The information which these ambulatory amateur spies collected was undoubtedly precious. It assisted in the spread of German commerce and German ideas. Our enemies worked on the principle that every little helped, and that the observations of a spectacled professor tramping through France could be turned to almost as much use as those of a professional spy, working under cover of a bank or an insurance company like the Viktoria zu Berlin in Paris, which our friends and Allies the French very soon closed down. The sum-total of the efforts of all these amateur and professional spies was enormous, and would indeed have led to the domination of Europe by the Teuton but for his inborn crass stupidity.
I wonder when we shall really learn to know the true character of the German? French people, who long ago put a stop to Teuton tricks, are amazed to hear that we still allow the enemy to remain in our midst, and that we actually help them to carry on their businesses, just as though the war never existed. "Are you aware of the fact," I have often been asked by Parisian friends, "that these large German concerns were nothing more or less than gigantic spying organizations?"
V—REVELATIONS OF THE SPY SYSTEM
Those who have any doubt about this should read the remarkable revelations of M. Georges Prade anent the Viktoria zu Berlin Insurance Company, the premiums of which represented over eighty million pounds. In the Paris offices of this company, in the Avenue de l'Opéra, M. Prade discovered a peculiar organization called the Special Büro. The employés of this office were all Germans, between twenty-five and thirty years of age, and officers in the German reserve. They spent from five to six months in France, received forty pounds a month each, with an allowance for travelling expenses, and spent their time motoring all over France. Eastern France and the Alps was their favourite region. Naturally they all disappeared a few days before the German mobilization in July, 1914. Whilst these men were spying out the land, their colleagues in Paris were performing equally useful work for the German Government, "establishing an exact estimate of the public fortune, a useful element in assessing war taxation and indemnities," and otherwise obtaining valuable information. The Viktoria, for example, offered special terms to French officers. It insured them, without extra charge, against war risks, and, through the medium of visiting agents, advanced money at very reasonable terms on their policies. The Berlin offices of the Viktoria thus secured the names of all the French officers who owed it money, an excellent arrangement indeed on which to base an organization for spying.
One of the most astounding institutions in Paris before the war was a free German school, open to children of all nationalities, where instruction was given entirely in German, and French was treated as a foreign tongue. Naturally history and geography were taught from the German standpoint, and a love of Germany and the Kaiser was dinned into the pupils. Stranger still, none of the professors held a French certificate, a sine qua non for a French teacher, or were even naturalized. Yet in 1908 one of them was even decorated with the Legion of Honour.
Side by side with this instance of "peaceful penetration" may be placed that of a commercial agency, the Agence Schimmelpfeng, which existed in Paris for years, and, under the guise of a society for giving confidential information to commercial houses and their customers, covered a most elaborate and minute spy system, with central offices in Berlin. To give but one example of the work of this agency, it knew the name of every baker in the East of France, how many men he employed, and the exact number of sacks of flour he used per week. Thus the German military authorities knew almost to a loaf how much bread could be counted on for an invading army.
German spies were always particularly active in Eastern France. Another precaution they took was to secure all the contracts for coal for the frontier forts, in order to be able to withhold supplies at a critical moment and thus render them useless. On a par with this was the establishment of a German chemical works adjoining an airship factory, which they were ready to supply with hydrogen just as long as it suited them. The arrangement had this additional advantage: when any little hitch occurred with a machine, German workmen were always ready with their help. A French dirigible had thus no secrets for them.
Supplies and the methods by which as complete a control of them as possible could be obtained must have been made the study of a special section of the Secret Service department in Berlin. It is not curious that in 1912 a German firm should have succeeded in obtaining the contract for the exclusive furnishing of lubricating oil for the French army motor-cars? But this is nothing in comparison with the plans laid for getting possession of the iron-fields of Normandy and a certain part of the French Channel coast.
VI—STORY OF A "GERMAN GIBRALTAR" IN NORMANDY
Germany, lacking iron ore, obtained extensive concessions of land in Normandy and annually sent vast quantities of mineral to Krupp's, where it went to the making of munitions to be used against the Allies. In the extraction of this ore only German machinery, worked by German coal, was used. Simultaneously our arch-enemy got possession of a place called Diélette, eighteen miles west of Cherbourg, and constructed there a deep-water port, capable of accommodating vessels of fifty thousand tons. The ostensible purpose set forth by the concessionnaires was the shipping of ore and the working of a submarine iron-mine, but the real object was made clear when the German newspapers, in their bragging way, began to write about Diélette as the "German Gibraltar." And a German Gibraltar it would have become but for Great Britain's intervention in the war. For if France had not had our Navy behind her, nothing would have been easier than to land German troops at Diélette. The port and arsenal of Cherbourg would have been but a mouthful for the Huns, the western side of Cherbourg, owing to the natural disposition of the land, being undefended, as it has always been looked upon as impregnable. And so it was until the port of Diélette was constructed.