Thus, in striving to attain the Napoleonic ideal in things military, Germany has failed. But Napoleon established a new branch of military organisation when he codified and arranged a system of espionage, and, in adopting from him this systematisation of what had hitherto been a haphazard business, German builders for a world-empire have gone far beyond their model, so that to-day the German spy system is the most perfect ever organised, not even excepting the system of Venice in its palmy days, where all was written and nothing spoken, nor that of Russia in comparatively modern times.
The German system falls naturally under several heads. To take them in reverse order of importance, there is first the commercial system of espionage, which takes the form of sending out men who accept posts as clerks in foreign (to Germany) business firms. These men come, especially to England, ostensibly to learn the language, but in many cases they have received thorough tuition in idiomatic and commercial English from some member of the British colonies existing in such centres as Berlin and Dresden. They accept a very low wage for what are in reality services far beyond their pay in value. They gain access to books and price-lists, and to lists of customers, by means of which they are able to give exact details of the markets to which British goods are sent, and the prices, rates of freight, discounts, etc. These particulars are transmitted in full to Germany, and with them the German competing firms are able to undercut British firms in foreign markets, and to secure British trade by always making their estimates a little lower than those of the competing British firms. Since in commerce all is legitimate in the interests of one’s employer, the only comment to be made on this method of spying is that it is despicable in that it involves the deliberate abuse of hospitality, and thus no code of ethics can be found to justify it; but business and ethics are two different things.
This commercial spying, however, is but an offshoot from the great espionage system perfected by Stieber, chief of German secret police and privy councillor, of whom more anon. The main system is concerned with military and naval matters, and various points discovered in connection with this main system show that Germany has for many years made up its mind to embark on a war of aggrandisement—whether or no the War Lord of popular conception was fully in agreement with the idea is another matter, and one that history will probably show.
The superiority of the German system to that of other and what may be termed competing nations is evidenced by one apparently unimportant fact. When French and British spies have been caught in Germany, and sentenced to terms of imprisonment in German fortresses, in a great number of cases it has transpired that the offenders were military officers still on the active list. They had been specially chosen for their work, perhaps; they had undertaken it with the highest of motives, also, perhaps; and they had understood the grave risks they ran in that their Governments would afford them no direct protection in case of their being detected. But they were officers on the active list, soldiers by profession.
Now, on consideration, the calling of a spy reveals itself as one of doubtful honesty, no matter what the motives prompting the spy may be—and the soldier is at all times supposed to be a man of honour and strict integrity—which he usually is. Whether the spy be a British, French, Russian, or German subject, he is engaged in abusing the hospitality of the country on which he is spying, and, from a military point of view, is not playing the game. So little is he playing the game, in fact, that in time of peace his government refuses to recognise him if he fails, and in time of war he gets no combatant rights, but is shot out of hand by the enemy into whose hands he falls. The formality of a trial is unnecessary, if the fact of espionage, accomplished or attempted, be apparent. Guilty of what cannot be called other than a mean act, attempting to endanger the lives of soldiers by unsoldierly methods, in revealing himself as a spy a man condemns himself and passes his own sentence—which is as it should be. And yet two of the Great Powers permit commissioned officers to undertake this dirty work, as it must be called!
Germany has realised that special men ought to be employed for this special, necessary, but at the same time despicable business. Your perfect spy is a man of criminal impulse, a moral pervert of sorts, and, recognising this, Stieber and his followers in the government of the system have organised a separate branch of the Great German General Staff, a branch made up of chosen men and women, of whom the men may at one time have held military or naval commissions in this warlike nation, but very few are officers on the active list. It has been realised in this land of nearly perfect espionage that the duties of a spy and those of an officer of the services—of either service—are not compatible.
The German secret-service corps which Stieber organised is a matter of three main departments: the military, the naval, and the diplomatic spy corps. Under the last-mentioned head must be grouped the work of Germans in foreign countries, notably in France and to a certain extent in England, with a view to influencing labour by means of strikes and industrial unrest, a system of influence which often approaches closely to and sometimes interlinks with commercial espionage, though it is primarily directed to the paralysis of a possible enemy in case of war, and the facilitating of a German attack on the country in which the work is being done. For always German strategy has been that of attack; whatever protestations of peaceful intents the German nation may make, there can be no doubt of its real designs when one considers the trend of all its policy in recent years, the nature of its naval and military increase of effort, and, as far as revelations show, the methods pursued in its espionage system. Germany as a whole has meditated attack with a view to extension of territory and commercial advantage for years, and no apologist can adduce evidence to justify, on the score of a defensive policy, such preparations for war as the country has made. One instance of the methods pursued by the espionage department will illustrate this.
The fortifications of Maubeuge, the French fortress which fell to the German attack in so marvellously short a time, were proof against anything short of the heaviest siege-artillery, and, before this class of artillery can be mounted for use against a town or fortress, gun-platforms levelled and supported by masonry equal to the strain imposed in firing the guns must be constructed. The construction of these platforms involves much calculation and measurement, and is not a matter of such time as was involved in the fall of Maubeuge, but of a much longer period. The explanation of the use of siege-guns against Maubeuge, and the rapid reduction of the fortress, is said to lie in the purchase of about 600 acres of the woods of Lanières, about four miles from Maubeuge, by an agent for Frederic Krupp, the builder of the siege-guns with which Maubeuge was reduced. The firm of Krupp, for whom this purchase was made as far back as 1911, announced its intention of building a locomotive factory on the ground acquired; but, long before the present war was declared, Krupp constructed the platforms on which siege-guns could be mounted to command Maubeuge, and totally neutralised the value of the fortifications as well as turning out locomotives.
Here is evidence, if evidence were necessary, of Germany’s deliberate intent to make war in its own good time; not merely to defend German frontiers, but to attack and reduce a neighbouring State by the use of methods which any nation save this one would regard as too dishonourable for use. Since the system of espionage has reached to such lengths as this, it will be seen that the stories of spies and their work, in which the public delights, are built up out of the doings of comparatively innocent agents, who are credited with dangerous tendencies and many melodramatic and impossible actions. That minor plans and persons do exist is certain, but for the most part the spying of which the public hears is merely incidental to the great whole—a whole composed for the most part of far different elements from the clerks, hotel-waiters, and other minor incidentals on which the imagination is fed, in order that the reality may more easily escape detection.
There are in existence many books purporting to tell the actual work of spies and to expose the system under which these spies work, but it may be said at the outset that no full exposure of the spy system of Germany has ever been made. Stieber, in his Memoirs, told exactly what it suited him to tell, but he did not give away any essential secrets of organisation,