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It is high time that this spy business was debunked. Several hundred books on secret service have appeared since the war; of these, about one per cent have been strictly accurate, a larger proportion founded on fact, but the greater part have been the sheerest of fiction—while pretending to be true! It is not difficult to sort out the three grades—for the average reader is not nearly so credulous as the sensational writer imagines or pretends.

There is a tendency in these days to romanticise everything: a straightforward tale must be so exaggerated that it becomes sensational. And, of course, every story must have its element of sex—many are founded on sex and constructed of sex. It is not enough that a man should manage to steal the enemy commander’s plans—there must be a beautiful woman spy to help him, vamping the general’s aide-de-camp, or drugging the chief’s coffee. Once, when I was younger and more serious, I used to rave at these books which so blatantly travestied the profession I adopted temporarily and almost involuntarily; now I turn to them for light reading, and I can always get a good laugh when the “beautiful woman spy” enters the pages.

I do not wish to infer that there were no women spies—although they were not conspicuously successful. There was only one Mata Hari—and she did not do one-hundredth part of the things credited to her in works of fiction, or one-thousandth part of that suggested in more (alleged) serious works. There was only one Mademoiselle la Docteur—and she was neither beautiful nor alluring, as I well recall.

It is not a sex-bar which makes women spies so uniformly innocuous, but merely the type of education. For, overlooked as it so often is by popular writers, it is very necessary for the spy to know something of the subject of his spying. It is quite useless to send a woman into an enemy country to worm out details of a new howitzer, when if she met a howitzer and a yogi coming down the road together she would not know the other from which. A spy out of his (or her) depth is a danger rather than an asset to the employing country. As I shall show, I made a bad howler myself over a question of tanks.

The chief fault I have to find in the usual spy story, whether purporting to be fact or fiction, is a glossing over of essential details. The spy gets into the enemy country in some mysterious way; sometimes this is vaguely indicated—it is usually a method which would lead to his arrest five minutes after landing. Then, a few days later, he is able by disguising himself as a plumber to gain admission to the general’s headquarters. There the general has kindly written down all his secret plans on a piece of paper, ready for any enterprising plumber to steal. There is no attempt in these books to get down to reality—no attempt to reproduce real conditions and to give detailed accounts as to how the actual situations were tackled.

Disguise, too, always makes me laugh. The spy always carries a few sticks of grease-paint and a dozen assorted sets of whiskers with him. Authors who write of these things ought to walk along their local street wearing a little grease-paint or a set of assorted whiskers, and see what happens! Disguise is, of course, sometimes essential; disguise of character and mannerism is often invaluable; but physical disguise is too fallible to be of the slightest use to a man whose life depends on the avoidance of mistakes. The Encyclopædia Britannica (which is not sensational) hits the nail on the head when it says: “False papers, disguises, secret ink, and all the other tricks beloved of the spy novel may form part of their equipment, but, in practice, the most dangerous and efficient spy is the least sensational in his methods; when arrested, he invariably has all his papers in order, and is the most plausible person alive.” I strongly recommend a reading of the very workmanlike article on “Intelligence, Military,” to all interested in spies and their work.

In my book I have tried to show, so far as is practicable, the details of my work as a spy—a history not only of what I did, but of how I did it. This book is not a record of my life during the war years hour by hour, however; for weeks and months nothing of special interest happened to me—of no special interest, that is to say, except to the technical military reader: the following pages, therefore, represent the high lights of my secret service career.

I should perhaps explain that I wrote the greater part of this record many years ago—very soon after the end of the war, in fact. Since then I have written nearly a dozen novels and travel books, and have naturally gained in literary craftsmanship. Looking over this, my first effort, I see obvious faults—a slow beginning, awkward constructions, an occasional missed climax. Yet I have left the manuscript largely untouched. The beginning may be slow, but it is very essential that my peculiar qualifications for spy work should not only be emphasised, but explained: I regard it as important that the reader should know why and how I came to be enrolled as a spy—for you would get the impression from some books that when the War Office wants spies it advertises for them in The Times. And I do not altogether regret the missed climaxes—this is no sensational or conventional story.

I did not write my story for publication. In my innocence, I imagined that it was far too delicately important ever to be publicly revealed. But now that every general and politician engaged in the war has loosed his restraint and poured out torrents of words, mainly directed at each other, then I need be concerned no longer. Maybe it is better so; from their various—and very varied—stories, historians will make history. And, in any case, I have always held firmly to the theory that the best preventive of another war is a study of the last.

One other word ought to be written—then on with the story. On my return to England from Germany, I found some of my friends looking askance at me. I was a spy. Had I been a clerk at the War Office or an A.S.G. lorry-driver I might have returned with honour, but—I had been a spy. There was a suggestion of the dishonourable in the looks they gave me, and they hurt me furiously. I knew only too well the courage required—many a time mine had been strained almost beyond its limits. I recalled the speech made by Mr. George Elliott, counsel defending Karl Lody, the German naval spy: “I defend him not as a miserable coward or as a faint-hearted fellow, but as a man faithfully devoted to his native land, its history, its tradition. His grandfather was a great soldier who successfully defended a fortress attacked by Napoleon, and as a soldier he claims to stand before this court. I am not here to beg for mercy to him. My client is not ashamed of what he has done. Many would gladly do for England what he has done for Germany, and may actually be doing it at this moment. Whatever his fate may be, he will meet it as a brave man.”

When Karl Lody was about to be led to his death, he said to the Assistant Provost Marshal in charge of his execution: “I suppose you would not care to shake hands with a spy?”

“No,” replied the British officer, “but I will gladly shake hands with a brave man.”

I was not ashamed of my profession then, nor am I now. Intelligence is vital to an army; without it, any quantity of thousands of brave men are impotent. It was universal since Moses sent his spies into Canaan till Wellington wanted to know what was happening on the other side of the hill. Throughout the nineteenth century its importance increased tenfold each year. During the last war its effects were tremendous—the fate of the British Army in France changed, in fact, from the day when an optimistic Chief of Intelligence Services was replaced by a sober realist!

There is an over-worn cliché about truth being stranger than fiction. This is highly accurate, not only because fiction so seldom appears or even pretends to be true. I have already known people who have found my story impossible of credence. As I shall show, I spent the last three years of the war not only in Germany, but at German General Headquarters! An Englishman at German G.H.Q.—it does seem absurdly impossible. Yet my feat was only unique in the comparative eminence of my position. A German spy found occupation in the British censor’s office in London throughout the whole of the war, collecting priceless information.^[1] A German spy was interpreter to the French courts martial for trying spies.^[2] On the eastern front a Russian officer managed to serve on both sides! His story,^[3] though confusing in its detail, makes fiction appear unimaginative. Yet it is fully confirmed. One German captain remained in France for over two of the war years—as a French officer; he was even invited to witness the trials of a new flame-thrower! Another German, Captain Preusser, three times penetrated British G.H.Q. at Cairo. His companion, Major Francks, was even bolder; he used to dress as a British Staff officer and wander about behind the British Palestine front; once, with supreme nerve and effrontery, he even inspected a regiment of artillery!^[4] But if any reader, in spite of these parallels, should be tempted to doubt my accuracy, there are a dozen obvious methods by which he can test it.

Perhaps I should emphasise that these feats were, however, exceptional. Many a spy scarcely experienced the mildest of excitement; the work of many was most uninteresting. The more normal and ordinary the method, the surer and the safer the result. Let me instance one of my own “exploits,” the essence of simplicity. Early in 1918 I was, as I shall show, behind the German lines. I wanted to send the warning that General von Hutier and his army had been transferred from the Russian front to the west, and was concentrating about St. Quentin. How to do it? Secret inks—codes—carrier pigeons? I used none of these time-honoured methods. Instead, I simply sent an obscure Baden newspaper to an address in Switzerland—that was all. In this paper was printed a letter of condolence—the stock affair—which had been addressed to the parents of a young German pilot who had been shot down behind the British lines. And the letter was signed by von Hutier! Now follow my mental workings; the aeroplane was brought down behind the British lines—therefore the British would normally have identified the pilot. If they could but see this simple, printed letter, therefore, it would show them that von Hutier was occupying the sector in the neighbourhood of the casualty. So I sent off the newspaper—without marking it in any way—to an address in Switzerland where it would immediately be forwarded to our Intelligence Office. There keen brains studied every line and every advertisement, knowing that the newspaper had not been sent for nothing. Soon the point was taken up, the inference seized, and the locality of the attack on the Fifth Army which developed on March 21st was at least no surprise.^[5]

Maybe some of my friends will read my book—I believe they have been good enough to read some of my others. Perhaps then they will regret those askance glances they once gave me; for, if I have done my job, I have given a fairly complete picture of the life of a spy—a successful spy, I should add, and one whose circumstances can best be described by the newspaper word “sensational.” That was my luck, not my virtue. The man who did a humbler job—watching railways, listening in pubs to the casual conversation of soldiers or sailors, or noting the arrival and departure of ships—he knew no sensations, but deserved well of his country. The hundreds of people in occupied Belgium and France—including dozens of women^[6]—who helped the Allied cause, particularly by acting as “postmen”—that is, passing on information to and from active spies—theirs was a perilous and thankless job. The only spy, in fact, who deserves anything but honour is the “bought” spy—the neutral who plies his trade for hire or, far worse, the man who sells his own country. For the first I have only contempt; the second is beneath it—for him I have only pity. Colonel Nicolai, chief of the German Intelligence Service, often used to say to me: “Spying is a gentleman’s job.” It is very true—there is no need for noble birth, but the task definitely demands unusual patriotism and a queer kind of courage. Kipling’s “Spies’ March” is not one of his happiest versifications, but its sentiment is true enough:

There are no leaders to lead us to battle, and yet without leaders we sally,

Each man reporting for duty alone, out of sight, out of reach of his fellow.

There are no bugles to call the battalions, and yet without bugles we rally,

From the ends of the earth to the ends of the earth ...

[1] See The Invisible Weapons, by J. C. Silber.

[2] See Spy and Counter-Spy, by Richard W. Rowan.

[3] K. 14—O. M. 66, by Colonel Kaledin.

[4] See Spy and Counter-Spy, by Richard W. Rowan.

[5] See The Fifth Army, by General Sir Hubert Gough. He mentions this incident on p. 228.

[6] Louise de Bettignies, of Lille, was an outstanding example. See Spies, by Joseph Gollomb.