It should be noted that the nationality of a spy is not material; neutrals found guilty may be punished as though they were the enemy subjects. Many Chinese who spied for the Russians during the Russo-Japanese War were executed by the Japanese. One of them was a Chinese officer, and the Government of China demanded an explanation. The Japanese reply was quite unequivocal, and insisted on the right to punish spies, no matter of what nationality.
As I have said, all nations spy in the interests of national self-preservation. It is not the fact of German espionage that has roused the indignation of the civilised world against her. We have no feelings even of resentment against such men as Carl Lody, though, of course, we are entitled to protect ourselves against them. They owe us nothing, and they are clearly doing their duty in trying to help their country. What has aroused anti-German feelings—which are not likely to die out for many years—is the baseness of the German method: systematic "planting" of agents who, for years, have posed as the friends of those among whom they lived, yet have not hesitated to betray them in the first shock of war. Thousands of paid German spies have deliberately become naturalised Frenchmen, Englishmen, and Belgians, as a mere cloak for their efforts to betray the country of their adoption. Hundreds of thousands of Germans accepted for years as friends in this country, bearers even of British honours, have abused our hospitality, and added the vilest treachery to the blackest ingratitude. While posing as our friends, they have worked their best for our undoing, and—worse still—they have suborned and made traitors of poor men, to whom the lure of gold of this kind is simply that it is "not cricket," and for the false friend, not for the open enemy, the British people reserve their bitterest scorn and contempt.
A REMARKABLE SPY
Of the many cases of espionage which have come before the British public recently, surely none exceeds in interest and importance that of Carl Hans Lody, who, after trial by court-martial, was shot in the Tower of London early in November. Lody was the first secret-service agent shot in England after the outbreak of war, and the first person executed in the Tower since the middle of the eighteenth century.
Lody, beyond all question, was a very remarkable man. Before going into the details of the charge against him, it is well worth while to recall some of the leading features of his career.
Born in Berlin, he was only thirty-five, yet he had seen enough of life and the world to have satisfied many men of double his age. There is hardly a corner of the civilised world into which he had not travelled. He had been much in America, and it was a considerable help to him, in his work as a secret-service agent, that he spoke English with a decidedly American accent. This, no doubt, explains the fact—of which more presently—that he posed as an American, and used an American passport, which really belonged to a certain Mr. Charles A. Inglis.
It was as Mr. Charles A. Inglis that Lody arrived in England early in August. He knew England and Scotland well, and he is believed to have been in this country once or twice earlier in the year. Originally, he served in the German Navy; after he left he became a steward on the liner "Hamburg." In the meantime he married a very handsome American woman, to whom, apparently, though the marriage did not turn out very happily, he was very deeply attached.