Of course, most of Pyke’s contemporaries would have dismissed this idea as fantasy the moment it entered their minds. It was thought to be impossible to get into Germany as an Englishman, impossible to move around and impossible to get one’s reports out.
Or was it?
Pyke knew that once he was in Germany he could pass his reports to Fox, the American, who could smuggle them back to Fleet Street. All he had to do was get in and out again. While he did not, as yet, know how to do this, he assured Perris that there was a plan but it had to remain secret. Just as he had done in Malmo harbour as the ferry began to pull away, Pyke did not intend to get bogged down in details. He wanted to jump.
In outline, at least, it was an impressive proposition. The thought of an English war correspondent in Berlin bristled with the kind of paradoxical ingenuity which Pyke so admired in others. He liked the challenge of it. ‘Glory of glory at having something to do that seemed impossible,’ he wrote, ‘something necessitating all the virtues and all the vices imaginable, something for which one would have to be alert and cautious, receptive and sceptical, something that would necessitate twenty-four hours’ work and twenty-five hours’ watchfulness a day, and above all things the colossal humour of the idea.’ But it was hard to see how he could actually spirit himself into the country, let alone out again.
For a moment Pyke’s idea hung in the air between him and Perris, there to be embraced as a stroke of brilliance or swatted aside as an adolescent daydream. As far as we know, Pyke had given a good account of himself. Having gone up to Cambridge as ‘an excessively shy youth’ he had rapidly grown into himself, speaking regularly in Union debates before moving on to the Heretics. While he might have had the occasional off-day during his first year at the Union, his speeches became funnier with practice and more fluent. The Cambridge Review noted Pyke’s ‘fine voice’, describing him as ‘a good elocutionist’; the Cambridge Magazine compared his delivery to ‘a soft and pleasing song’; while for Granta, ‘[Pyke] probably does some thinking in his spare moments.’
Ernest Perris spoke for the next half-hour, pacing the room, dropping occasionally into his swivel chair and swinging a leg over the arm. He liked the plan, yes, he was intrigued by it, he got the humour of it. Perris enjoyed the idea of having a Chronicle correspondent in Germany, in the way that he liked the thought of setting up a practical joke, but it was hard to say whether the young man sitting in front of him would be able to pull it off.
Perris later described his visitor on that day as ‘a rather brilliant but erratic youth of twenty-one’ (Pyke was twenty), who had, Perris understood, done ‘brilliantly at Cambridge, but has always been ill-balanced’. Pyke had in fact scraped through his only Cambridge examination nine months earlier with a Third. While in a time of peace this apparent imbalance might have counted against him, by September 1914 the journalistic landscape had changed. The first scoop of the war had come to the Daily Telegraph from an unknown American freelancer after he had overheard the doorman at the US Embassy confirm the German advance into Belgium. Just as Perris needed a scoop, he appreciated that it might come from an unusual source. His main hesitation concerned the idea of sending an inexperienced correspondent into enemy territory on what might later be described as a fool’s errand.
Perris offered Pyke the following terms: Perris would publish any material that Pyke could get out of Germany and would pay the standard rate offered to Special Correspondents, but he could not offer Pyke a position on the Chronicle’s staff. Nor would the paper be legally responsible for him. It would, however, make a contribution to his expenses.
Pyke accepted.
‘Righto!’ concluded Perris. ‘Let’s leave it at that.’
Perris urged Pyke as he left to take care of himself in Germany. If he felt someone was onto him, or had even the slightest suspicion that he was being watched, he must leave immediately. Pyke stepped out of the offices of the Chronicle feeling punch-drunk and on his way down Fleet Street began to sweat.
Over the next twelve days he prepared for his journey with the urgency of a man fighting for air. He read up on Germany, Germans and German frontiers. He spent the night in a print shop on Fleet Street. He went to Tilbury with a Chronicle employee to meet a sailor. He found the names of men who had managed to get out of Germany and travelled the length of the country to pick their brains: ‘some knew a little, most knew nothing, one knew a lot.’
On 12 September, a forgettable and blowy day in London, Pyke said goodbye to his mother, his brother and two sisters, telling them that he had been taken on as a Chronicle Special Correspondent and was off to Stockholm. This was true. Perris had accepted him as a Special Correspondent, and, yes, he planned to go to Stockholm. Only it was not the whole truth.
As Pyke waited on the platform at King’s Cross for the train to Newcastle, where he would take a boat to Norway, his mind turned again to the mission ahead. If caught, the best he could hope for was to be sent back to England with the German equivalent of a clip round the ear. More likely, he would spend the remainder of the war in prison. Confident that hostilities would be over by Christmas, this did not trouble him – and besides, several months in a German jail might make for an interesting set of articles.
There was another possible ending to this adventure which until then he had contrived to ignore. Pyke knew that what he hoped to do might be construed as espionage. While he had not heard of Englishmen being executed for spying, the war was barely a month old and there was no reason why they might not start with him. Indeed, he might not live to see his twenty-first birthday – the thought of which, he wrote, was ‘like a hot iron searing my soul’.
Less than two weeks later Geoffrey Pyke settled down to a cold beer in a café deep inside the German Empire. By then the British intelligence agency later known as MI6, or SIS, was unable to get even one of its agents into the country. This untrained twenty-year-old, incapable of speaking fluent German and thought to be ‘unbalanced’, had somehow succeeded where MI6 had either failed or had not dared to take the risk. It was a breakthtaking achievement, not least because it had been done entirely on his own initiative. Pyke had defied the received wisdom of the day, according to which Germany was an impenetrable fortress. In doing so he had set himself up for the great journalistic scoop of the war. What baffled everyone who heard about this – as many soon would – was how on earth he had managed to get himself into Germany in the first place.
How to Smuggle Oneself into Wartime Germany
Pyke’s first step when facing any problem, including this one, was to set out exactly what he wanted to do. In its simplest form his aim was as follows:
I want to smuggle myself into Germany.
His next step was to imagine a response to that. Not any kind of reply, but the sort of reaction you might expect from an older, wiser voice of authority. It would most likely be along the lines of: You’re mad, you’ll get caught. This was the voice of reality responding to fantasy.
Having set the two against each other, it was time to pull this exchange apart.
It was all very well saying ‘you’ll get caught’, but where would this happen? At the frontier, you might think, where he was bound to be picked out by the guards. But how would they catch him?
If he arrived at a recognised border crossing he might either reveal himself to be an English journalist – which was unlikely – or a German official could work this out for himself. Yet to do so he would need to be on the lookout for people like Pyke. ‘Of course, if the Germans were expecting English journalists to come into Germany after the war had broken out – then I should probably get caught. But the point was, were they? Would they be as wide awake as all that?’
Already the chances of getting in appeared to be better than he’d originally thought. What was more, if he entered the country at Warnemünde, a sleepy German port on the Baltic, rather than the Kiel Canal, the guards would be more relaxed. At least, this was what he had heard in Copenhagen, where Warnem�
�nde was referred to as the ‘back door’ to Germany.
But even if the guards at Warnemünde were not on the lookout for English journalists they might be interested in anyone who looked obviously English, Russian or French.
This led to Pyke’s next question: to what extent could he distance himself from these nationalities?
A German suit would help. Yet perhaps his greatest advantage here was an inherited one. Geoffrey Pyke’s maternal great-grandfather had been a French Count. His grandfather on the other side was the Warden of London’s Central Synagogue. He came from high-born Franco-Anglo-Jewish stock and had grown up within London’s haute juiverie. Both his parents were Sephardic Jews whose ancestors had settled long ago in southern Spain before being forced to leave after the Alhambra Decree of 1492. They had moved to Holland and later to London, where the Dutch name taken by one, Snoek, was translated as Pike (the ‘i’ later became a ‘y’). Which was to say that Geoffrey Pyke had a naturally dark complexion and, while he did not strike everyone he met as being Jewish, nor did he match a German guard’s approximation of a ruddy-cheeked Englishman or indeed a stubbly Frenchman. There was an ambiguity to his looks which might be put to good use. Later on in his life it would work against him.
In theory, at least, he had made a good start. The combination of heading for Warnemünde, his appearance and the fact that the German guards would not be on the lookout for undercover English journalists all boded well. But they did not get him across the frontier.
Many years later, Pyke wrote that ‘the correct formulation of a problem is more than halfway to its solution’. Perhaps he had not formulated the problem correctly.
I want to smuggle myself into Germany. You’re mad, you’ll get caught.
The word ‘smuggle’ could be improved upon. It implied physical concealment, yet there might not be any need for this. The only reason Pyke was not allowed into Germany at that moment was because of his nationality. Here was the breakthrough he needed. If he could assume a different nationality he would be welcomed into Germany as an Englishman would be in peacetime. He knew that US Consulates across Europe were by then overrun with Americans who had left home without a passport and consequently needed documentation. To claim an American passport Pyke had only to present himself at an American Consulate with valid papers, a passable American accent and a plausible account of his fictional American identity.
He had a good ear and had spent much of the summer with his half-American friend Philip Sargant Florence, so the accent would be easy. Finding valid papers was more of a problem. Here Perris came to his aid by sending a Chronicle employee with him to the docks at Tilbury where they found an American sailor named Raymund Eggleton who was willing to part with his birth certificate – for a small fee.
The final piece in this deceptively simple jigsaw was Pyke’s occupation. As a willowy undergraduate he would struggle to pass as a sailor. Pyke was a journalist with a Futurist’s interest in machines so he decided to pass himself off as a print-machine salesman. On the remote chance that he might face awkward questions about the print-machine business he spent a night in the bowels of Fleet Street boning up on how these machines worked.
Several days after arriving in Scandinavia he walked into the US Consulate in Stockholm posing as Raymund Eggleton. He wore a German suit, a Serbian felt hat and boots made from Russian leather that would be worn out by the end of the year. But there was a problem with his performance, for he left the consulate without a new laissez-passer.
This was what he had feared more than anything: travelling as far as Sweden only to learn that his fantastic plan was impossible. Others might have turned back. He decided to try again. After depositing a sealed parcel in Stockholm’s Grand Hotel, probably containing his English papers, he went to the US Consulate in Gothenburg where he gave his second turn as Eggleton. It worked. He was handed an American passport and several days later he stepped onto the ferry at Falster Island bound for Germany.
You can imagine the explosive compression of nervous excitement that built up in his slender frame as that ship steamed into German waters. After only a few hours it arrived at Warnemünde, the tiny hodgepodge port that he had heard so much about.
Once the ferry had docked he followed the trail of fellow passengers down the gangplank into a newly built wooden Customs shed. Around him he could see Landwehr troops in gaudy red and blue uniforms, their guns glinting in the half-light. Up ahead were policemen checking papers. When his turn came Pyke handed over his American passport.
It was in order, and he was waved through. Now all he had to do was get to Berlin and find some news.
While most of the new arrivals from Denmark took the train to Hamburg and continued from there to the capital, Pyke took a seat on a Bummelzug heading east to Stettin. These rickety trains stopped every few miles and were notoriously uncomfortable. They were also among the last places in Germany where you might expect to find an undercover Englishman. Though Pyke was travelling on a valid American passport he faced a new and even more potent threat: that someone he encountered might detect his Englishness and raise the alarm, leaving Pyke at the mercy of an angry mob.
By late September 1914 a siege mentality had set in across Germany. ‘The people know; they are absolutely convinced that our enemies forced us to fight,’ explained one German, ‘and nothing, no matter what may be the outcome of this terrible struggle, can change that conviction.’ In any nation whose people feel that they have been attacked unjustly and know that their borders are closed there is this same tendency to look for the enemy within. Since the declaration of Kriegsgefahrzustand – ‘imminent danger of war’ – issued in late July, anyone who did not look right, sound right, or who merely acted in an unusual manner ran the risk of being singled out and branded as a foreign agent. The American Ambassador to Germany described this febrile atmosphere in which ‘people were seized by the crowds in the streets; and in some instances, on the theory that they were French or Russian spies, were shot.’
All this was before England joined the war. The English were loathed in a way that made the Russians and French seem like old friends with whom there had been a regrettable misunderstanding – largely because the German identification with England was so much stronger. War felt like more of a betrayal. Gott strafe England – May God punish England – was already an informal greeting between German troops (the response was: ‘He will punish them’). The British Embassy was stoned. The American Ambassador was spat at because he was mistaken for an Englishman. (The culprit, a lawyer, apologised when he realised his mistake.) By the time Pyke sat down in a near-empty Bummelzug bound for Stettin there was a new bogeyman in Germany: the undercover Englishman.
As the train pulled out of the station Pyke noticed a sluggish, heavyset man heffalumping towards him. It was an off-duty German soldier. He had a pink neck and a half-grown moustache, and rather than keep to himself during the long journey east he had decided to keep Pyke company.
While it was improving rapidly, Pyke’s German remained limited. He must have been hoping for a deaf old man to sit opposite him, a Trappist monk, perhaps – anyone, really, other than a German soldier.
After a perfunctory greeting the soldier unfastened his belt and bayonet, swung both onto the rail above, slumped down into his seat and began to talk. Pyke felt a wave of relief. This soldier only wanted to be heard. He must be ‘divorced,’ thought Pyke to himself, ‘which was possible, since he never stopped talking. [. . .] It was twenty-three and a half minutes before he stopped, and then it was only to take a breath.’ The soldier seemed to become most agitated when speaking about his commanding officer, referred to variously as der schweinhund and verfluchte schafskopf – literally, ‘the pig-dog’ and ‘cursed sheep’s head’. As the train bobbled along, the invective continued, the flow punctuated by ‘spitting at what, from a grammatical aspect, was the crucial point of every sentence’. Pyke nodded sympathetically, making sure to add the occasional ‘Ach so’ or ‘Naturlic
h’.
It seemed to be going well. There was no sign that the Englishman was expected to converse and the soldier looked at ease in his company. Indeed, after an hour or so he wore himself out and fell asleep. Pyke pretended to do the same, but kept one eye on the landscape passing by, noting the freshly dug vegetable patches and ageing postmen. This last detail he saw as evidence of the younger ones having been called up to the front. Such was the news blackout from Germany that even details like these were valuable. Already he might have enough for a short dispatch.
After another hour, as the train began to pull away from a station, the soldier awoke with a start. Bleary-eyed, he asked Pyke if this was Stettin. It was not. Either the young Englishman misheard or he thought it would be amusing to put the soldier out at the wrong station.
‘Ja, ja,’ replied Pyke.
In an explosion of arms and legs the soldier gathered his things and hopped down onto the line. As he did so his trousers fell down. He had forgotten his belt and bayonet. Staggering after the gently accelerating train, one hand holding his trousers up, the soldier yelled up at Pyke to throw them down, but in doing so Pyke accidentally hit the soldier across the shins.
Worried that the disgruntled soldier might cable ahead to Stettin – his destination and the final stop – about this unusual passenger, Pyke knew that it would be unwise to linger there. On arrival he rushed to buy a ticket for the next train to Berlin before turning his attention to food. He had not eaten all day, but the thought of entering a restaurant had become terrifying. In his mind he was unmistakably and unbearably English. He needed some kind of disguise or prop. Yet it was hard to see how he could find one in a railway station.
Churchill's Iceman_The True Story of Geoffrey Pyke_Genius, Fugitive, Spy Page 3