Hamil Grant

“ Technically the spy has been defined as one who clandestinely goes in quest of information, whilst a traitor is one who spies within his own community and to its undoing. Although most authorities agree in considering espionage as lawful among the ruses of warfare, all, with one exception, concur in determining that death remains the only logical desert of the man who has possessed himself of secrets upon which the common safety depends. ”

“ As a maker of theories, your German of all kinds and conditions, is the first man in the world; it is when he comes to their practical application that he fails so badly and disappoints his admirers so painfully. The end of German naval espionage is of course the invasion and conquest of Britain, and until German armies defeat us and our Allies on land and her Navy has beaten us at sea, we may feel justified in holding that both her military and naval systems of espionage are respectively not worth the rentals paid for their dingy offices in Berlin. ”

“ The war-time mind of Prussian militarism is keen and right to the point. It saw not the chance of getting publicity in America, but the certainty that other more dangerous spies could come through the same way. By all the rules of the war game, Prussian militarism would have been thoroughly justified in treating me as a common spy in possession of vital military secrets, but it courteously contented itself in insisting on plucking out the heart of the journalistic mystery. ”

“ My best agents, when I had charge of secret-service work, were as much entitled to respect as were my officers in the Criminal Investigation Department when I had charge of that branch of Police work, or as our military who 'spy' the German trenches from aeroplanes. Others again take up that sort of work for 'filthy lucre sake,' and yet others from all sorts of motives, some praiseworthy and some contemptible. Spies differ as much as parsons or doctors, and no general rule can be applied to them. ”

“ German experts are, however, unanimous in eliminating to a minimum point the services of women as spies, and that too on the ground that they are rarely to be relied upon if once romantic sentiment becomes engaged in their operations—an ever-present possibility. "Any woman but a German woman" was a common cry of Karl Stieber who may be trusted to have well understood the character of his fair compatriot, for whom love and romance—the purer the better—constitute the only things worth living for in this drab enough world. ”

“ She had been in her time a famous opera singer who had tried to found a political salon on the basis of the private information which her husband possessed, and altogether seems to have been one of those terrible but inept females who wander through the world for the unrest of souls, not only knowing, but knowing that they know. We make no apology for insisting that the fact that d'Antraigues was of Gascon birth is a point in favour of our idea that megalomania is in a large measure the motive-power which turns men and women to the business of espionage. ”

“ Obviously, the work of the spy, no matter how dramatic it may appear in its co-ordinated whole, must, in respect of its various separate acts and phases, be bared of all dramatic or arresting incident. Were the opposite the case, woman, a natural actor, would find herself in the most congenial of elements. Anything more sordid, however, or more commonplace than the general phase-work of the spy, it would be difficult to imagine, and it is precisely for this [25] reason that woman as a rule fails as a secret service agent. ”

“ People who travelled much on the Continent before the outbreak of the Great War may recollect how on crossing the frontier of Belgium into Germany—at Herbesthal, if we remember—one invariably seemed to experience much the same sensation as that of exchanging the atmosphere of some warm and comfortable sitting-room for the cold and formal conditions of a public office. ”

“ If a French President were nowadays to invite a rising or, better still, a risen politician who had served the party well, to make his particular request, it is certain that first, and before all things, the politician would ask to be put in possession of his dossier, since no man, great or small, cares that the world should know by what arts he taught himself to rise, as Pope puts it. It is an undoubted fact that the dossier is frequently asked for by arrivals at high political position, and the police, of course, make a pretence at surrendering it. ”

“ So that, when we consider how our agent is a man of leisure who fishes the local streams, and has plumbed their various depths; how he keeps horses and knows the average amount of forage available in his town at any given moment; how he has shot over the outlying country and knows the lie of the land for miles around; how he is on visiting terms with every local farmer and knows his resources—why, it is not surprising that when German armies are moved across the frontiers, they should know every step of the country much better than the inhabitants themselves are likely ever to know it. ”

“ Once across the border, the military spirit seemed to predominate everywhere, while among the friendly enough natives of the unofficial classes there was a subdued not to say cowed demeanour which was in saddening contrast with the free-and-easy cheeriness of the people just left behind. Everywhere was there evidence of set discipline and on all hands the spectre of officialism appeared to darken the daily lives of men with some sort of unexpressed threat. ”

“ There is no 'spy hysteria' in Germany but none the less the German authorities know perfectly well that there are swarms of spies in their midst and are hunting them down with quiet, typically Teutonic thoroughness. But the very perfection of the German military machine is its weak spot, and on this, my second visit to the German Great Headquarters, I was able to give the astonished authorities a personal demonstration as to how any smooth-tongued stranger could turn up at even this 'holy of holies.' The nocturnal trail led in a military train from Luxemberg over Longwy to Longuyon. ”

“ Thus, our agent can spy upon the local garrison, upon a military post, a railway depot, a terminal, and at any critical moment he has his own corps of agents—some of them, alas, unconscious traitors—ready, for a few francs, to do his bidding, among them, perhaps, a poor charwoman or an unemployed labourer. In country towns in France it is not hard for a prosperous man of business to make friends with the officers of the garrison. ”

“ It may be objected that at least it is a business which requires courage and that all successful exponents of the metier of spying have been men of undoubted courage. While admitting the boldness of men like Le Caron and Schulmeister, it may be said that they displayed audacity rather than courage, and the two qualities spring from entirely distinct motives. Often the audacity which passes for courage arises either from a lack of imagination, or else from a blind fatalism, and in neither case is there any display of real courage. ”

“ Our own study of the master spy has left us unimpressed regarding the qualities of either head or heart which are called for in the business of espionage, and whatever courage may appear to attach to the characters of men like Schulmeister, Stieber and even André, we remain convinced that there was in none of them anything like nobility of purpose and that a very cheap material ambition underlay all their respective rôles, dramatic though those rôles may have been. ”

“ After the establishment of the Republic the spy police was reorganised and a special brigade of secret-service agents was formed whose object was—and still is—to spy upon all those political sects at the head of which stand pretenders like the Duke of Orleans, or Prince Napoleon, or the late General Boulanger. At any grave political crisis in France these political sects display more than their usual energies, trusting more or less, as they do, in the star of their particular candidate, and at such times the corps of spies become correspondingly active. ”

“ Lastly comes the age of Napoleon, in which we find that, for all the essential militarism of the imperial regime, the spy really played a more prominent rôle in the social and political drama than in that of the camp, the great soldier, except in extraordinary cases of long-laid plans, as in the Austerlitz campaign, relying mainly on human cupidity touched by the magic of his gold, to find, as the occasion demanded, willing perverts to provide him with the information necessary to the success of his combinations. ”

“ While absolutely incapable of the commonest feelings of humanity where strict business was concerned, as in the murder of Enghien, the spy appears to have considered it an indispensable part of his social equipment to waltz like a gentleman of the old court of Versailles, and with this momentous object in view employed the services of the most eminent dancing masters. ”

“ As in England, or Scotland and Ireland, so in America there is little in the way of systematised espionage, even among the vast community of German-Americans who might be supposed to revert to type, as the Darwinians put it. Over there, as in these Islands, espionage is only organised for expediency's sake and according to the exigencies of any particular scandal, social or commercial, which may require the intervention of the agent of stealth and observation. ”

“ Nevertheless, politics plays a rôle in every state of the Union, the complexity and strenuousness of which are not known in any other country in the world, and wherever the political game is pursued with resoluteness and vigour, we may depend upon it that all factions possess what Americans themselves very aptly describe as "inside information" regarding what is taking place in other opposing camps; all the more so, indeed, as success in political campaigns in America means possession and employment of a kind of patronage which is invariably expressed in terms of dollars and cents. ”

“ Duty, presumably, is the fundamental motive of courage, and until your spy can be shown to have engaged in the perilous business of espionage out of purely conscientious devotion to task and principle—Le Caron, it is only right to say, claims all of this—he must be classed with that type of individual who enters into the business of unrighteousness "for all there is in it," to use an American phrase, and well knowing the tolls and penalties which failure will inevitably exact. ”

“ It is customary for Americans to declare that they possess no system of espionage in their country, and as a rule this is true of American life under normal conditions. Putting aside the questions of purely detective work and criminal investigation, and in these spheres of police activity America is probably served as well as any other country in the world, we may safely say that there is too much individual or social freedom in the United States to warrant the permanent existence of anything like organised espionage. ”

“ The merest novice who enters in any capacity into the limelight of publicity, even artists, literary men, frail queans of the demi-monde, financiers, politicians, social fancy-men, jockeys, actors, clerics, opulent mistresses, editors—all these in point of personal "pedigree," to cull an expression from the American police vocabulary, are better known to the secret service than to their own parents. ”

“ Like his fellow-spy André, Hale was a man whose social and intellectual gifts were of an important order, while the admitted excellence of the man's private character, as well as his high sense of personal honour, go a long way to justify the opinion generally held by Americans regarding the motives which induced Hale to enter into the business of spying—according to that view, a pure love of the principle of liberty, which prompted him to risk his life in the service of his country. ”

“ Statesmanship can be reduced to three principles or maxims: the first is to maintain your power and, according to circumstances, to increase and extend it, just as I doubled my army on reaching the throne for the sole purposes of conquest. Make sure of your army; have plenty of money and bide a favourable time; you can then be certain, not only of preserving your States, but of adding to them. The term 'balance of power' is one which has subjugated the whole world ”