personal
liberty but not to his baggage or papers, and without further ado the
officer took possession of these and, among them, of all his used
cheques, cheque-books, and paying-in slips, which proved to be a mine
of information. There were payments to a man who was known in the
United States as a wrecker of bridges, and to others who were known to
have been guilty of sabotage. There were payments to Kuppferle, who
committed suicide in Brixton Prison, and to von der Goltz, as well as
to other suspects. It is said to be the fashion in Germany to lay much
of the blame for defeat upon the ineptitude of the German diplomatic
agents abroad, and certainly Colonel von Papen, either by bad luck or
bad management, had helped us not a little, for not long before this
date Bernstorff had made a solemn declaration that no member of the
Embassy had had anything to do with sabotage or with espionage.
Bernstorff was not the first to use the diplomatic machinery for
espionage. The foreign ambassadors at the Tudor and Stuart Courts
made considerable use of secret agents. In 1745 Monsieur Tiquet, the
French diplomatic agent at Brussels, obtained from Grieling, a Brussels
shopkeeper, plans of the fortresses of Nieuport and Dunkirk, in which,
following German methods in our own day, he had worked as a labourer.[1]
[1] _Campagnes de Maréchal Saxe_ (Colin), p. 257.
In the War of the Austrian Succession Count de Tilly, the French
Minister at Mannheim, got from an Italian named Pasetti, who was
actually serving as an officer in the Austrian army, information that
determined the choice between the Rhenish and Flemish theatres of war.
Belgium and Holland were then, as they have been in our own time,
hotbeds of espionage against England, but one may read between the
lines that even during the Seven Years’ War the British Intelligence
Service was more than a match for the French, and that Louis XV. spent
very large sums to little purpose. In those days the _agent double_
seems to have been as common as he is now.
Louis XV. had scruples that would have seemed curious to the German
General Staff in the late War. He would not listen to a scheme for
causing a run upon the Bank of England by means of forged notes, or to
employing Ivan Golofskin, the friend of the secretary to the Duke of
Cumberland, who was exceptionally placed for obtaining information,
but he was not above using duplicates of the Russian Ambassador’s
dispatches addressed to his own Government, or to arranging with the
Czarina Elizabeth to pay her new ambassador £100,000 a year to send to
the French Government information about military plans of the British,
and especially the plans of the projected invasion of the Low Countries.
Spies in those days were treated with remarkable leniency. Robinson,
a French spy arrested in London, was imprisoned for six months in the
Tower in 1757, and was then released. Dr. Hensey was arrested in London
in June 1758, and sentenced to be hanged, but it is not certain that
the sentence was carried out. This unusual severity was sufficient to
frighten the other agents of the business.[2]
[2] _Campagnes de Maréchal Saxe_ (Colin), pp. 257-259.
It must not be supposed that no German spies in England went
undetected. We learned of the operations of two or three after they had
left the country, and they were wise enough to attempt no second visit,
but if one may judge from the character of the information supplied
by those who were arrested the intelligence they gave to the Germans
cannot have been of great value. Probably the spy who brought them the
most useful information was a certain American journalist.
As the activities of German agents in America were gradually unfolded
the American Government began to take more drastic action. They opened
the safe of von Igel, and found there documents of extraordinary
interest. To me the most interesting was a letter from the German
Consul General at Shanghai to the Foreign Office in Berlin, in which he
deplored his ill-fortune, and gave an accurate account of the German
Secret Service activities in the Far East, for there was nothing in
the document that we did not know before; it might have served for
a _précis_ of German activities written in any British Intelligence
Office.
The Germans made great use of sabotage in America. Unquestionably,
they would have done the same in England if they could, but it would
not be safe to say that none of the accidents that took place during
the War was caused by sabotage. The difficulty was to know how much
was due to criminal carelessness, how much to fanatical pacifism among
our own people, and how much to German agents or to Sinn Fein. I
remember one case where matches were picked up in the mixing machine
of a high-explosive factory. If even one of them had gone down into
the mixer many hundreds of people would have lost their lives. The
man who found the matches brought them to the foreman and received
the thanks of the manager, but the police inspector who was sent down
to investigate was a sceptical kind of person, and insisted upon the
finder of the matches re-constituting the crime by placing matches in
the exact position in which he found them. The extreme uneasiness of
the workman confirmed the inspector’s suspicions, and after a prolonged
interview the man confessed that he had put the matches there himself
and had taken them to the foreman in order to win credit and promotion
from his employers.
From time to time bolts and hammer-heads were found in the crank
cases of aeroplane engines, where they had evidently been placed by
design. It is hard to believe that the man who put them there intended
deliberately to send an airman to his death; perhaps all he aimed at
was to wreck the machine during its bench test. The criminal in this
case may have been a discontented workman or a fanatical pacifist of
the ‘Stop the War’ Committee type.
It must certainly have been a man of this type who dropped a
hammer-head into the gearing of a new tunnelling machine which
was designed to bore tunnels 5 feet in diameter far underground.
Fortunately, the obstruction was found before it had time to do any
damage.
The propaganda carried on by the opponents to conscription during
1916 and 1917, particularly among the engineers and electricians, was
certainly disturbing. Some of the electricians in one of our filling
factories had been heard to enunciate violent revolutionary sentiments,
and their technical knowledge was such that they could at any time have
contrived an accident which, while destroying the factory, might have
caused no loss of life if it were so timed as to take place when the
hands were at home.
In October 1917 there was a fire and explosion at a large factory
in Lancashire which caused the death of ten people and enormous
devastation. Sabotage was suspected, particularly as the factory was
situated in a part of the country where Sinn Fein influences were
strong, but nothing was ever proved.
At five minutes to seven on the evening of 19th January 1917, I was at
a house in Kensington when the Silvertown explosion shook the house to
the foundations. Our first thought was that a bomb had fallen quite
near; our second that a gasometer had exploded. People in the street
suggested an explosion at Woolwich Arsenal. The telephone cables had
been cut by the explosion, and it was some time before we knew what
had happened. I visited Silvertown, the scene of the explosion, on
the following afternoon. The devastation was extraordinary. For quite
a mile before we reached the spot we drove through streets of broken
windows, and here the explosive had shown its usual caprice, for many
panes of glass much nearer to the scene were intact. The firemen
located the buried mains and coupled up their hose with wonderful
rapidity, and they soon had the fire under control. Meanwhile, the
Guards had carried out the very dangerous duty of searching for bodies.
Forty-five persons were known to have been in the works at the time of
the explosion, but practically no traces of them were to be found.
The fire had broken out in an upper storey, where a man and a woman
were employed in feeding tri-nitrotoluol (T.N.T.) into a hopper. Two
women on the ground floor called up to ask whether they had sufficient
explosive for the next twenty minutes, and on hearing that they had
they left the building for about a minute. As they came out the whole
floor burst into roaring flame.
Now, it is known that a piece of a certain chemical substance no larger
than a Brazil nut introduced into T.N.T. will lie in it innocuous
for months, but that on the application of heat it ignites the whole
mass. The T.N.T. was falling from the hopper into a temperature of 130
Centigrade: a small piece of the chemical would not have been noticed
by the people feeding the hopper. This particular batch of explosive
had been brought by train from the north of England, and at any stage
of its journey it would have been possible to introduce the chemical
into one of the bags. But while the facts were consistent with sabotage
there was no proof, and the case of Silvertown must remain among the
mysteries of the War. If it was sabotage surely eternal justice demands
that some special place of chastisement be reserved hereafter for the
fiend who caused it.
If the explosion at Arklow during the previous September, in which
a number of people lost their lives, was not due to sabotage, the
coincidence was remarkable, for threatening letters had been received
by the management, but in that case it is probable that the Germans
were not concerned.
There were many dramatic and a few amusing incidents during the
examinations of suspected persons. The Germans had been using as spies
people belonging to travelling circuses and shows, as being less
likely to invite suspicion than the pseudo-commercial travellers,
of whom we had taken a heavy toll. Consequently, a sharp look-out
had been kept for messages from such people. One day a telegram to
a world-famous American showman announced that the sender was ready
to book his passage to New York. He was invited to call, the stage
was set, the chair was ready--and there walked into the room a blue
man! His face was a sort of light indigo set off with a bristling red
moustache. He was a really terrifying spectacle. If we were surprised
we did not show it. All we dreaded was what would happen to the
stenographer when she would steal a glance at the object sitting beside
her. Then the moment came. She leaped a foot from her chair with a
little sob. He turned out to be an ex-cavalry sergeant who had turned
blue after his discharge, and now got his living honourably as a blue
man. The stenographer was accustomed to men of colour, but never to
that particular shade.
Among the curious persons who drifted into my room was a Dutch
Socialist Member of Parliament who had been admitted to the country on
19th May 1916, on condition that he gave an account of his intentions
at Scotland Yard. As it turned out, he had been sent over to study
food legislation in England, for the Dutch were in the uncomfortable
position of having to contend with high food prices without a
corresponding rise in wages, and the Government was attempting to
regulate the maximum retail prices for all commodities, without much
chance of success. He was astonished to hear that the only controlled
commodities in England were sugar and coal. He was very indignant with
the _Amsterdam Telegraaf_, in which Mr. Raemakers’ cartoons were being
published. He said that the paper was trying to force Holland into
war. ‘We are a tiny country crushed between two giants.’ He was very
contemptuous of the official Socialists in Germany, who he said did
not represent their Party. They were elected over and over again as a
matter of routine, and when the government squared them, as it always
did, the Party itself remained unaffected. In his opinion Liebknecht
had a very large following even in the army itself. He said that the
food riots reported from Germany were more serious than was generally
supposed.
A few days later a Dutch Socialist journalist came in. He was cheerful
but very dirty, and when I hinted that people were suspicious of him
he said that it proceeded from envy and lack of principle. As for
him, he lived by principle: he was an anti-smoker, an anti-drinker, a
vegetarian, and he wore no socks--all from principle. At this point
he pulled up the leg of his trousers to prove his case, much to the
scandal of the lady stenographer who was present. If I felt inclined to
ask whether he went unwashed from principle I restrained myself.
It was about the same time that a mysterious person calling himself
Colonel Dr. Krumm-Heller was taken off a Danish steamer at Kirkwall. He
must have expected that this would happen because he had been sending
anticipatory protests by wireless all the way over. He claimed to be
the Mexican military attaché in Berlin, and to be well known in Mexico
for his scientific, literary, and philosophical works. His mission, he
said, was to study schools in Scandinavia and not to become military
attaché until he entered Germany: his real mission, we felt sure, was
propaganda. When I told him that he might have to go back to Mexico he
began to cry and said that Carranza would most certainly dismiss him.
It became known to me a little later that he was carrying a letter from
Bernstorff to the German Government, but that when he found that he was
to leave the steamer he had passed it to a Russian for delivery. The
next day Colonel Dr. Krumm-Heller offered to make a bargain with me. If
I would not send him back he would reveal a new German plan and would
thus save the Allies thousands of lives. But when it came to the point
he had nothing at all to tell, and back he went. In due course a demand
was made upon the Government for £10,000, at which he assessed his
‘moral and intellectual’ damages.
All this time England was seething with excitement about the battle of
Jutland. The editor of a certain daily newspaper called on an officer
of the Admiralty and said, ‘We are not satisfied with Admirals Jellicoe
and Beatty.’
‘Who is “we”?’ asked the officer.
‘The public.’
‘Oh,’ said the naval officer, ‘then you are one of those people who,
if you had lived a hundred years ago, would have said, “Who’s that
one-eyed, one-armed beggar in charge of our Fleet? Have him out!” Now,
look here, supposing you and I had a row in this room, and you knocked
my teeth out, and I kicked you out of that door and you stood cursing
in the passage, not daring to come in, would you say you had won a
victory?’
The same officer, when questioned by a pressman as to why the German
Fleet had come out, replied, ‘They came out to get a mutton-chop for
the Kaiser. I believe there were some other reasons, but these I am not
at liberty to tell you.’
We were busy talking about the end of the War as early as October
1916, so busy that some satirist circulated the following rhyme:
‘Accurate evidence have I none,
But my aunt’s charwoman’s sister’s son
Heard a Policeman on his beat
Say to a nursemaid down our street
That he knew a man who had a friend
Who said _he_ knew when the war would end.’
One of the most romantic incidents in the War experience of Scotland
Yard was the arrival in England of an educated Jew who had, against
his own will, been closely associated with Djemal Pasha, the Commander
of the 9th Army in Palestine. According to his account, there had been
attempts on the lives of both Djemal Pasha and Enver. In one attempt
Djemal had received a bullet in the cheek. He gave a very curious
account of the relations between Enver and Djemal. According to rumour,
though they kiss one another on both cheeks and travel in the same car,
each man has his hand upon his revolver as they sit side by side. The
popular rumour at the time was that Enver had six hundred men specially
told off to protect his life, and in 1916, when a plot against him was
reported, he executed forty-two people merely on suspicion without any
trial.
This man was a native of Haifa, in Palestine, and was therefore a
Turkish subject, though his parents had come from Roumania. As a
young man he had taken to scientific research work in agriculture,
and had gone through a course in Berlin. He was director of the
Jewish Agricultural College. Djemal used to apply to him for advice
on agricultural and economic matters. He said that all the Jews and
Christians had been put into a labour battalion, where they were
employed in road-making, on very slender rations. In some places they
were under German direction, but in others under Turkish officers. In
1915 there had been a locust plague, and in 1916 they had the worst
harvest that had been known for thirty-five years, and the population
of Palestine was in dire straits. He believed it to be the policy of
the Turkish Government to allow them to starve, for Djemal Pasha did
not approve of open massacres, but preferred starvation as a means of
purging the population of what he regarded as its undesirable elements.
He said there was great friction between the German officers and the
Turkish, and it was common talk in the German mess that they were more
likely to fall from a bullet in the back than in the front. Very few of
the Turkish officers seemed to believe in success. They talked of this
campaign as their last fight and that they wanted to fall in it like
men.
He had for some time been trying to get out of the country. He must
have played his cards well, for in the end he obtained leave from
Djemal Pasha to go to Berlin _en route_ for Denmark for scientific
agricultural study, and from Copenhagen he succeeded in obtaining leave
to come to England.
I heard afterwards that this man had been out to Egypt and Palestine,
where he had put his local geological knowledge to good use. A
year later he came to see me, and he was convinced that from El
Arish northward there is a water zone where water can be tapped at
semi-artesian depths. This he had discovered when he was Agricultural
Adviser to the Zionists. Borings in this area produced water, which
rose to within thirty feet of the surface. He was a great reader,
and he told me that his attention had been first called to the water
question through reading Josephus, who describes Caesarea as being
surrounded by gardens for an eight hours’ walk in every direction,
whereas now it is a sandy desert right up to the walls through the
encroachment of the sand. He said that he had tried very hard to
persuade our engineers to try the experiment, but when at last they did
there was an abundant supply of water, and it was no longer necessary
to bring tanks by rail from Egypt. He was convinced that experimental
borings in the Sinai desert would produce water in the same way, and
thus the Mosaic miracle of striking the rock with a staff may be
performed again in the twentieth century.
After the Armistice I saw this man again in a new capacity. He was a
member of a deputation of Zionists to the Peace Conference. He had a
tragic end. He took aeroplane to fly to London on some urgent business;
the machine came to grief, and he and his companions plunged into the
Channel and were lost.