"I enclose your salary for the past month. Your reports of last month are not bad. On the whole your work is satisfactory and next year you may get a better salary. Nevertheless, your reports are too few in number; work harder, send more. Don't trouble about Uncle Charles; we have all the information we require. We got through the last inspection without loss of salary. Keep up your relations with your correspondents."
It is obvious that our residential spy is not allowed to select his place of business at random. His location is at some strategical point in the line of military advance, mapped out some years ahead. 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. Sooner or later and after a series of visits to the billiard-table, or the hotel bar, he discovers among his military acquaintances needy young officers who are in debt, who have lost heavily on the race-courses, and it is not long before he begins to talk of his large winnings on the turf. The way is quickly opened to a loan, and then the German Secret Service begins to find out things. Naturally our residential spy keeps his book of expenses and is duly recouped for his outlays on drinks, dinners, race-course visits and loans, with interest at 5 per cent. And if the spy is unable to make headway with a young officer, there is always a possibility of his being able to bribe the officer's wife or mistress, and his allowance of earnest-money is practically unlimited. 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. And so with Belgium and England, where there is not a farmhouse, a strategic copse or upland, the depth of a river, or military capacity of a given road, which is not as well known to the headquarters staff in Berlin as to our own ordnance-surveyors.
XIII
GERMAN SECRET SERVICE—continued
The strategic ideas laid down more than two thousand years ago by Polyænus, of whom we have spoken in an earlier chapter, and to whom Napoleon admitted some indebtedness, are evidently rated high among the military authorities of the Berlin military academies. It is therefore not surprising to learn that in accordance with the Greek's teachings every foreign general or superior officer of note who is considered likely ever to play a prominent rôle in European wars, is in each case as well known to the German military authorities as he is to his own military superiors. His personal character, disposition, virtues, vices and foibles, once an officer reaches to high rank and acquires a reputation as a possible commander, all form the subject of one of those dossiers with which the Dreyfus case made us so familiar. It is a main part of the duty of our fixed-point agent to collect all sorts of information regarding the chief garrison officers at the town in which they are established and transmit the resulting data to their inspectors by whom, when verified, they are forwarded to military headquarters. The especial categories which claim the attention of the German authorities are the following:—
(a) Generals and officers of superior rank and high repute.
(b) The staff-college professors at Saint-Cyr, the École Polytechnique and Saint-Maixent, the disciplinarians, bursars and superior employés of these institutions.
(c) The managers of all arsenals and military establishments.
(d) All aides-de-camp and staff-officers.