Odd People

by Basil Thomson

  Now it chanced that on the steamer was a very tall, lanky currant merchant who spoke no tongue but his native Greek, but was brimming over with geniality, particularly towards English people, on whom he was dying to practise the few words of English that he knew. Another British officer who was on board undertook to carry the bag to England and for this purpose the steamer called at an Italian port specially to land him. The irrepressible Greek, seeing an opportunity of making the journey to England with a companion who would interpret for him, hastily collected his modest luggage and, wreathed in ingratiating smiles, attempted to board the boat. He was sternly repelled from the gangway; the steamer continued on her voyage and landed her passengers.

  The officer had gained no time by his detour: the other passengers arrived in Rome in time to take the same train for Paris; he was just taking his seat with the precious bag when the currant merchant recognised him and rushed upon him with outstretched hand, as if to say, ‘My deliverer! We will travel in the same compartment.’ Probably he ascribed the rebuff he received to the well-known eccentricity of the British character, for at the Gare du Nord the same comedy was enacted, as well as on the Havre–Southampton boat. Long before this he had been classed as a German spy and at Southampton he was handed over to the police and brought to me in custody.

  In a seedy frock-coat, unshaved, speechless, except in voluble Greek and bewildered by British eccentricity, he certainly seemed to justify all the suspicions that had been attached to him. I was about to send for a Greek interpreter when I was informed that his brother, a currant merchant of Mincing Lane, was asking leave to come in and there walked into the room his double – a man so like him in stature, attenuation and feature that when dressed alike they could never have been distinguished. But the brother spoke fluent English and the motive for all this misplaced geniality was explained. I hope that this currant merchant has not lost his love for the English nation, but I have my doubts.

  At a time when the spy-mania was at its highest we found ourselves involved in a ghost story. A certain titled foreigner, a devout Catholic, had taken and enlarged an early Tudor farm in one of the southern counties in which, according to local tradition, a Spanish friar named Don Diego had been found concealed during one of the Recusant persecutions and murdered. To the simple villagers any foreigner, disembodied or otherwise, was almost certain to be engaged in intrigues against the Allied cause and if he had been a priest in these troublous times he could have had no love for this Protestant country. Moreover, the farm had been filled with strange furniture and was full of dark corners, mysterious doorways and galleries. Strangers came down from London for weekends and it was whispered in the village that there were strange doings behind the oaken shutters after nightfall. In this rumour was for once correct. Don Diego made no corporeal appearance: he was a voice and nothing more, but a voice of such a musical and thrilling quality that, in the opinion of those who listened, it could have proceeded from no earthly throat. Don Diego was more concerned with mundane than with spiritual matters and his chief concern was matchmaking, which was unusual in disembodied spirits and not altogether becoming in a murdered priest. He wanted his host to make an advantageous marriage.

  The manifestations began generally at dinner. A singularly sweet voice of the quality which in ghost stories is called sepulchral would be heard calling the name of a guest: the family professed not to hear the voice. The guest would leave the table and follow the voice to the hall, where she would commune with it in private and return to her dinner filled with its mysterious injunctions. She had heard it, now from the gallery, now from the staircase, for the shade of Don Diego was amazingly agile in its movements and to prove that it was no human voice there was the fact that whichever lady happened to be called the ghost could always tell her something of her past life, or some family secret that was known only to herself. These, however, were mere conversational by-paths; the burden of the sing-song voice was that people must be up and doing if the Count (for that was the host’s title) was to make an advantageous marriage.

  The rumours of espionage became so persistent that I invited the gentleman to an interview. He was nervous and evasive; he admitted the supernatural manifestations, but remarked that he could not be held responsible for having taken a haunted house. I felt certain, nevertheless, that he knew all about it and I told him plainly that Don Diego must thenceforth lie quiet in his grave. It was a peculiarity of the murdered priest that he became vocal when the Count was present in the room. Sometimes the butler and one at least of the two footmen were there too; at others the Count would be absent and the servants be clearing the dinner table.

  The fame of Don Diego spread very rapidly and a small party of gentlemen interested in psychic phenomena took the matter up. What they represented themselves to be in order to gain admission to the haunted house I do not know, but I can conjecture. They found the poor Count in a state of nervous prostration from a disturbing anonymous letter that had reached him and he was prepared for a visit of some kind; in fact, he was in a condition very favourable to their designs. What passed at an interview in which there was consummate acting on both sides has not transpired, but it resulted in a full written confession and Don Diego has since appeared no more. The Count himself, aided by his Irish butler and two other menservants, had been the voice in turns, the duty falling upon him who happened to be disengaged at the moment and the confession was countersigned by them all. The supposed apparitions of Don Diego, it said, were produced by purely natural means for the purpose of practical joking and an undertaking was given that no more phenomena would occur.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE GERMAN SPY

  MY READERS MAY now be asking themselves how soon I am going to write about German spies. There are obvious reasons why it is impossible to divulge secrets. I shall tell, therefore, as much as the military authorities have already allowed to be divulged and nothing more, but I shall tell most of it at first hand.

  There is much confused thinking about the ethics of spying on movements of an enemy. The very word ‘spy’ has acquired so ugly a significance that we prefer to disguise our own spies as ‘Intelligence’ or ‘Secret Service Officers’ and to regard them as necessary evils; but any government that accepted the standards set up by certain censorious newspapers and declined to ask Parliament for a vote for Secret Service on the grounds that it was dishonourable would be guilty of treason against its own countrymen. To be forewarned about the intentions of an enemy, whether internal or external, may be to save the lives and property of many hundreds and to allow the enemy to make all his preparations unheeded would be criminal negligence of the worst kind. The cost of a good system of intelligence is like the premium paid for insurance against fire.

  Whether an individual degrades himself by engaging in espionage depends on how and why he does it. If his motives are purely patriotic and he performs this dangerous duty at the risk of his life, without thought of personal gain; if in carrying out the duty he does not stoop to form friendships in order to betray them, but comes out with clean hands, what is there degrading in his service? But if he spies upon a nation with which his country is not at war merely for the money he can make and lives riotously, as nearly all such hirelings do, he should be treated like the vermin that he is and nailed to the barn-door as a warning to others. Nevertheless, there is something pitiful even about such men when they have played their stake and lost and they feel the cold hand laid upon them and all their profitless debaucheries sour upon the palate. It is as if they ran unheeding round a corner and came suddenly upon Death standing in the path. Then all honour to them if they can meet him with a smile, for not all of us, feeling that cold breath on our cheek and the grip of the bony fingers closing on us, can be sure that we should pass through the ordeal with credit.

  During the first few days of the war I remember a staff officer remarking that we should repeat the experience of the Napoleonic Wars: we should begin the war with the worst Intelligen
ce Service in Europe and end with the best. I was inclined to think that he was right about the first part of his prediction and I now think that he was right about the second. But then if he had gone on to say that the Germans started the war with the most elaborate Secret Service organisation in Europe and ended it with the worst he would have been equally right. I have already related how at the vital moment of mobilisation the whole of the German organisation in the United Kingdom was broken up; how it was possible for us to dispatch our Expeditionary Force to France without the loss of a single man or a single horse and without the knowledge of the Germans. It was, of course, not long before they attempted to make good. They had established espionage centres at Antwerp and Brussels, they had branch offices in connection with the German Consulate at Rotterdam. Unfortunately for them, there was great jealousy between the navy and the army and each had been entrusted with a certain amount of Secret Service money, on which they entered into a sort of civil war of competition. Anything reported by a spy employed by the German naval authorities was at once ridiculed by the military Intelligence and vice versa. This keen competition made them very easy prey. On one occasion an adventurous Englishman actually passed into Belgium to take service in one of these intelligence offices and came back with useful information. They were prone also to engage quite unsuitable people – the sort of people who in wartime at once become what the French call agents doubles; that is to say, they attempt to serve both sides, either with the object of obtaining double pay or of making their lives safe in the event of detection. What these men do for a living in peace time is hard to guess. I can imagine them running cheap gambling-hells, frequenting the docks to pick up some dishonest profit, resorting to a little blackmail and performing the humbler offices for the white slave trafficker. In wartime you will find them swarming in every capital, for war is their brief summer. The money they get by their complicated villainies is spent with both hands. They live like princes and dress like bookmakers’ touts. The Germans were so easy to manipulate that quite early in the war some of these men came over and offered their services to us. They felt sure that any story, however improbable, would be swallowed. Certainly the Germans got more interesting information from the agents doubles than they ever got from their own spies in England. Sometimes they acted upon it and they paid quite liberally. When you come to think of it, not many private Englishmen were in a position to give naval or military information of importance and still less a foreigner who dared not ask questions.

  There was in my office an armchair in which every spy, real or fancied, sat while he was accounting for his movements. It was realised during the first weeks of the war by the judges and the law officers, as well as by the laity, that the ordinary criminal procedure was of no avail against spies. If no questions could be asked of a person under arrest, how were you to piece together the documents in his possession – marked dictionaries, memoranda of addresses, code telegrams and the like. The only way and, to the innocent, the fairest way was to adopt something like the French criminal procedure. As I have said, there was never anything approaching what is called in America ‘the Third Degree’. The suspects were cautioned that they need not answer any questions, but that what they said might be used in evidence against them, a caution which almost invariably induced loquacity and questions and answers were recorded in shorthand. I suppose that on the average four persons a day sat in that chair throughout the war. At the least, nine out of every ten who might otherwise have been detained under suspicion for an indefinite period were entirely cleared by the examination. It used to be a joke among my staff that no single person, however angry he was when he came in, left the room without thanking me profusely, though one, and he was a Mexican, did afterwards make a claim of £10,000 for moral and intellectual damages. One man was so grateful that he asked leave to make a contribution to the fund of the Police Orphanage. This I had not the face to allow, perhaps because his arrest had been the result of a mistake and I felt that, if money had to pass, it should be going the other way.

  I made a discovery about that low armchair. For some time I had noticed that whenever a particularly disconcerting question was put the suspect instinctively raised himself by the arms to reply to it. My assistant, in peace time an eminent KC, suggested one day that I should sit in it and be interrogated by him. I felt at once an irresistible impulse to raise my face to the level of his. The fact is that if you want to get the truth out of a witness the worst way is to put him in a box above the level of the cross-examining counsel; if our law courts were intelligently constructed the cross-examiner should take his stand in a kind of lift and be suddenly elevated to the proper position just before his cross-examination begins. Primitive races have found this out, for their chiefs stand erect while their inferiors squat on the ground when they are being questioned.

  During the first few days of the war I detained a curious person who arrived in the country on an American passport and who claimed to be a major in the Mexican Army. He was a typical international spy – mysterious, wheedling and apprehensive. He pretended to be eager to enter our service. I told him that we would make use of his services – as a prisoner of war in Brixton Prison. It was not until early in 1916 that the capture of von Papen’s chequebooks disclosed his real activities. He had been engaged in the United States in sabotage and probably he had come to this country for the same purpose, but he took alarm, imagining that his every movement was being watched and he came to us with offers of service to save his own skin. When we found his name among the cheques I sent for him from prison to ask him to explain. He then made a statement about his activities in America, which was considered so important that on 18 March 1916 he was sent over to the United States to give evidence against two of the German Consuls, one of whom was Krupps’s agent, for attempted outrage and breach of neutrality. The American government was quite ready to send us back our prisoner at the end of the case, but I assured them that we were altruistic and had no desire to deprive them of so interesting a personality. Afterwards he published in America his own version of his adventures.

  The first serious spy to be arrested was Lody. Carl Lody was a good example of the patriotic spy. He had been one of those Germans who had lived long enough in the United States to acquire what he believed to be fluent English with an American accent. He had held a commission in the German Navy and was a Reserve officer. He then entered the employment of the Hamburg-America Steamship Line as a guide for tourists. In that capacity he had travelled all over England and had even attempted, though unsuccessfully, to obtain employment under Messrs Thomas Cook & Son. A few days before 4 August 1914 Lody returned to Berlin from Norway and got into touch with the German Intelligence. It happened that there was staying in Berlin at that time an American named Charles A. Inglis, who had applied to the American embassy for a visa to his passport, enabling him to continue his travels in Europe. His passport was passed by the embassy to the German Foreign Office for the visa, but there it was ‘mislaid’ and the Foreign Office promised an exhaustive search. This passport was used by Lody. Mr Inglis’s photograph was removed from it and Lody’s substituted. Mr Inglis obtained a new American passport from his embassy.

  As Mr Charles Inglis, Lody presented himself at the North British Station Hotel in Edinburgh and from Edinburgh he sent a telegram to one Adolf Burchard, in Stockholm. Telegrams had to pass the Censor and there were matters in Inglis’s telegram that called for close scrutiny. Meanwhile, Lody took private lodgings, realising, no doubt, that hotels are not very safe places for spies. He hired a bicycle and spent a fortnight in exploring the neighbourhood of Edinburgh, looking into Rosyth Harbour and asking too many questions for the ordinary sightseer. From Edinburgh he came to London and put up at a hotel in Bloomsbury. Here he interested himself in our anti-aircraft defences. He was back in Edinburgh two days later and on 26 September he went to Liverpool, where ocean liners were being fitted out as auxiliary cruisers. From Liverpool he went to Holyhead and thence to Ir
eland and here his nerve was a little shaken by the close questioning that he underwent. From the Gresham Hotel in Dublin, where other Americans were staying, he wrote to his Swedish correspondent that he was becoming nervous. He wrote all his letters both in English and German in ordinary ink, without any disguise. His information would have been of comparatively little value even if it had reached the Germans, which it did not. The only report that was allowed to go through was the famous story of the Russian troops passing through England.

  From Dublin Lody travelled to Killarney, no doubt on his way to Queenstown, but on 2 October he was detained by the Royal Irish Constabulary to await the arrival of the detectives from Scotland Yard. They found among his luggage the forged passport, about £175 in English notes and gold, a notebook with particulars of the naval fight in the North Sea of a few weeks earlier, addresses in Berlin, Stockholm, Bergen and Hamburg and copies of the four letters that he had written to Stockholm. He was tried by court-martial at the Guildhall, Westminster, on 30 and 31 October. His counsel made no defence except that Lody was a man who, having done his duty, left the consequences in the hands of the court. His grandfather had a military reputation; he had held a fortress against Napoleon and the grandson wished to stand before his judges in that spirit. He was not ashamed of anything that he had done, he would not cringe for mercy, he would accept the decision of righteous men. He was found guilty and sentenced to death and was executed in the Tower five days later. A letter that he wrote to his relations in Stuttgart before his execution was as follows: