The personnel consists of all classes of men and women. Princes and counts, lawyers and doctors, actors and actresses, mondaines of the great world, demi-mondaines of the half-world, waiters and porters, all are made use of as occasion requires. It may well happen that your interesting acquaintance in the saloon of an express steamer, or your charming companion in the tea-room of the Ritz, is the paid agent of some Government.
A sinister side of the profession is also revealed; grave risks are run by the spy even from his own side. A woman named Olga Bruder, whose death in a hotel on the Russian border was described as suicide, is said to have been poisoned; a Lieutenant von Zastrov was compelled to fight duels until he was at last killed. They knew too much, Graves declares, and the death sentence came from their own employers. One can well believe it, for the records of German espionage show that in their own interests the Germans stick at nothing.
One episode which Graves relates concerns a famous dancer, still living, whom the Germans believed to be a Russian Government spy. They suspected that she had an "affair" with a young officer in the Potsdam garrison, and one night they became interested in a gold "vanity bag" which the young officer had given to her; they believed it contained some secret military intelligence. How they got possession of it was very clever.
The dancer was at supper at the Ice Palace in Berlin, and her bag lay on the table. A "clumsy" waiter upset a glass of champagne on the cloth. Instantly the cloth was whipped off, and, with the bag inside it, was taken away. A moment or two later back came the waiter with the bag and many apologies. The waiter was a clever spy, and in the moment or two that he had been absent the incriminating letter had been secured. The bag was offered to the dancer, who at once opened it, and finding the letter had disappeared, promptly said the bag was not hers. But she was put over the frontier just the same.
Many more cases might be cited to show the ramifications of the German spy system in England, but I have selected the foregoing as typical, and most of the others follow more or less the same general outline. They all point to the same conclusion: that the number of German agents in England is endless, that they are to be found in all places and in all ranks of society, that they are clever and daring to the last degree, and that nothing is too large or too small for their attention. Many of them, no doubt, have been interned; many of them, no doubt, are still at work, risking everything in their ceaseless efforts to bring about our undoing. There is only one effective protection—to make a clean sweep of all Germans and Austrians, naturalised or not, and confine them in the concentration camps until the war is over. Treat them properly, by all means, but put them out of the way of doing us harm.
This drastic measure, it is true, will not protect us against the traitor within our gates, but it would at least do much to remove the greatest source of peril.
27,000 ALIENS AT LARGE IN GREAT BRITAIN