THE SPY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVII, Issue 14566, 31 December 1910, Page 5 (Supplement)

THE SPY.

ESPIONAGE IN PEACE AND WAR. This is an age of mutual suspicion, and the nationsespecially neighbouring ones —are all spying on ono another as they never did before. hat does it all mean ? Some littlo time ago one of our own writers, Mr. W. Lo Queux, wrote a book in reply to this question, entitled " Spies of the Kaiser : Plotting the Downfall of England, *' while a companion volume to this has now appeared in the shape of " The German Spy System in France " — translated from the French of Paul Lanoir (Mills and Boon, 5s net).

"The number of agents," writes Mr. Le Queux, "of the German secret police at this moment working in our midst on behalf of the Intelligence Department in Berlin are believed to be over 5000" ; while M. Lanoir will have it that " 35,000 German spies have been distributed at fixed posts throughout French territory since 1867." Moreover, ""'Germany admittedly places £780,000 a year at the disposal of her secret service of espionage, whose main ' efforts are directed against us," though Englishmen have hitherto been taught to believe that their country is the favourite hunting ground of Teutonic spies. GERMAN" SPIES IN* ANTE. One peculiarity of the German spy in France, according to M. Lanoir, is that he is not merely a collector of information, but would also be an active co-operator with an army of invasion by organising strikes among railway employees and even paralysing tho work of mobilisation by blowing up lines, etc. 51. Lanoir'B volume is to a great txtent based on the memoirs of the late Heir St.ieber, a sort of Prussian Sir Robert Anderson, who organised the secret police required for the campaign of '66 and '70.

Espionage either in time of peaca or war is not the most honourable form of military enterprise, but it has been practiced by and on behalf of all armies known to history. The punishment of a spy in war time, if he be, or bo disguised, as a civilian, is off-hand hanging without trial or benefit of clergy, and even Washington treated in this way one of of our cwn off-cere, Major Andre, for being found m mufti on the Hudson Rivjr; while when CMquhoun Urant, Wellington's famous scout in the Peninsula, once tell into the hands of Marmont, his life, says Napier, was only spared " for something resembling a uniform which he wore." Yes, a uniform will save a spy in v/ar-time from at least an ignominious death, just as the lack of it—as in the case of Mr. Brown, the hero of "An Englishman's Home"— expose a civilian defender of his country to be treated as a franc tireux- and shot without mercy on his own lawn.

THE TRAITOR AS SIT. But undoubtedly the safest, as it is also the most effective way of getting at the secrets of an enemy, actual or possible, is to secure the services of a traitor—one that will sell his country for gold, and Frederick the Great once said that hoi was no camp without it« traitor. He himself also practised what he preachedin peace no less than in war— one .if his feats in this respect is truly classic. For years he continued to receive from one Mensel, a. needy clerk in the Foreign Office at Dresdenwhom lie kept well supplied with money as well as with false keyscopies of the most important State documents Among these was a secret treaty between Russia, Austria, and Sax-ony-Poland, aiming at the partition of Prussia—a treaty signed in spite of the solemn protestations of' these three Powers that their feelings towards Frederick wore of the friendliest kind. Armed with this knowledge, Frederick at once marched on Dresden, where he broke open the Royal archives, possessed himself of the original of the treaty, of which lie had thus acquired a copy, and held it up to an astonished Europe .is his justification for beginning what proved to be the Seven Years' War. Perfidy on one side had thus been baffled and exposed • by unprincipled espionage cn the other. Frederick had been well and truly served by Meneeland anyone who cares to rend the dramatic, story in detail will find it in Carlyle ; but the trouble wi.;h these traitors in the opposite camp is that you can never be quite sure . what and whom they really are betraying—whether they are revealing the secrets of their own side or deliberately misleading you, their paymasters. Oases Save been known where a man has deserted from one side in order to deceive the other. A counterpart to the Dreyfus case was thai' of the Russian Colonel Grimm, of the headquarters staff at Warsaw, who wast arrested and placed upon his trial for having 6up

plied to a foreign —which could only be Germanycopies of most important military papers, including the FrancoRussian scheme of co-operation in the event of war. The colonel's defence was that the papers he had thus given away werj purposely falsified in order to deceive his would-be corrupters; but it was a pica which, while sparing his life, did not save him from imprisonment in a fortress.

Major Esterliazy, as we all know, was never suspected by his foreign paymasters of betraying them, and, indeed, if he had done so there never would have been tho shadow of a* case against his Semitic victim, Dreyfus. But even now there arc plenty of Esterhazys in our midst, not of British but of foreign breed—low-born blackguards belonging to the various anarchist and revolutionary societies scattered all over our metropolis from Whitechapel to Soho. How is it that our police are always so well informed about the principles and plans of these underground societies? It —as lam assured from a trustworthy —that there is not a single anarchist "group" without its traitor spy i.i the pay of Scotland Yard. Not a man of them but has got his price, and in no case is it a high one. _ But sometimes patriotism more than pelf is tho dominating motive for treachery of this sort,, as it was, for example, in tho case of Thomas Beach, of Colchester, calling himself Major Henri le Caron, whose "Recollections of a Spy" form ono of the most enthralling books of the kind ever written.

is Tire enemy's cAMr. For 25 years the major belonged to the innermost circles of the Fenian movement in. America, and during this long period kept Scotland Yard minutely informed about Jill its secrets without ever so much as being suspected by his comrades and bosom friends, who therefore stood aghast, when at last their betrayer threw off the mask and stepped into the witness-box against them. Does the end always justify the means? And is all ever fair in love and warespecially war? " I have no apology to make," says the major himself, "for mv 20 and odd years' work in the Secret Service. I took up that work from a conscientious motive and in a conscientious spirit I pursued it to the end. I have in no sense been an informer, as the phrase is understood. I allied myself with Fenian ism in order to defeat it. ... I never had any svm-

oathy with Irish Revolutionists. Quitt lie opposite. . . . True, I had to Mike many oaths, but what of that? By the taking of them I have saved many lives. Which counts the weightiest in the balance of life? And who is to sneer at me for my conduct in this regard?"

The offices of all the general staffs in Europe contain secrets which, by their very nature, can only he got at through the treachery of one of their guardians. Failing such a traitor in the enemy's citadel, camp, or capital, the only alternative for an inquisitive Government is to do the necessary work of espionage itself as best it directly but secretly. That is to say, it must send its spies, "scouts," or "intelligence officers" to the country about whose military preparations it desires to bo accurately informed. Did not Moltke himself make several secret visits to Alsace-Lorraine when at last it had become clear that tho policy of France rendered war inevitable?

In his "Recollections of Forty Years' Service " does not our own Major-Gene-ral Tulloch frankly relate how, in pretence of indulging in a snipe-shooting expedition in the Nile Delta, he carefully examined the works of Arabi at Tel-el-Kebir ami discovered the exact number of his guns? Our own Moltke, too, Lord Kitchener, did not he acquire Lis reputation as a man of iron nerve by volunteering to precede our Nile Expedition of 1884 and mix with the wild tribes of Dongola for the purpose of discovering their sentiments and gaining them over to our cause? In taking this fearless plunge into the desert disguised as an Arab, like Sir Richard Burton when he went to Mecca, Kitchener was acting as an ''intelligence officer," or in other words as a daring spy, compared with whom Fennimore Cooper's hero was but a milk and water one. But there is a great difference between the desert sands of Berber and the sand-dunes of Borkum.