The Defence of the Realm (5 page)

Fear of the threat from the growing High Seas Fleet encouraged the myth that it was to be used for a surprise invasion of England. William Le Queux quickly assumed the role of alarmist-in-chief. His best-seller
The Invasion of 1910
, published in 1906, described how German spies were already hard at work in England, preparing the way for the invaders. It sold a million copies and was published in twenty-seven languages, including German. Melville gave Le Queux much of the credit for ‘waking up the public'.
²⁷
At London clubs and dinner parties, Le Queux was, by his own immodest account, ‘hailed as the man-who-dared-to-tell-the-truth'. Success on so heady a scale launched him further into a fantasy career as secret agent and spy-catcher extraordinary. He became a member of a ‘new voluntary Secret Service Department': ‘Half-a-dozen patriotic men in secret banded themselves together. Each, paying his own expenses, set to work gathering information in Germany and elsewhere that might be useful to our country in case of need.'
²⁸

The Invasion of 1910
was serialized several months ahead of book publication in Britain's first mass-circulation newspaper, the
Daily Mail
. The
Mail's
proprietor, Lord Northcliffe (soon to become owner of
The Times
as well), was convinced that the invasion scare was well suited to the average Briton's liking for ‘a good hate'. Germany was one of Northcliffe's own pet hates and was to figure prominently in the paranoia of his final years. (His last two wills, written shortly before his death in 1922, complained that he had been ‘poisoned by the Germans by ice cream'.) Northcliffe, however, found much to criticize in the original route selected by Le Queux for the German army, which included too many villages where the market for the
Daily Mail
was small. So in the interests of circulation the German invasion route was changed to allow the Hun to terrorize every major town in England from Sheffield to Chelmsford. Special maps were published each day in the
Daily Mail
to show which district the Germans would be invading next morning. The serial added 80,000 to the
Mail's
circulation.
²⁹
Le Queux later complained of the ‘many imitators who obtained much kudos and made much money' by jumping on the bandwagon of invasion scares.
³⁰
Not all, however, were imitators. His most successful rival, E. Phillips Oppenheim, embarked independently on his own ‘crusade against German militarism', made enough money from it to give up the family leather business and began a full-time career as one of Britain's most prolific popular novelists.
³¹

By the autumn of 1907 a press campaign backed by the ageing military hero Field Marshal Lord Roberts VC (who had collaborated with Le Queux in working out the German invasion route), and some of the Conservative front bench, had persuaded the Liberal government to appoint a sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence to consider the invasion threat. The membership of the sub-committee bears witness to the importance of its task. The chair was taken by Asquith, then Chancellor of the Exchequer but soon to become prime minister. With him sat four senior ministers (the Lord President, the Foreign Secretary, the Secretary for War and the First Lord of the Admiralty) and an impressive array of service chiefs. They met sixteen times between November 1907 and July 1908, completing their report on 22 October 1908. The result of their deliberations was to demolish most of the arguments of the invasion theorists and show surprise attack to be impossible. The sub-committee's conclusions, however, failed to carry conviction with most of those whose arguments it had demolished. During summer naval exercises a small force of invaders managed to elude the fleet and scramble ashore in the north of Scotland. With the Admiralty maintaining an embarrassed silence, the
alleged numbers of the invaders multiplied alarmingly. Reginald McKenna, the First Lord of the Admiralty, was forced to deny a report that 70,000 invaders had landed at Wick. His critics remained sceptical. The
Daily Mail
claimed that during an invasion exercise, despite using two charabancs and a steam engine, the Territorial Army had taken three hours to reach the threatened coastline.
³²

Fear of the invading Hun was further fuelled in the autumn of 1908 by reports that Germany was secretly stepping up dreadnought construction. Though inaccurate, the reports were confirmed by the British naval attaché in Berlin and the consul in Danzig.
³³
The cabinet dispute which ensued began in acrimony and ended in farce. ‘In the end,' wrote Winston Churchill, ‘a curious and characteristic solution was reached. The Admiralty had demanded 6 ships: the economists offered 4: and we finally compromised on 8.' This remarkable decision was the result of outside pressure. The Tory Opposition, the Tory press, the Navy League and other patriotic pressure groups worked themselves into a frenzy as they denounced government hesitation in the face of the German naval menace. ‘We are not yet prepared to turn the face of every portrait of Nelson to the wall,' thundered the
Daily Telegraph
, ‘and to make in time of peace the most shameful surrender recorded in the whole of our history.' Assailed by the vociferous demand ‘We want eight, and we won't wait!', the Liberal cabinet surrendered to it.
³⁴

By 1907 Major (later Major General Sir) William Thwaites, head of the German section at the War Office, was convinced that there was ‘much truth' in newspaper reports that German intelligence officers were at work in every county. The Director of Military Operations, Major General (later Lieutenant General Sir) John Spencer Ewart, also believed that Germany was pouring ‘hosts of agents and spies' into Britain.
³⁵
Edmonds, the head of MO5, agreed. German friends had told him of requests by the German Admiralty to report on the movement of British warships, work in dockyards and arsenals, aeroplane development and the building of munitions factories.
³⁶
Late in 1907 he began keeping a record of reports of alleged German espionage ‘which on inquiry appeared to offer some justification for suspicion'. Not a single case was reported to the War Office by the police. All the reports came from members of the public, many of them influenced by alarmist press reports. As Edmonds acknowledged, ‘it is only since certain newspapers have directed attention to the subject that many cases have come to notice.' MO5 lacked the resources to check adequately the reports it received.
³⁷

Though Edmonds, Melville, Thwaites, Ewart and others at the War Office
were too uncritical of alarmist reports from press and public of spies and invasion plans, they had much better grounds for believing that there was a major German espionage offensive against Britain than most historians have been willing to recognize.
³⁸
Edmonds was arguably the leading army intellectual of his generation as well as a gifted linguist with a largely self-taught reading knowledge of many languages as well as fluency in German. After education as a day boy at King's College School, Wimbledon, he passed first into the Royal Military Academy with the best marks the examiners could remember. He also passed out first, winning a number of prizes including the sword for the best gentleman cadet, and was gazetted to the Royal Engineers, where his brilliance earned him the nickname ‘Archimedes'. He later passed first once again into Staff College. In 1899 he was posted to the War Office Intelligence Department (ID), and after three years in South Africa from 1901 to 1904 returned to the ID. By the time he became head of MO5, Edmonds was an experienced intelligence officer.
³⁹

As a nine-year-old child living in France at the end of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, Edmonds had witnessed at first hand the occupying forces of the newly united Germany. He spent much of his life thereafter studying the German army.
⁴⁰
Edmonds shared with others at the War Office the belief that the Franco-Prussian War, the last between major European powers, provided important insights into likely German strategy in the next war. Germany's rapid, crushing victory in 1870–71, he believed, was due partly to the effectiveness of its intelligence services and to the ineffectiveness of French counter-espionage. The head of German field intelligence, General Lewal, had established an effective network of agents who helped to guide the invading Prusso-German regiments into France. Some of these agents were ‘mobile agents', loyal German citizens (
Reichsangehörige
) in France who worked as waiters, barbers and language teachers, and sent whatever military information they could acquire back to Berlin. German intelligence in 1870 was known to have had a collecting agent in Lyons, who telegraphed all intelligence reports to Geneva, whence they were forwarded on to Germany.
⁴¹
MO5 also concluded that, in the years preceding the Franco-Prussian War, German intelligence made use of German army reservists living in France as well as the German consular service.
⁴²
It studied German military publications such as the
Militärwochenblatt
, which included articles on the need to establish sabotage agents in enemy countries before the mobilization of troops.
⁴³
The official German Field Manual (
Felddienstordnung
) of 1894, of which MO5 obtained a copy, ‘stated without reticence the necessity of espionage, and ordered the use of spies in every command'.
⁴⁴

During the 1890s, initially as the result of exchanging intelligence on Russia, Edmonds established friendly relations with several German military intelligence officers. Though his main contact was succeeded in 1900 by an officer of ‘anti-English proclivities', other informants told him – correctly – that in 1901 German intelligence had set up a new department to target Britain.
⁴⁵
Neither Edmonds nor anyone else in the War Office, however, realized that the department was purely naval and had no involvement with Sektion IIIb, military intelligence. It was therefore assumed that Germany had begun to develop a military espionage network in Britain similar to its successful network in France before the Franco-Prussian War. Though MO5 was aware that German naval intelligence was at work in Britain, it mistook some of the operations of the Nachrichten-Abteilung (‘N'), founded in 1901, for those of the military Sektion IIIb. The ‘N' network in Britain, directed by Melville's old acquaintance Gustav Steinhauer, included both ‘reporters' (
Berichterstatter
), who passed information on the Royal Navy back to Berlin during peacetime, and ‘confidential agents' (
Vertrauensmänner
), who were to be mobilized after the outbreak of war. Though Steinhauer's recruitment methods, which usually involved letters by him to German citizens living in Britain written under an alias from a cover address in Potsdam and asking for their services, were somewhat hit-and-miss, the ‘Kaiser's spy' also developed a more sophisticated system of ‘intermediaries' (
Mittelsmänner
) to act as cut-outs between him and his agents in Britain. After the outbreak of war, a ‘war intelligence system' (
Kriegsnachrichtenwesen
) was to be introduced, using agents travelling to Britain under false identities to conduct specific missions. Steinhauer, however, was left largely to his own devices with little active tasking by the German Admiralty.
⁴⁶

Edmonds's willingness to believe that German intelligence was actively engaged in the military reconnaissance of Britain, as well as collecting naval intelligence, was strengthened by mirror-imaging – his knowledge that the British army was secretly carrying out detailed reconnaissance on the continent. In 1907 the War Office ordered a secret survey of the area in which the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was expected to be deployed in time of war. By 1908 the survey was so detailed that it included information on the population of villages and the locations of post offices, pipe water supply, bicycle shops and railway sidings.
⁴⁷
Convinced that there must be similar German military reconnaissance in Britain, Edmonds was therefore predisposed to believe reports of spies working for Sektion IIIb. In his later career as official historian of the First World War, his meticulous (if sometimes ponderous) use of both British and German
military records was to earn him an honorary DLitt from Oxford University.
⁴⁸
The same level of critical judgement, however, was sometimes woefully lacking in his assessment of pre-war German espionage. Despite his reputation as the army's leading intellectual, Edmonds had what Kell later called a ‘cranky' side, which helps to explain why, despite his gifts, he never rose above the rank of honorary brigadier general.
⁴⁹

Edmonds later attributed what he believed to be his success in uncovering the scale of German espionage in Britain, military as well as naval, to two remarkable ‘pieces of luck', whose improbability he failed to grasp. One of his friends, F. T. Jane (the founder of the naval and military annuals which bear his name), who was ‘on the lookout for spies', found a suspicious German in Portsmouth, drove him to Woburn and, to teach him a lesson, claimed to have ‘deposited him in the Duke of Bedford's animal park'. Immediately following this exploit, Jane received a series of letters about other suspected spies which he passed on to the War Office. Edmonds's second apparent stroke of ‘luck' was a flood of correspondence to William Le Queux from readers of his books and newspaper serials, convinced that they had seen suspicious-looking aliens on ‘early morning walks and drives', correcting maps, showing ‘curiosity about railway bridges' and making ‘enquiries about gas and water supply'. During 1908 Edmonds got in touch with ‘the most promising' of Le Queux's and Jane's correspondents and made further inquiries. In February 1909 he concluded in an alarmist memorandum: