The adventures of Heine

Ward, Lock & Co., Limited London And Melbourne 1929

Contents

Chapter I. Alexander and the Lady Chapter II. The Man who Dwelt on a Hill Chapter III. The Lovely Miss Harrymore Chapter IV. The Affair of Mister Haynes Chapter V. The Man from the Stars Chapter VI. The Affair of the Allies’ Conference Chapter VII. The Word of a Prince Chapter VIII. The Jermyn Credit Bank Chapter IX. Mr. Collingrey, M.P.--Pacifist! Chapter X. The Grey Envelope Chapter XI. The Murderers Chapter XII. The Passing of Heine Chapter XIII. The U-Boat Adventure Chapter XIV. Brethren of the Order Chapter XV. The World Dictator Chapter XVI. The Syren Chapter XVII. The Coming of the Bolsheviks Chapter XVIII. The Going of Heine Endnotes

The Adventures Of Heine

Chapter I. Alexander And The Lady

Secret Service work is a joke in peace time and it is paid on joke rates. People talk of the fabulous sums of money which our Government spend on this kind of work, and I have no doubt a very large sum was spent every year, but it had to go a long way. Even Herr Kressler, of the Bremen-America Line, who gave me my monthly cheque, used to nod and wink when he handed over my two hundred marks.

“Ah, my good Heine,” he would say, stroking his stubbly beard, “they make a fool of me, the Government, but I suppose I mustn’t ask who is your other paymaster?”

“Herr Kressler,” said I earnestly, “I assure you that this is the whole sum I receive from the Government.”

“So!” he would say and shake his head: “Ah, you are close fellows and I mustn’t ask questions!”

There was little to do save now and again to keep track of some of the bad men, the extreme Socialists, and the fellows who ran away from Germany to avoid military service. I often wished there were more, because it would have been possible to have made a little on one’s expenses. Fortunately, two or three of the very big men in New York and Chicago knew the work I was doing, and credited me with a much larger income than I possessed. The reputation of being well off is a very useful one, and in my case, it brought me all sorts of commissions and little tips which I could profitably exploit on Wall Street, and in one way or another I lived comfortably, had a nice apartment on Riverside Drive, backed horses, and enjoyed an occasional trip to Washington, at my Government’s expense.

I first knew that war was likely to break out in July. I think we Germans understood the European situation much better than the English, and certainly much better than the Americans, and we knew that the event at Serajevo--by the way, poor Klein of our service and an old colleague of mine, was killed by the bomb which was intended for the Archduke, though nobody seems to have noticed the fact--would produce the war which Austria had been expecting or seeking an excuse to wage for two years.

If I remember aright the assassination was committed on the Sunday morning. The New York papers published the story on that day and on the Monday afternoon I was summoned to Washington, and saw the Secretary, who was in charge of our Department, on the Tuesday evening after dinner.

All the big people, even his Excellency, called me by my Christian name, for I was at college with many of the officials who are prominent in the world to-day, and I served as volunteer in the engineers of the guard and afterwards served a probation on the Great General Staff, Survey Department.

The Secretary was very grave and told me that war was almost certain, and that Austria was determined to settle with Serbia for good, but that it was feared that Russia would come in and that the war could not be localised because, if Russia made war, Germany and France would also be involved.

Personally, I have never liked the French, and my French is not particularly good. I was hoping that he was going to tell us that England was concerned, and I asked him if this was not the case. To my disappointment, he told me that England would certainly not fight; that she would remain neutral, and that strict orders had been issued that nothing was to be done which would in any way annoy the English.

“Their army,” he said, “is beneath contempt, but their navy is the most powerful in the world and its employment might have very serious consequences.”

It seemed very early to talk about war, with the newspapers still full of long descriptions of the Serajevo murder and the removal of the Archduke’s body, and I remembered after with what astounding assurance our Secretary had spoken.

I must confess I was disappointed, because I had spent a very long time in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, establishing touch with good friends who, I felt, would work with advantage for me in the event of war. I had prepared my way by founding the Chinese News Bureau, a little concern that had an office in Fleet Street and was ostensibly engaged in collecting items of news concerning China and distributing them to the London and provincial press, and in forwarding a London letter to certain journals in Pekin, Tientsien and Shanghai.

Of course, the money was found by the Department, and it was not a financial success, but it was a good start in case one ever had to operate in London, since I was registered as a naturalised Chilian and it was extremely unlikely that Chili would be at war with any European Power.

I could not see what there was to do in New York, where the ground was so effectively covered. We had a police force of our own associated with the Bremen-America line. We had reservist organisations in every big town, and both the military, naval and commercial investigation--I will not use the hateful word “espionage”--was in good hands, and I looked like being at a loose end and subordinate to people who were my inferiors, if I remained in America.

On the 3rd August, 1914, I received a message from Washington in the Departmental code, telling me that war with England was inevitable and that I was to sail on the first boat and take up my duties in London in full control of the British Department.

I was overjoyed with the news and I know that men like Stohwasser, Wesser, and other men of my Department, looked at me with envy. They did not think they had an easy task because the American Secret Service is a very competent one; but they thought I was a lucky pig--as indeed I was--to be operating in a country containing a population of forty millions, most of whom, as one of their writers said, were fools.

The English are, of course, a very thick-headed people, as I have reason to know. They are childish and unsuspecting, and you have only to ask for valuable information to get it. The Scotch, or Scots, are shrewder in business, but very simple people, practically ignorant, as are the English, of European politics, and very naïve in all matters affecting the State.

Moreover, as I have discovered on several of my visits, the Scots are not particularly well disposed to their southern neighbours, and I have heard many insulting references made by one against the other. It is quite a common thing to hear the expressions of scorn as a “close-fisted Scot” or “a pudding-headed Englishman,” whilst in Wales neither the Scots nor the English are popular.

Ireland, of course, was in a constant condition of rebellion, and I looked forward with great pleasure to witnessing and inflaming the little domestic quarrels which I knew would arise as soon as war broke out.

I landed at Liverpool on August 11th. My passport was in order and I immediately went forward to London. There was no trace of any excitement. I saw a lot of soldiers on their way to their depôts; and arriving in London, I immediately received the reports of our innumerable agents.

With what pride did I contemplate the splendid smoothness of our system!

When the Emperor pressed the button marked “Mobilise,” he called, in addition to his soldiers, a thousand gallant hearts and brilliant minds in a score of countries all eager and happy to work for the aggrandisement of our beloved Fatherland.

Six of us met at a fashionable restaurant near Trafalgar Square. There were Emil Stein, who called himself Robinson, Karl Besser--I need not give all their aliases--Heine von Wetzl, Fritz von Kahn and Alexander Koos.

Stein had arrived from Holland the night before and Fritz von Kahn had come down from Glasgow where he had been acting as a hotel porter. These men were, as I say, known to me, and to one another, but there were thousands of unknowns who had their secret instructions, which were only to be opened in case of war, and with whom we had to get in touch.

I briefly explained the procedure and the method by which our agents would be identified. Every German agent would prove his bonâ fides by producing three used postage stamps of Nicaragua. It is a simple method of identification, for there is nothing treasonable or suspicious in a man carrying about in his pocket-book a ten, twenty or a fifty centime stamp of a neutral country.

I sent Emil Stein away to Portsmouth and instructed him to make contact with sailors of the Fleet, especially with officers. Besser was dispatched to a West Coast shipping centre to report on all the boats which left and entered. I sent Kahn and his family on a motor-car tour to the East Coast with instructions to find out what new coast defences were being instituted.

“You must exercise the greatest care,” I said; “even though these English are very stupid, they may easily blunder into a discovery. Make the briefest notes of all you see and hear and only use the Number 3 code in case of urgent necessity.”

We finished our dinner and we drank to “The Day” and sang under our breath “Deutschland über alles” and separated, Koos coming with me.

Koos was a staff officer of the Imperial Service, and though he was not noble, he was held in the greatest respect. He was a fine, handsome fellow, very popular with the girls, and typically British in appearance. His English was as good as mine, and that is saying a great deal. I sent him to Woolwich because in his character as an American inventor--he had spent four years in the States--he was admirably fitted to pick up such facts as were of the greatest interest to the Government.

I did not see Koos for a few days and in the meantime I was very busy arranging with my couriers who were to carry the result of our discoveries through a neutral country to Germany. The system I adopted was a very simple one. My notes, written in Indian ink, were separately photographed by means of a camera. When I had finished the twelve exposures, I opened the camera in a dark room, carefully re-rolled the spool and sealed it so that it had the appearance of being an unexposed pellicle. I argued that whilst the English military authorities would confiscate photographs which had obviously been taken, they might pass films which were apparently unused.

I had arranged to meet Koos on the night of August 17th, and made my way to the rendezvous, engaging a table for two. I had hardly seated myself when, to my surprise, Koos came in accompanied by a very pretty English girl. He walked past me, merely giving me the slightest side-glance, and seated himself at the next table. I was amused. I knew the weakness of our good Koos for the ladies, but I knew also that he was an excellent investigator and that he was probably combining business with pleasure. In this I was right. The meal finished--and the innocent laughter of the girl made me smile again--and Koos walked out with the girl on his arm.

As he passed my table he dropped a slip of paper which I covered with my table-napkin. When I was sure I was not observed, I read the note.

“Making excellent progress. Meet me at a quarter to eleven outside Piccadilly Tube.”

I met him at the appointed time and we strolled into Jermyn Street.

“What do you think of her?” was Koos’ first question.

“Very pretty, my friend,” said I. “You have excellent taste.”

He chuckled.

“I have also excellent luck, my dear Heine.” Even well-born people call me by my Christian name, as I have before remarked, though I do not boast of this because my father’s mother was a von Kuhl-Hozeldorf and I am in a sense related to the best Würtemberg nobility. “That lady,” went on Koos, “is the daughter of one of the chief gun-constructors at Woolwich.”

He looked at me to note the effect of his words, and I must confess I was startled.

“Splendid, my dear fellow!” said I, warmly. “How did you come to meet her?”

“A little act of gallantry,” he said airily; “a lady walking on Blackheath twists her ankle, what more natural than that I should offer her assistance to the nearest seat? Quite a babbling little person--typically English,” he added dryly.

I laughed again.

“I could have done very well without her assistance, of course,” he went on; “as a matter of fact, I had met one or two very excellent Englishmen who, with their usual penchant for boastfulness, were able to supply me with particulars of a new gun-lathe of which they are very proud. In fact, I have got the rough drawings, but the little lady----”

He raised his eyes to the heavens and chuckled joyfully.

“My dear friend,” he said impressively, “she is a mine of information. An only daughter and a little spoilt, I am afraid, she knows no doubt secrets of construction of which the technical experts of the Government are ignorant. Can you imagine a German talking over military affairs with his daughter?”

“The English are a little mad, as I have remarked before,” said I. I then closely questioned Koos as to the activity of the police. It was naturally to be expected that Woolwich would be well guarded and that strangers would arouse suspicion.

“There is no English secret police,” said my friend cheerfully; “there is a special department at Scotland Yard whose footsteps you can hear a mile away, but a secret service, as it is understood in Germany, or even in America, does not exist, except in the fervid imagination of romantic novelists.”

“I only asked you,” I said hastily, “for fear that this girl should be watched.”

“You can dismiss that possibility from your mind,” smiled Koos.

By this time we had reached the end of Jermyn Street and had turned down St. James’s Street toward the Palace, and our conversation was naturally interrupted, for we had to speak in English and there was rather a crowd of people. It was not until we had reached the Mall, comparatively deserted, that Koos continued this story.

“You need not worry. The girl is romantic--an idealist.”

“And you are the ideal, you dog!” said I.

He twisted his moustache, by no means ill-pleased at the accusation.

“Some men have that power of attraction,” he said modestly. “I am rather sorry for the little thing.”

“What have you learnt from her?” I asked.

Koos did not reply for a moment, then he said:

“So far, very little. I am naturally anxious not to alarm her or arouse her suspicions. She is willing to talk and she has access to her father’s study and, from what I gather, she practically keeps all the keys of the house. At present I am educating her to the necessity for preserving secrecy about our friendship and to do her justice, she is just as anxious that our clandestine meetings should not come to the ears of her father as I am.”

We walked along in silence.

“This may be a very big thing,” I said.

“Bigger than you imagine,” replied Alexander; “there is certain to be an exchange of confidential views about artillery between the Allies, and though we have nothing to learn from the English, it is possible that the French may send orders to Woolwich for armament. In that case our little friend may be a mine of information. I am working with my eyes a few months ahead,” he said, “and for that reason I am allowing our friendship to develop slowly.”

I did not see Koos again for a week, except that I caught a glimpse of him in the Café Riche with his fair companion. He did not see me, however, and as it was desirable that I should not intrude, I made no attempt to make my presence apparent.

At the end of the week we met by appointment, which we arranged through the agony column of a certain London newspaper.

I was feeling very cheerful, for Stein, Besser, and Kahn had sent in most excellent reports, and it only needed Alexander’s encouraging news to complete my sum of happiness.

“You remember the gun-lathe I spoke to you about,” he said. “My friend--you may regard the blue prints as in your hands.”

“How has this come about?”

“I just casually mentioned to my little girl that I was interested in inventions and that I had just put a new lathe upon the market in America and she was quite excited about it. She asked me if I had heard about the lathe at Woolwich, and I said that I had heard rumours that there was such a lathe. She was quite overjoyed at the opportunity of giving me information and asked me whether in the event of her showing me the prints I would keep the fact a great secret, because,” he laughed softly, “she did not think her father would like the print to leave his office!”

“You must be careful of this girl,” I said, “she may be detected.”

“There is no danger, my dear fellow,” said Alexander. “She is the shrewdest little woman in the world. I am getting quite to like her if one can like these abominable people--she is such a child!”

I told him to keep in communication with me and sent him off feeling what the English call in “good form.” I dispatched a courier by the morning train to the Continent, giving details of the British Expeditionary Force. Only two brigades were in France--and that after three weeks of preparation! In Germany every man was mobilized and at his corps or army headquarters weeks ago--every regiment had moved up to its order of battle position. Two brigades! It would be amusing if it were not pathetic!

Besser came to me soon after lunch in a very excited state.

“The whole of the English Expeditionary Force of three divisions is in France,” he said, “and, what is more, is in line.”

I smiled at him.

“My poor dear fellow, who has been pulling your foot?” I asked.

“It is confidentially communicated to the Press, and will be public to-morrow,” he said.

“Lies,” said I calmly, “you are too credulous. The English are the most stupid liars in the world.”

I was not so calm that night when I ran down in my car to Gorselton, where our very good friend, the Baron von Hertz-Missenger, had a nice little estate.

“Heine,” he said, after he had taken me to his study and shut the door. “I have received a radio through my wireless from the _Kriegsministerium_[1] to the effect that the whole of the British Expeditionary Force has landed and is in line.”

“Impossible, Herr Baron,” I said, but he shook his head.

“It is true--our Intelligence in Belgium is infallible. Now, I do not want to interfere with you, for I am but a humble volunteer in this great work, but I advise you to give a little more attention to the army. We may have underrated the military assistance which Britain can offer.”

“The English army, Herr Baron,” said I firmly, “is almost as insignificant a factor as--as well--the American army, which only exists on paper! Nevertheless, I will take your advice.”

It was necessary to humour the good baron who, although a naturalised British “subject” (which, of course, means absolutely nothing), is nobly born and is indeed a member of the Hesse-Hohenlohe princely-descended family.

We talked a little while about the British. I told the Herr Baron what I had said about the British Secret Service, and he quite agreed.

“I have been in this country for twelve years and I have met everybody of importance,” he said, “and I can assure you there is no Secret Intelligence Department such as we Germans have brought to such perfect efficiency. As you know, I am a racing man, and I meet with all sorts of people, good and bad, and I can endorse all that you say.”

I went back to town and dispatched another courier, for as yet the Torpington Varnish Factory (about which I will tell you later) had not been equipped with Radio.

That night I again saw Alexander. It was at supper at the Fritz, and he looked a fine figure of a man. I felt proud of the country which could produce such a type. Where, I ask you, amongst the paunchy English and the scraggy Scotch, with their hairy knees and their sheep-shank legs, could you find a counterpart of that _beau sabreur_? Cower, treacherous Albion, shiver in your kilt, hateful Scotch (it is not generally known that the Royal and High-Born Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria is rightful King of Scotland), tremble, wild Wales and unreliable Ireland, when you come in arms against a land which can produce such men as Alexander Koos!

I never saw a girl look more radiantly happy than did the young woman who was sitting _vis-à-vis_ my friend. There was a light in her eye and a colour in her cheeks which were eloquent of her joy.

I saw Alexander afterwards. He came secretly to my rooms.

“Have you brought the blue print?” I asked.

He shook his head smilingly.

“To-morrow, my friend, not only the blue print of the lathe, not only the new gun-mounting model, but the lady herself will come to me. I want your permission to leave the day after to-morrow for home. I cannot afford to wait for what the future may bring.”

“Can you smuggle the plans past the English police?” I asked, a little relieved that he had volunteered to act as courier on so dangerous a mission.

“Nothing easier.”

“And the girl--have you her passport?”

He nodded.

“How far shall you take her?”

“To Rotterdam,” he said promptly.

In a way I was sorry. Yes, I am sentimental, I fear, and “sentiment does not live in an agent’s pocket,” as the saying goes. I wish it could have been done without. I shrugged my shoulders and steeled my soul with the thought that she was English and that it was all for the Fatherland.

“You must come to the Café Riche to-night and witness our going,” said Alexander; “you will observe that she will carry a leather case such as schoolgirls use for their books and exercises. In that case, my friend, will be enough material to keep our friends in Berlin busy for a month.”

I took leave of him, giving him certain instructions as to the course he was to take after reporting at Headquarters, and spent the rest of the night coding a message for our Alexander to carry with him.

I snatched a few hours’ sleep between telephone calls, and rising at noon I read the morning papers (full of lies, as are all British papers, though the Americans are worse) and went through the picture postcards which my kind friends von Kahn and von Wetzl had sent to me. If you had seen those postcards with their long “holiday messages,” I wonder if you would have taken a magnifying glass to search for minute pinpricks under certain letters and words? I did, because I was a chief of a bureau unequalled in the world for ingenuity and prescience.

The hour at which Alexander was to meet the girl was eight o’clock in the evening. His table (already booked) was No. 47, which is near the window facing Piccadilly. I telephoned through to the café and booked No. 46, for I was anxious to witness the comedy.

All was now moving like clockwork--and let me say that the smoothness of the arrangements was due largely to the very thorough and painstaking organisation-work which I had carried out in the piping days of peace. We Germans have a passion for detail and for thoroughness and for this reason (apart from the inherent qualities of simplicity and honesty, apart from the superiority of our kultur and our lofty idealism) we have been unconquerable throughout the ages.

For example, we had foreseen the necessity in organizing our Intelligence Department, to employ, not Germans, but subjects of neutral states wherever possible. People who talk of “German spies” or “the uninterned German peril” cannot realise that from the moment war broke out, all Germans, known as such, were under the observation of the police, and not only the police but their own neighbours. It would be impossible, as I had foreseen, for such men to offer assistance to our great and splendid cause, because the least suspicious movement on their parts would result in their arrest. I have a considerable respect for the Scotland Yard routine investigation. No, my sirs, you do us no justice when you talk of “German spies.” Search not for the “Hun,” as in the bitterness of your impotent rage you call us, but for the----

I think that I have said that much of my time was taken up by answering telephone calls.

You must remember that I was in London as the representative of a Chinese News Bureau. I was also an agent for a firm of importers in Shanghai. It was therefore only natural that I should be called up all hours of the day and night with offers of goods.

“I can let you have a hundred and twenty bales of Manchester goods at 125.”

Now 120 and 125 added together make 245, and turning to my “simple code” to paragraph 245, I find the following:

“2nd Battalion of the Graniteshire Regiment entrained to-day for embarkation.”

The minor agents carried this code (containing 1,400 simple sentences to cover all naval or military movements) in a small volume. The code is printed on one side of very thin paper leaves, and the leaves are as porous and absorbent as blotting paper.

One blot of ink dropped upon a sheet will obliterate a dozen--a fact which our careless agents have discovered.

Clipped in the centre of the book (as a pencil is clipped in an ordinary book) is a tiny tube of the thinnest glass containing a quantity of black dye-stuff. The agent fearing detection has only to press the cover of the book sharply and the contents of the book are reduced to black sodden pulp.

Need I say that this ingenious invention was German in its origin.[2]

My days were therefore very full. There came reports from all quarters and some the most unlikely. How, you may ask, did our agents make these discoveries?

There are many ways by which information is conveyed. The relations of soldiers are always willing to talk about their men and will tell you, if they know, when they are leaving, the ships they are leaving by, and will sometimes give you other important facts, but particularly about ports and dates of embarkations are they useful.

Also officers will occasionally talk at lunch and dinner and will tell their women folk military secrets which a waiter can mentally note and convey to the proper quarters. Our best agents, however, were barbers, tailors, chiropodists, and dentists. English people will always discuss matters with a barber or with the man who is fitting them with their clothes, and as almost every tailor was making military uniforms and a very large number of the tailors in London were either German or Austrian, I had quite a wealth of news.

Tailors are useful because they work to time. Clothes have to be delivered by a certain date and generally the man who has the suit made will tell the fitter the date he expects to leave England. Other useful investigators are Turkish-bath attendants and dentists. A man in a dentist’s chair is always nervous and will try to make friends with the surgeon who is operating on him. Of all agents the waiter is in reality the least useful, because writers have been pointing out for so many years the fact that most waiters were German. But the truth is that most restaurant waiters are Italian, and it is amongst the bedroom waiters that you find a preponderance of my fellow countrymen.

Another department of my work which kept me busy was the money-lending department. I had initiated a system of inquiry into the financial affairs of officers and I was able to keep track of all officers who were in financial difficulties. This department had been a very great disappointment to us, for in spite of the fact that we had the power to ruin hundreds of careers, we have never been able to employ that power profitably. The British officer is absolutely unscrupulous and has no sense of honour. Often our agents have offered to release them from their liabilities in return for some trifling service and these people have preferred to live under the odium of owing people money, to securing an honourable release from their debts; by some simple little obliging act, such as giving us particulars of their brother officers’ losses at cards, and the like. And that is what is called English honour!

Is it not more dishonourable to owe money you cannot pay than to whisper a few little secrets about men who probably are as dishonourable as yourself? However, to return to Alexander and his inamorata.

Prompt at eight o’clock, I took my place at the table and ordered an excellent dinner (my waiter was naturally a good German) and a bottle of Rhenish wine. A few minutes after I had given my order Alexander and the girl arrived. She was dressed in a long travelling coat of tussore silk, and carried--as I was careful to note--a shiny brown leather portfolio. This she placed carefully on her lap when she sat down and raised her veil.

She looked a little pale, but smiled readily enough at Alexander’s jests.

I watched her as she slowly peeled off her gloves and unbuttoned her coat. Her eyes were fixed on vacancy. Doubtless her conscience was pricking her.

Is it the thought of thy home, little maid, from whence thou hast fled never to return? Is it the anguished picture of thy broken-hearted and ruined father bemoaning his daughter and his honour? Have no fear, little one, thy treason shall enrich the chosen of the German God, the World Encirclers, Foreordained and Destined to Imperial Grandeur!

So I thought, watching her and listening.

“Are you sure that everything will be all right?” she asked anxiously.

“Please trust me,” smiled Alexander. (Oh, the deceiving rogue--how I admired his sang-froid!)

“You are ready to go--you have packed!” she asked.

“As ready as you, my dear Elsie. Come--let me question you,” he bantered; “have you all those wonderful plans which are going to make our fortunes after we are married?”

So he had promised that--what would the gracious Frau Koos-Mettleheim have said to this perfidy on the part of her husband?

“I have all the plans,” she began, but he hushed her with a warning glance.

I watched the dinner proceed but heard very little more. All the time she seemed to be plying him with anxious questions to which he returned reassuring answers.

They had reached the sweets when she began to fumble at her pocket. I guessed (rightly) that she was seeking a handkerchief and (wrongly) that she was crying.

Her search was fruitless and she beckoned the waiter.

“I left a little bag in the ladies’ room--it has my handkerchief; will you ask the attendant to send the bag?”

The waiter departed and presently returned with two men in the livery of the hotel.

I was sitting side by side and could see the faces both of the girl and Alexander, and I noticed the amusement in his face that two attendants must come to carry one small bag.

Then I heard the girl speak.

“Put your hands, palms upward, on the table,” she said.

I was still looking at Alexander’s face.

First amazement and then anger showed--then I saw his face go grey and into his eyes crept the fear of death.

The girl was holding an automatic pistol and the barrel was pointing at Alexander’s breast. She half turned her head to the attendants.

“Here is your man, sergeant,” she said briskly. “Alexander Koos, alias Ralph Burton-Smith. I charge him with espionage.”

They snapped the steel handcuffs upon Alexander’s wrists and led him out, the girl following.

I rose unsteadily and followed.

In the vestibule was quite a small crowd which had gathered at the first rumour of so remarkable a sensation. Here, for the first time, Alexander spoke, and it was curious how in his agitation his perfect English became broken and hoarse.

“Who you are? You have a mistake maken, my frient.”

“I am an officer of the British Intelligence Department,” said the girl.

“Himmel! Secret Service!” gasped Alexander, “I thought it was not!”

I saw them take him away and stole home.

They had trapped him. The girl with the sprained ankle had been waiting for him that day on Blackheath. She had led him on by talking of the plans she could get until he had told her of the rough plans he already had. Whilst (as he thought) he was tightening the net about her, she was drawing the meshes tighter about him.… Phew! It makes me hot to think of it!

Was there a secret service in England after all?

For myself, my tracks were too well covered; for Alexander I could do nothing. He would not betray me. I was sure of that. Yet to be perfectly certain I left the next night for Dundee, and I was in Dundee when the news came that Alexander had been shot in the Tower of London.

Chapter II. The Man Who Dwelt On A Hill

When I left London hurriedly, after the arrest of Alexander Koos, I must confess that my mind was greatly disturbed. I sat half the night in my sleeper, turning over all the circumstances leading up to the arrest of my good friend. We Germans are the most logical people in the world. We argue with precision from known facts, and we deduce from those facts such subtle conclusions as naturally flow.

We do not indulge in frivolous speculations--we Germans are a serious people with a passion for accurate data.

Thus I argued: (1) If a secret police force had been established it is a post-war creation. Otherwise our general staff would have known of its existence and have advised us. (2) Supposing a secret service had been initiated where would its agents be found? Naturally in the vicinity of the great arsenals and military camps. Under these circumstances it was not surprising that Koos, confining his investigations to Woolwich, had been brought into contact with a member of this new organisation. (3) It was humanly impossible that the operations of an improvised secret service could be extended in a few days to areas other than military and arsenal areas. Therefore, it behoved the investigator to avoid as far as possible arousing suspicion by pursuing his inquiries in the neighbourhood of arsenals and camps.

When I had reached this conclusion I was much comforted. I had no desire to take unnecessary risks. It seemed certain to me at that time, that the war would not last longer than three months. Koos had thought it would be over in two months, but I felt that he erred on the side of optimism. So that the period of risk was not a very prolonged one, and if I were wise and discreet and succeeded in impressing my subordinates with the necessity for similar discretion, there was no reason why we should not return to the Fatherland with a flawless record to receive those honours which the Supreme War Lord bestowed upon the faithful servants of our beloved Deutschland.

At eight o’clock in the morning I was taking my breakfast in the station-buffet at Edinburgh. Von Kahn was awaiting me, and over the meal, served by a sleepy waitress, I had an opportunity of retailing the events which had led to my hasty departure from London. Von Kahn stroked his moustache thoughtfully.

“Koos was an impetuous man,” he said, “I am not surprised that he has been detected. You must not forget, my dear Heine, that we Germans have only one thought, only one goal, the welfare of the Fatherland. Koos allowed his penchant for feminine society to overcome his judgment. That is a mistake which I should never make.”

I looked at our good von Kahn, with his big red face and his short, well-fed body, and I could not help thinking that it would be indeed a remarkable circumstance if he allowed himself to be lured to destruction in such a manner.

He joined the train and went on with me to Dundee. We had not gone far from the station before the train stopped and an attendant came in and pulled down all the blinds, removing, in spite of our protest, all our baggage, which he locked in an empty compartment.

“What is the meaning of this?” I demanded.

“I am very sorry, sir,” said the man, “but those are my orders.”

For a moment I had a cold feeling inside me that I was suspected, but his next words reassured me.

“We do it to everybody, sir, before we cross the ---- Bridge.”

When he had gone I turned to von Kahn.

“This is an extraordinary thing,” I said. “I never suspected the English of taking such intelligent precautions.”

Von Kahn laughed.

“The English here are Scots,” he said, “and they are very cautious.”

I should have dearly liked to peep out when the rumble of the wheels told me we were passing the famous bridge, but in the corridor outside the carriage I discovered, to my amazement, a Scottish soldier with fixed bayonet, and for some reason or other his eyes never left us.

It was not until we were a very long way past the bridge that the attendant returned my bag and suit-case and pulled up the blind, and not until we reached Dundee that I discussed the matter at all with von Kahn.

“I have reason to believe,” he said, “that we have passed a portion of the British Fleet, and it will be my endeavour during the next few days to discover what units are at present in the region of Rosyth.”

He told me this in the cab on the way to our hotel and he also gave me a great deal of information about the East Coast defences which it had been his business to investigate.

“It is practically impossible to get near the important parts of the coast,” he said, “and I think you must give up all idea of establishing light-signal stations at X and Q.”

This was a sad disappointment to me, which I did not attempt to hide.

“My dear von Kahn,” I said testily, “you are getting hypnotised by the English. You are giving them credit for gifts which are not theirs. You are imagining that these people, these Scotch for example, have the same keen national sense of suspicion as we Germans possess.”

We drove the rest of the journey to an hotel in silence. I registered here in the name by which I was known to the Chilian Legation.

I had never been in Dundee before and I hope I may never see the town again, for reasons which will be sufficiently obvious to all the good friends who read my narrative.

Dundee is a sad, grey town, so grim on the rainy morning I arrived, that I was filled with a strange sense of foreboding. It is a city of high chimney-stacks that stream smoke, and of clanging tramway cars.

I don’t know whether it was my imagination, or due to the shock of poor Koos’ arrest, but it also seemed that it was a town of graveyards, for whichever way I went I seemed always to return to one drear space of tombstones and sad trees.

My local agent here was a barber named Shmidt, and the first thing I did on my arrival at the hotel was to send for a barber! What was more natural than that a weary traveller should require shaving! Ah! do not smile, my friends! By such acts of forethought and detail was our great service built up and wonderfully established. Our good friend came with his little black-leather bag and was admitted to my room. The honest fellow was almost overcome by the sight of one whom he regarded as being a veritable link between himself and his Supreme War Lord.

“It is beautiful to be able to speak our noble German tongue again,” he said; “think of it, Herr Heine! Here I am week in and week out talking Scotch--not even English.”

He had much to tell me that I committed to memory. He even had had the good fortune to be called in professionally to an admiral who was passing through Dundee on the way to a certain town in the north.

“Naturally,” said Shmidt, “I was extremely tactful and suspicion-avoiding. But, Herr Heine, not even the high officers of State know discretion. Reticence is not!

“‘I wish you’d take me with you, Sir Jones,’ I said; he was well-born and had been created a Sir for war knowledge.

“‘Come along,’ said Sir Jones, ‘but I’m afraid you will not be comfortable when our fleet goes into action next week against Heligoland.’

“‘That is a strong fortress, Admiral,’ I said.

“‘We have been undermining it for a month,’ said Sir Jones.

“Herr Heine, I nearly fainted with excitement. Consider the position. Here was I, a faithful servant of the Fatherland, listening to one of the most important military secrets from an Excellency of the English Navy. I kept my blood cool and went on lathering without a tremble of hand.’

“‘That must have been terribly difficult, Sir Jones,’ I said.

“‘Not at all,’ said Sir Jones; ‘we have a new submarine on wheels that creeps along the bed of the ocean and fortunately there are beneath Heligoland several very large caves in which our divers can store explosives. I trust you will regard all I have told you as confidential!’”

By the time Shmidt had finished I was on my feet. I knew that there had been a secret vote or appropriation for the British Navy a year before. So this was the reason.

“Send Herr von Kahn to me, you will find him in Room 84,” I said; and long before my companion had arrived I was working at my codes.

“We must find a way to get this information to Germany,” I said.

“The way is simple,” said he; “the _Sven Gustavus_ is in harbour, waiting to clear for Bergen. She has wireless, and outside of the territorial waters she can get into touch with the Bremen wireless station.”

The message I sent was a long one, and I have since learnt that it created something like a sensation at the Admiralty. All the warships in the vicinity of Heligoland were ordered away, the Corps of Divers came from Cuxhaven and the foundations of the island were thoroughly explored, although the Admiralty Marine Survey Department was emphatic on the point that no caverns existed under the island.

As a matter of fact none were discovered, though a certain suspicious-looking hole was found in one of the rocks.[3]

I cannot believe that a High Officer of State who was also a Sir would condescend to a lie or be so frivolous as to invent such a story, and to this day I believe that my promptitude in notifying Berlin in all probability saved the Fatherland from an incalculable disaster. It was after I had sent this message away, together with certain data which I received from London, that I set about the business which had induced me to choose Dundee as the scene of my sojourn.

Scotland had an importance in our scheme which many people have made the mistake of under-estimating. To appreciate that importance, let us examine the nature of the German Plan in the event of war. Britain’s strength and weakness lay in her great extent and in the homogeneous nature of her people. In this respect she resembled the Royal and Imperial Empire of Austria-Hungary, with its German, Magyar, Czec, Slav and Jugo-Slav, Italian, Serbian, and Roumanian subjects. Austria-Hungary, however, had this advantage, that whatever views might be held, whatever dissatisfaction and dissensions might exist amongst the peoples, the Empire was organised for control by a certain authority. Britain was not so organised. The English hated the Irish, the Welsh hated the English, the Scotch despised both, and the Irish hated everybody, including themselves. At the outbreak of war the north and south of Ireland were on the brink of civil war, a great strike was pending in Wales (of this more anon), and the Scottish industrial classes, particularly on the Clyde, were in a state of unrest.

Outside of the island kingdoms we had an Egypt ripe for rebellion, with the Khedive on our side, we had India seething with sedition, and South Africa organised for revolt under two of the most popular of the Boer Generals in De la Rey and De Wet. Our task was, of course, to drive the wedges of dissension still deeper, and largely my work was specialised in this direction, for now the routine of gathering naval and military information was so smoothly-running that there was nothing for me to do but to sort out the news which came to me and pass it along to the proper quarters.

And here I might explain that there were in reality two branches of Investigation. There was my own, which comprehended all the hackwork of espionage and propaganda, and there was the Higher Service with which I was seldom brought into contact. The Higher Service was unpaid but skilfully organised. Its members were practically unknown to one another, though most of them were known to me and watched by my agents. We Germans leave nothing to chance. In Scotland, living not a very long way from Dundee, was one whom for certain reasons I regarded as a good friend of ours and who was known locally as “Mr. Brown from Australia.”

He had a cottage in the loveliest part of the Highlands,[4] where he lived for three months in the year, spending his time in fishing one of the little rivers in the neighbourhood. Beyond that he was eccentric and had had a big flag-staff erected before his cottage on which he used to fly the Australian flag, little was known of him.

He had few visitors. His cottage was on an inhospitable spur of the hills, which was more often than not wreathed in the low-lying clouds or mists which seem to be a permanent feature of this country.

Now and again a member of the Mounted Constabulary would ride up and exchange a few words or even go inside for a glass of refreshment when he saw the flag flying, which was always a sign that Mr. Brown was in residence.

He had one servant, a Swiss youth, who was valet, groom and cook.

I have said about the Higher Service that I knew most of the members. Some of the names had been officially supplied to me, before my return to England to take up my work, by von Igel, who was practically in charge of all the commercial work in New York. Some of them I had already located on my previous visits to England; while some were so important, so well-born and so well-connected with Illustrious Excellencies, that not only were their names withheld from me but I was discouraged whenever I applied to Headquarters for information.

My local agents in Scotland had already marked down Mr. Brown, of Australia, and I had put through an inquiry about this gentleman, informing the _Kriegsministerium_ that he was evidently well educated, that he was a fluent German scholar, and that he belonged to a superior London club, much frequented by ministers and attachés. Obviously his name was not “Brown,” and the two surreptitious views I secured of him, one close at hand and one through powerful field-glasses, left no doubt in my mind that he was a son of the Fatherland. We Germans have an instinct one for the other, a sort of sixth sense due to our common kultur and to our higher human development.

Headquarters could tell us nothing, and I thought I detected a certain discouragement in the wording of the brief message which came through to me, and drew my own conclusions. There were certain peculiarities about Mr. Brown which strengthened my resolve, and von Kahn, who had paid two visits to Glen Macintyre, was even more emphatic.

“It is not my desire, as you well know, von Kahn,” said I, “to intrude myself into illustrious circles, but there is every reason, in view of the fate of poor Koos, why we should get in touch with every friend we can muster.”

There is only one other incident of my stay in Dundee to record, and that is a curious one. In my rôle as a Chilian importer, I carried a fairly large sum of money, and to emphasize my association with the South American Republic, and the international character of my business, it was my custom in every new town I visited to call either on a money-changer or the principal bank, and request an exchange of British money for my foreign notes.

Accordingly I went into the Dundee branch of the Bank of Tayside and producing a small bundle of notes asked for their British equivalent. There were, I remember, twelve hundred _peses_ notes of Chili, a ten-condor note of Ecuador, a hundred-franc note of France and a hundred-franc note of the Bank of Switzerland.

The teller took the money, counted it and jotted the totals down until he came to the Swiss note. He looked at the note and then looked at me. Then he pushed the note back.

“We cannot change Swiss money,” he said.

I scented a mystery--possibly some hidden diplomatic trouble with our good Swiss neighbour.

“Why?” I asked. “The Swiss exchange is above parity.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” said the clerk decisively, “but we are not changing Swiss notes.”

He added some lame story about a large number of Swiss forgeries being in circulation, but I sought a deeper reason. There had been a frontier incident. Two or three English newspaper correspondents had been arrested at Bale and there had been certain hints in the Paris newspapers that a member of the Swiss General Staff had been conveying information to our own staff. Here was a matter on which I could very well consult “Mr. Brown,” if von Kahn’s inquiries satisfied me as to his bonâ fides.

I started off next morning, accompanied by von Kahn, who had left his family at an East Coast watering place, fully determined to over-ride the objections which Berlin had shown and to establish communication with “the hermit of the Glen,” as I had, with a little touch of true German sentimentality, described him.

We went across Scotland, changing at Stirling, and in the evening I came to the little town which was the nearest point on the railway to Mr. Brown’s residence.

Stirling was interesting. It was full of soldiers in their picturesque kilts.

“Ah, my fine fellows,” thought I pityingly, “how little you know of the humiliation in store for you!”

In six months’ time these proud regiments who were marching to the station with bands and banners would come creeping back, possibly under a German guard! Little did they think, these officers who sat chattering so frivolously on the station, that the unobtrusive man in knickerbockers and rough stockings, watching them so innocently, was a member of the dominant race and an officer of that great secret service which has no parallel in the world.

But to resume my narrative. The next morning, at six o’clock, I rose and knocked on the door of von Kahn’s room. He was up and dressed, and after a hasty breakfast we were soon flying through the morning sunlight to our destination.

Four miles out of the town we left the main road and pursued a narrow cart-track which led gradually up to the hills. The road crosses a saddle of one of these ridges, then drops steeply into a broad green valley, through which runs two rivers.

We stopped at the top of the hill and von Kahn pointed out the shooting-box which stood on the crest of the farther rise--a little white building.

“Our Mr. Brown is at home,” he said and pointed to the flag, a yellow flag with a red lion in the centre, the same being the secret standard of Scotland, which is always flown in defiance of the English, whose banner is the Union Jack.

We had discussed our plans thoroughly the night before because, obviously, nothing could be left to the last, and it would have been extremely dangerous to have talked in the presence of the chauffeur of our hired car.

I have always made it a point to have no dealings with anybody outside our own service, and I had arranged with von Kahn to undertake all negotiations with this stranger. I said good-bye to my friend and wished him good luck, and I watched him as he descended a steep footpath and walked along the little road that led to the farther hill.

I sent the chauffeur back to the main road, telling him to rejoin me at noon, and profitably spent the time of waiting by exploring ground and coding a message on the Swiss incident, for transmission to Germany. Through my glasses I could watch from time to time the progress of my comrade. I saw him climb the hill and stand before the door of the cottage, and presently a man came out. They talked together for about ten minutes and then they both disappeared into the interior.

It was not until half-past ten that von Kahn made his appearance again. I saw him shake hands with his host and wave his hand cheerily, and three-quarters of an hour later he rejoined me on the crest of the hill.

“Well?” I asked.

There was no need to ask von Kahn. His eyes were gleaming with triumph.

“I can only say,” said he, “that our Mr. Brown is a remarkable man.”

“In what way?”

“He speaks German, he reads German, and he is German,” said von Kahn emphatically, “he has a library of all the German classics. I discovered that when he was out of the room. His flag-post obviously supports a wireless aerial in the night-time, and although he is bland and uncommunicative, I have no doubt whatever about his character. He is one of the Higher Service.”

I nodded.

“Did he give you any hint----?” I began.

“Not a word,” said von Kahn emphatically; “he speaks splendid English, is well acquainted with Australia, and pretends that he is a wealthy pleasure-seeker with no other interest than fishing and shooting.”

“I hope you were tactful,” I said suddenly.

Von Kahn smiled.

“My dear Heine,” he said, “you need have no apprehension. I whistled a certain little tune you know, and he finished it without hesitation. He is not only in the Higher Service, but he stands very high in the Higher Service.”

To make absolutely sure, we returned that night, and in company with von Kahn I crossed the valley and climbed the hill.

I was half-way up the hill when I heard a familiar sound. If you can imagine the rattling of dried peas in a tin canister shaken at irregular intervals, you know the sound that wireless makes, and that a wireless message was being tapped from the cottage on the hill there was no doubt. More than this, the unknown Mr. Brown had taken elaborate precautions to avoid detection. We climbed the hill a little higher and suddenly my foot caught an obstruction. I flashed my electric lamp down and saw that I had snapped a tiny wire.

Instantly the “clickety-click” of the wireless ceased. There was a stealthy footstep at the top of the hill and I guessed that the aerial was being taken down and that it would be stowed and hidden, together with the instruments, long before any intruder could reach the cottage.

“Go up now,” I whispered to Kahn; “go quickly and reveal yourself.”

I handed him the message I had coded and which I had brought with me.

“Give him your official number, show him your credentials, and ask the illustrious gentleman to send this message through.”

Kahn took the message without a word and began the ascent. I watched him, not moving from my position and presently I heard him challenged sharply.

“It is I,” said von Kahn’s voice and, like the bold fellow that he was, he spoke in German.

Some one replied in the same language. There was a brief exchange of question and answer, and the three--the Swiss valet was evidently present--disappeared into the cottage, and a few minutes later I saw the red glow of a light from the windows.

I was sorely tempted to creep up and listen. After all, there was no reason why von Kahn alone should have an opportunity of meeting this well-born gentleman who might be in a position to speak a favourable word in the highest quarters regarding myself. Then, again, I was not sure that von Kahn would fulfil his mission to my satisfaction.

We Germans trust nobody. Probably that is one of the reasons of our phenomenal success in dealing with people of less kultural eminence than ourselves.

I determined to risk it, and keeping as much in the shadow as possible, and feeling gingerly for other wire signals, I made my way to the little platform upon which the cottage stood. We had specially put on rubber-soled shoes for the night’s work, and I moved noiselessly. The door was closed, but there was no difficulty in discovering the room to which von Kahn had been taken. I crept nearer to the window.

The two men were talking and laughing and, thank heaven! their speech was German.

“But how do I know,” I heard Mr. Brown say, “that you are not a member of the British Secret Service?”

“For the matter of that,” said von Kahn jovially, “how am I to know that your Excellency is not also of that phantom body?”

And they both laughed together.

I heard the clink of a bottle on a glass and two hearty “Prosits,” and then Mr. Brown spoke again.

“Now what can I do for you? I suppose you know that you ought not to have come anywhere near me? How did you find me out? Was it the ever-to-be-condemned tune I whistled?”

Von Kahn chuckled.

“I have known about you for a long time,” he said, “and as I am in need of help I thought I would take the bull by the horns and seek this interview.”

“Are you alone?” asked Mr. Brown.

“Quite alone,” said von Kahn promptly.

“I mean, were you alone in making the discovery?”

“Quite alone,” said von Kahn again.

“Then you are a remarkably shrewd fellow,” laughed Brown.

I can tell you it made my blood boil to hear this swine-hound taking all the credit for this discovery. Little he knew that I was standing outside the window listening to his immodest perfidy! Could he not have said, “No, Excellency; the credit is due entirely to my respected chief, whose name I am forbidden to mention. I am merely an instrument in a superior hand?” Oh, no! In his vanity and deceit he must take full kudos to himself. Would he go any farther? Almost as I framed this question he spoke.

“I would ask your Excellency,” he said, “if you ever refer to this meeting to the illustrious Chief of Naval Intelligence that you will give him a testimonial.”

I could hardly restrain myself. For one second it was in my mind to rap sharply at the window and denounce this underling. But, fortunately, I restrained myself, though I was boiling with rage. We Germans have a keen sense of justice and are inherently, almost transparently, honest, and nothing so distresses us, so angers us, as duplicity and ingratitude.

“But surely,” said Mr. Brown’s voice, “you did not come alone to-night.”

I waited.

Just as I had been anxious for von Kahn to give me full credit, so was I now as anxious to hear him deny my presence. I do not know what it was that brought this revulsion of feeling, whether it was something in the tone of Mr. Brown or some instinctive flash of knowledge that all was not well, but I sweated as I stood waiting for the answer which seemed an eternity in coming, though in reality it was only a second or so.

“No, I assure you, Herr Brown,” said von Kahn, “I came alone.”

“That makes matters simple,” said Brown’s voice, and as he spoke the light went out. I heard von Kahn shout, but his voice was instantly muffled.

There was a struggle, a thud that seemed to shake the little building, a groan, and then silence.

I had my automatic pistol in my hand in a second.

Should I go to his rescue and take the risk of capture or should I leave him to his fate? It was a terrible decision I was called upon to make. We Germans do not shrink from our responsibilities, nor are we governed by the foolish sentimentality which dictates the actions of the commoner tribes. I made my way down the hill with great rapidity. You may say that I was leaving a comrade to his fate, but I answer that when one cog of a wheel breaks off do the other cogs disintegrate themselves in sympathy. We were part of a great machine, von Kahn and I, and my action, if it needed such justification, was justified by the events which followed.

I was within fifty yards of the narrow road which winds along the base of the hill when I thought I heard a sound before me and I stopped, flattened myself on the ground between two bushes, and listened. There was no doubt that I had reason for my suspicions. I heard, not one stealthy footfall, but a dozen, and, peering up, I saw against the artificial sky-line which I had created by lowering myself to the earth, half a dozen shadowy figures. The nearest was ten yards away and my heart came to my throat when I saw a gleam of light upon the tunic of a policeman.

They were police, undoubtedly, and they were making their way up the hill in such a manner as led me to believe that the hill itself was practically surrounded. I watched, holding my breath. The first of the figures passed not two yards away, the second on my right less than a yard. I waited until they were well up the hill before I moved, and then I wriggled forward with the utmost caution, for I thought it was possible that they had left a guard on the road. This view proved to be correct as I had not got far before I saw a man pacing the roadway.

Fortunately his beat was long and I was able to gain the road and cross it.

I found myself in a field of cabbages. Here again luck was with me, for running along two sides of the field was a deep ditch. Into this I sank and with great labour reached the opposite hill, on the top of which, hidden in a small copse, were the two motor bicycles which had brought us on our night adventure.

Here again German forethought saved me from what might have been destruction. Von Kahn had suggested we should have the chauffeur and the car we had in the morning, but as I pointed out, this would have aroused suspicion, and so instead we had hired two motor bicycles, not from the town in which we were staying, but one five miles farther along the line from whence we had set forth upon our quest.

Near by the copse, as I had seen earlier in the day, was a disused quarry overgrown with vegetation. Swiftly I wheeled Kahn’s bicycle to the edge and flung it over. It would remain undiscovered for at least a few days, and possibly for ever, unless a search was made.

To leap upon the other motor cycle and to go flying down the road was the work of a few minutes. I confess I was agitated and nervous. Who was this mysterious man who lived at the top of the hill? How did he know we were coming that night and was so sure of the hour that he could surround his house with policemen to trap us? Why had he assaulted my friend when he and his servant could have overcome him or have held him at the point of a revolver until the police arrived?

My position was a precarious one. Von Kahn had been seen with me in Dundee and obviously my business was to make myself scarce. It was half past eleven that night when I rode up to the cycle dealer’s in X----, and knocked at the door. The town was asleep and the street deserted, but the man had been expecting our return and was waiting up.

He looked surprised at my muddy appearance and more surprised at the absence of my companion. I apologized to him, and told him that my friend had been called away to London and had ridden down to a station on the main line. I think he was most surprised when I offered to buy the cycle I was using and also to buy that of von Kahn. I told him that I had taken a liking to the machine and that von Kahn had similarly expressed a wish to retain his. The price he fixed was a fairly moderate one--we had already paid a large deposit--and I concluded the bargain there and then.

I was anxious, of course, to finish this business of the motor-cycles in order that I should not set on foot independent inquiries as to their whereabouts, inquiries which would certainly have identified me with von Kahn.

Taking on a supply of petrol and trimming my lamp, I set out for Dundee, arriving at my hotel a little after four o’clock in the morning. After some difficulty I aroused the night porter, a sleepy old man whose name, I remembered, was Angus, and went to my room, packed my small valise and, awaiting my opportunity, stole out of the hotel, strapped my bag to the carrier of the bicycle, and rode through the drear, menacing streets of Dundee for the last time.

Twenty miles out of Dundee all trace of the mysterious person who had disappeared from his hotel leaving a £5 note to cover his bill and a polite request that his letters should be forwarded to the Majestic Hotel, London, vanished. A cool young Englishman joined an early morning train to Edinburgh at an intermediate station, and certainly that cool, young Englishman in his grey tweeds and his eye-glass bore no resemblance to the muddy cyclist in soiled overalls who had crossed the river at Perth and had excited the attention of a certain mounted constable.

That cool young Englishman, perfect in every detail, might have been seen leaving the Central Station at Glasgow that same afternoon not only accompanied by his valise but by a large portmanteau which he had taken from the cloak-room at the station and which with characteristic German foresight he had caused to be forwarded to Glasgow on the night he left London for Dundee.

I had communicated with London by telephone. Nothing had been heard of von Kahn, but the whole of my service in England was now on the _qui vive_. Posser, one of my assistants, was on his way to Glasgow to confer with me, and half a dozen agents in that town were busy investigating the mystery of the man on the hill.

I was sitting at dinner that night in one of the fashionable restaurants of Glasgow, a restaurant approached through a magnificent marble vestibule, searching the latest edition of the papers, hoping for two lines which would give me a clue to von Kahn’s fate, when a staring headline met my eye and I gasped.

“Swiss Forgers: Sensational Arrests at Glen Macintyre.

“The Sheriff’s Court at Stirling was crowded to-day when Emil Zimmwald, alias Brown, a Swiss, Louis Swart, Swiss, and Heinrich Kahn, also described as a Swiss, were remanded on a charge of forging Swiss bank notes. Inspector Macguire, of the Stirling Constabulary, stated that the prisoner Zimmwald, who called himself Brown, rented a cottage at Glen Macintyre, Swart posing as his valet. The two men were well-known international forgers, and had been engaged in printing a very large number of Swiss bank notes. The attention of the police had first been attracted to the house owing to the noise of working of the small printing machine which the prisoners used for their nefarious purpose. On raiding the premises the prisoner Kahn was discovered in a dazed condition. There had evidently been a quarrel and Kahn had been struck. The prisoner Zimmwald made a rambling statement to the effect that Kahn was a detective who had been sent to arrest him, but this highly improbable story will be investigated by the sheriff at a later sitting. The man Kahn resolutely refuses to make any statement at all.”

My poor von Kahn! Thou shalt go down in Scottish history as a confederate of forgers and shall spend many years in that grim penitentiary at Perth, pleading guilty to a crime abhorrent to thee, lest the confession of thy true crime lead thee to a firing party in the chilly dawn!

Chapter III. The Lovely Miss Harrymore

In America, where the German and Austro-Hungarian population is so much larger than in any other foreign country, the work of my department is split up into three sections. There is a naval, a military, and a commercial branch, each under an expert controlling and distinct organization which could, however, be co-ordinated in the event of war. In the United Kingdom there was no separation of interests, and the root organization, that which I controlled, covered, after the outbreak of the war, all three departments.

And let me say here for the information of my good friends who may perhaps imagine I am boasting, that when I describe myself as “controlling” the organization, I may inadvertently deceive. The exact position was that I had organized my department, dug the channels through which would flow the streams or rivulets of information; that I myself had been in the position of the central reservoir which collected and refined and transmitted the information so received. It does not necessarily mean that because I was the architect that I was necessarily the tenant of the fabric which I had created.

All the time in the first months of war there were great comings and goings. Men arrived from Germany, from America, from Switzerland, Sweden, and Holland, with forged passports, each charged with a distinct and separate mission. Lody, whose name you may have heard, came in the guise of a tourist agent, having certain definite discoveries to make and certain propaganda to forward. Other men came from America on similar missions. Some of these were gentlemen of the very highest character who were not associated with me in any way, but nevertheless sought me out in order to secure my assistance for the development of their plans. Of their adventures I know little. Whether they returned to Germany or not I am unable to say. Some got away and some were caught, but in what manner I never knew.

I was loath to believe, and, indeed, did not believe, that a Secret Service existed in Britain. There were, of course, detectives and plain clothes policemen, whose task it was to watch railway and steamship arrivals, but obviously it was impossible in the space of a few weeks to create such a bureau as exists in the Wilhelmstrasse, or that over which Captain von Treutchen presides with such distinguished success in the Admiralty Buildings.

In November, 1914, I received orders direct from Berlin--the first I had ever received--telling me that I must devote myself entirely to industrial propaganda. I was informed that the sum of £12,000 had been placed to my credit in the West London and Birmingham Bank, and I was told to make my headquarters at Manchester in the capacity of buyer for a well-known firm of Chilian importers with whom my chiefs had a working arrangement.

I arrived at Manchester late one misty afternoon and made my way to the best hotel, where rooms had been reserved for me.

I went to the desk and registered, and upon seeing my name the clerk informed me that two gentlemen were waiting for me in the palm court.

“I don’t know whether you want to see them, sir,” he said; “I think they are commercial travellers.”

“I will see them in my room, if you will be good enough to send them up,” said I, and five minutes later the “commercial travellers” were shown in to me and introduced themselves as representatives of the Incorporated Carolina Cottonfields Company.

“I am afraid I am rather tired to-night,” said I; “but as you seem in a hurry to do business I will compare your quotations.”

When the door had shut upon the waiter who had shown them in we got to business. One, of course, was my friend Posser, and the other was young Klein, one of those brilliant children of the Fatherland, who had been in the service of the department ever since he left Heidelberg.

“We are ordered to place ourselves at your disposal, Herr Heine,” said Klein, “and we have been here two days investigating the conditions.”

“Are they favourable?” I asked.

“Extremely so,” said Posser; “but you will have an opportunity of judging for yourself.”

We exchanged experiences, and half an hour later I rang the bell for the waiter and my visitors were shown out. After I had dined I left the hotel for the rendezvous I had made outside the post-office.

It was now raining heavily, and I would like to have taken a taxi, but Klein suggested that we should make our way on foot to our destination, which proved to be a very small hall in some unsavoury part of Manchester. It was a dilapidated building, the entrance door being flush with the street and had the appearance of being a mission hall dedicated to one of those dour and unhappy sects which find a virtue in the very dreariness of their environment.

Two nights a week it was used for religious services, but on the other nights it was let out to whosoever cared to hire the place. On this occasion some sort of Labour meeting seemed to be in progress and a small bill attached to an inner baize door leading to the hall itself announced an address by Mr. William Craigmair on “Labour and the War.”

The hall was sparsely filled and I do not suppose there were more than fifty people present when we walked in and took our seats. The man who was speaking was of the usual demagogic type, loud-mouthed, illogical, full of bitter jibes at Capitalism, which he said was the cause of the war and at the bottom of the whole European crisis.

Klein nudged me.

“Imagine this in Berlin!” he whispered.

I nodded. It was indeed pathetic, and only shows how wholly inefficient the English police service is that it allowed such men to be at large.

I sat through the tirade, a little bored if the truth be told, because this was to be the least interesting part of the evening.

After the meeting was over Klein told us to go out and wait for him, and presently he rejoined us accompanied by a man whom I recognized as the speaker, Mr. Craigmair. He introduced us as sympathizers with the cause of Labour, and I congratulated this gaunt Englishman upon his “wonderful rhetoric,” though worse balderdash I had never heard in my life.

The man’s harsh arrogance melted under this well-directed stream of Teutonic flattery and he became almost human in the glow of our admiration.

“I am much obliged to you, gents,” he said, grinning; “speakin’ impartially, I can say it wasn’t a bad speech for a self-taught man. Any Sunday afternoon you happen to be in Finsbury Park you will find me there addressing the proletariat.”

“Finsbury Park?” said I. “Do you come from London?”

“Yes,” said the man. “Our comrade here,” he nodded to Klein, “persuaded me to go round delivering a few addresses to the working classes. I’ve got a lot of friends in this part of the world,” he went on, “and you mustn’t judge me on the audience I got to-night. I am addressin’ the Junior Operatives’ League to-morrow and then you _will_ see an audience if you like.”

I murmured my intention of being present, expressed my sympathy with the Labour movement, and invited him to meet me at lunch on the following day.

When we had parted Klein told me that he had first heard the man addressing meetings in London, either at Finsbury or in Hyde Park.

“He was such a fanatic, and he had, moreover, such a convincing way that I thought we might find him useful. I know you think what he says is nonsense,” Klein went on, addressing me; “but what is illogical to us is sound sense to the common workman. To-morrow’s meeting, for example, is of the greatest importance to us. The Junior Operatives have threatened to strike against the advice of their Trade Union, and as they have a working arrangement with the Carters’ Union, a strike would be of the utmost importance. Whilst I do not expect we can do very much in the early stage of the war to bring about a general stoppage of labour, we can embarrass the Government, and who knows how these little labour troubles may develop!”

I quite agreed with Klein, who is a psychologist of a very high order, in addition to being well born, his mother being a Frenheim-Hazebrucken, and her sister being married to Graf von Metzenheim, an illustrious gentleman with whom I once had the honour of taking wine.

Mr. Craigmair came to lunch the next day. In order not to excite attention I arranged with him to meet me at Lytham, and there we spoke frankly and freely. I told him how intensely interested we all were in the Labour movement, and I pointed out that this war might be brought to an end if some great leader arose from the people and seized his opportunity.

“For, Mr. Craigmair,” said I, “what is war but a negation of all law? Is it better that a few miserable capitalists and statesmen should be chagrined, or that thousands of human lives should be sacrificed in the red-hot pit of battle? Is it not better that these money-grabbers should be ruined than that innocent people who have no concern in the war and have no hatred towards any nation should be compelled to walk into the shambles like dumb beasts? If they tell you that it is not patriotic to attempt to stop a war, even though you may be acting contrary to the maddened sentiments of the majority of the people, you answer that there is no such thing as patriotism, that we owe our chief duty to humanity which knows no frontier and no language. For what is there more precious in the soil of England than in the soil of Germany or in France? Do they not equally produce wheat and sustain life? Has anyone a more precious value than another? Does one handful of red earth contain a magic quality which is not possessed equally by a handful of any other kind of earth? Patriotism is the shibboleth of the capitalist and the ambitious statesman, my friend, and he who opposes his will to that hateful creed is doing magnificent work for mankind.”

I spoke in this vein and I could see that Mr. Craigmair was impressed. He made little notes with the stub of a pencil upon what looked like a laundry-book, interrupting my remarks with uncouth sounds of admiration and approval.

I gave him £50, as a mark of my interest in his work.

“And on the day you bring the people out on strike I will give you another £50,” I said; “not because I am anxious to promote industrial discord, but because war is against my principles as a hateful and an unnecessary evil.”

I went back to my hotel feeling that I had done a good day’s work. I did not attend the meeting of the Junior Operatives, but I am told that it was very enthusiastic and that by an overwhelming majority the men and the women members had decided to strike, and had received a promise of support from the transport workers.

My interest in the Labour movement was momentarily diverted that same day by the receipt of a message from London--it was brought by courier on the afternoon train. The message was an important one, and had been received by radio direct from Potsdam, and had been decoded in London and transmitted to me for report.

News had reached Berlin that the firm of Pollygay & Moxon, a chemical firm on the outskirts of Manchester, were engaged in conducting secret experiments with a new bomb. The news had reached Berlin from a very reliable source. I believed that it had been mentioned after dinner at a well-known Bohemian club in London by an under-secretary in a certain Government department. He had spoken rather boastfully of “something” very deadly which the Government were experimenting with, and our agent, who was one of the party to whom this was told, discovered by a well-timed display of scepticism that the experiments were being conducted by Pollygay & Moxon, and had sent forward the information which, had I been in London, must have gone through me.

I put Klein on to the job immediately, and he called in the assistance of Craigmair, who apparently was in touch with workmen in most of the big factories, and fortunately numbered among his acquaintances a wretched German named Bluer, who was employed in the laboratories of the firm. As a matter of fact, we did not know of the existence of Bluer, a dour, taciturn man of the hateful socialistic type who had no patriotism, no love for his Fatherland, and was tainted with poisonous internationalism.[5]

This renegade, living in England, with excellent opportunity for serving the Fatherland, had never put himself into touch with the superior authorities, nor had he offered the slightest assistance to the officers of State, and it was only by accident that we discovered his existence. However, his internationalism served one good purpose. Though he might earn his livelihood by preparing deadly weapons for the destruction of his fellow-countrymen, he was in theory an opponent of war, and Mr. Craigmair, after a while, enlisted his sympathies and introduced him to Klein, who said he was an author engaged in writing a book painting war in its most horrible aspects. He also told him that he was compiling as long and as formidable a list of deadly weapons as he could secure.

“And when I have finished, my friend,” said Klein, “we shall have the most damning indictment of warfare that the world has ever seen.”

This interested Bluer and it was not long before he told of the secret experiments which had been conducted on the firm’s private range with the new hand grenade.

“I don’t know how it is made,” said Bluer, “because that is not in my department, and all the chemical experiments have been in the hands of the head chemist, but my brother-in-law is a night watchman and has the entry to the records office and I daresay I could give you a rough idea of what it is like.”

I was overjoyed to hear this news, the more so since I had received another, and even more urgent, message from Headquarters, telling me to spare no expense or pains to secure a specification.

I now come to the remarkable part of this narrative, one which I cannot tell without a little shudder. Bluer and his relative certainly made an attempt to locate the specifications and drawings. I will do this un-German Teuton (to whom Klein was eventually compelled to reveal something of his designs) the credit of saying that he tried his best--but for a week he and his relative were unsuccessful.

The manager was a gentleman named Tyson, or Tynson, a good-looking man of about twenty-eight. Naturally, I had set my people to work to find out all particulars about every member of the firm, and it was reported to me that Tyson had been frequently seen in the company of a very beautiful lady, named Miss Harrymore.

I put my own men on to discover something about Miss Harrymore, and found that she was a stranger to Manchester; that she had only arrived a month previous to my appearance on the scene; and that she occupied a small house which she had taken furnished in the most fashionable suburb of the Lancashire city.

She had come from London and almost immediately had made friends with the manager. This in itself was to me a most remarkable circumstance, because Manchester people are very suspicious, almost as distrustful as the Scotch, and I wondered what inducement there was to cause this young man to contract so sudden a friendship. They used to dine occasionally and they went to the theatre together once a week, but there was no evidence that the friendship was a very warm one. Miss Harrymore had been a dancer; but apparently had retired from the stage--at least that was the story which her maid told Posser, who investigated the matter.

I smoked many cigars over this friendship and formed certain conclusions, especially after I had learnt that on the nights Mr. Tyson was working late the lady had driven down to the factory in her car, had spent some little time in the manager’s office, and had driven that gentleman to supper.

I have already told you of my disbelief in the existence of a secret service in England, but I had modified that view after the experience of my poor friend Koos, who was brought to an untimely end through the artfulness of a chit of a girl.

Naturally I was suspicious of beautiful ladies who were on terms of furtive friendship with Government officials--and to all intents and purposes Tyson was a Government official--and I kept my eyes “skinned,” as they say in England.

The business of the bomb was worrying me more than I cared to confess to my assistants. A third message had come through from Berlin, even more urgent than the last, and one paragraph of that message considerably disturbed me.

It ran:

“Whilst we expect you to secure these plans we are leaving nothing to chance. We hope, however, that the credit for securing them will fall to you.”

I understood this significant passage. It meant that Berlin was sending independent agents to England to try their luck, and I was determined to justify myself in the eyes of the Fatherland.

I sent for Posser and Klein to come to my room and I outlined my views and gave my final instructions. Posser gave me encouraging news. He told me that Bluer had secured some information of the greatest importance. It appears that the Government had sent for a rough drawing of the bomb, and that one of the engineers was coming next night to make the drawing and a copy of the secret specification, and that the original was kept in a safe in the records office. The combination safe opened to the word “Track” and the specification would be found in No. 3 drawer, the lock of which could be picked.

So far, so good, but the situation was still desperate. It was as clear as daylight that my chief difficulty was going to be, not to circumvent the manager, but to get past the guard which the secret service had set up. It was then a struggle between Miss Harrymore and Heine. Very well! Heine picks up the gauntlet with a clear mind and a high confidence in his German genius.

Klein saw Bluer on the following afternoon and an unexpected difficulty arose. Bluer, if you please, had discovered a conscience! This renegade, this traitor to the Fatherland, this dirty Swabian refused to go any farther in the matter!

“The English have always treated me well,” he told Klein; “my children have been born in the country and I have friends here. I cannot help you any more, Herr Klein. I should not only be a traitor to the English, but a traitor to the Internationale, if I betrayed my employers. You have the combination word--I can do no more.”

“Are you a German?” asked Klein sternly.

“Ja!” replied Bluer, “but I’m not a fool.”

“If you refuse your help,” said Klein, who was by now filled with holy annoyance, “you are a traitor to your Kaiser and to your Fatherland. The curses of unborn generations of Germans will be upon you. Every German will shun you and spit upon your name, which shall be ‘accursed.’”

“Herr Klein,” said Bluer with emotion, “I think that anyway all the world will spit upon the name of a German after this war is over.”

Klein threatened and argued, pleaded and raved, but all to no purpose.

“I have told you where you will find the specifications,” said Bluer doggedly; “you have a plan of the factory--which is not guarded--and you know the way to the records room. In telling you this I have done more than I ought to have done. If you threaten me any more I will go for the police and tell them all I know.”

Ingrate! Rascal! Black swine of Würtemberg!

I paced my room cursing the villain, and Klein stood by in respectful silence as I “let off steam,” as the British say.

However, I soon mastered my rage and sat down to evolve a plan. We Germans can meet all contingencies and adapt our minds to any difficulty which may arise. I drew out the plan of the factory and soon Klein and I were deep in the discussion of the alternative scheme.

The factory was a straggling collection of buildings, enclosed on three sides by high walls and on the fourth by a canal, alongside of which ran a double-track railway siding. There were three gates and two small wickets, none of which were practical for our purpose, since there would be a night watchman at each, and, moreover, the records office was a fairly long distance from all. This squat building adjoined the main warehouse near the canal-siding and obviously it was from the canal that we must make our entrance. We had learnt that the wharf was patrolled by a watchman who had a little hut at the northern end of the quay, to which it was his habit to retire between eleven and twelve at night to make his coffee or tea, or whatever refreshment he favoured, and we decided that this should be the hour for our attempt.

Our plan was to paddle down the canal in a small collapsible canoe (an advertisement of which Klein had seen), wait our opportunity and land. With Klein’s equipment of keys and instruments we should have no difficulty in forcing an entrance, and the rest would be easy.

When we had agreed upon our scheme, Klein went off to Chester to purchase the boat, whilst I elaborated my plan for conveying the specifications to Germany.

I was working away at this all the afternoon, telephoning to certain garages, arranging routes and rendezvous, and reporting points, newspaper advertisement codes, etc., and had almost finished my organization work when the waiter brought me a card.

I took the paste-board from the salver and as I read the name I felt myself grow pale. It was--

Miss Angela Harrymore.

Yes, my friends, I confess it, in that second of time I experienced the gripping fear-panic which comes to such men as myself perhaps twice in a lifetime.

Prince Bismarck said: “We Germans fear God and nothing else,” but the Illustrious Highness was either a very religious man or he had never engaged himself in espionage work in an enemy country in the days of war; he had never looked into the cold and merciless eyes of a woman enemy; he had never confronted the possibilities of a grey dawn and a firing party…

“Show the lady up,” I said.

As soon as the waiter was gone, I took my Browning from my pocket, examined it and slipped its blank barrel under my left armpit, the butt concealed by the fold of my coat. Only thus can a danger-waiting man be sure that he has his pistol ready for use.

The door opened and I rose to meet the lady. She was, as far as I could judge, about twenty-six years of age. She was tall and willowy, and perfectly gowned in some blue stuff which admirably suited her fair complexion.

About her neck and shoulders was a Chinchilla wrap, which I valued at £250, and beneath the white kid gloves of one hand I saw the bulge of many rings. Her features were regular and aristocratic, her eyes blue and steadfast, her hair of pale gold. She was a type one meets as frequently in England as in Northern Germany or Denmark. In fine, the first impression I had was that she was of my own race, an impression helped very cleverly by her greeting.

“Good day, Herr Cannelli,” she said (Cannelli being the name I traded under), and she spoke in faultless German.

But, O gracious lady, Heine was on guard!

At all times, I think, I am clever and alert; at some times I may be a little too clever, but never am I caught napping.

I frowned, smiled, and shook my head.

“You are speaking German, are you not?” I asked in English. “I am afraid I do not speak that language.”

It was her turn to smile.

“Come, come!” she rallied me, “you are not going to pretend with me,” and she laid two slim fingers on her chin, the old sign--the pre-war sign--by which one recognized a member of the Admiralty Secret Service.

Aha! Gracious lady, thought I, would you try an old trick upon an old wolf! Do you not know that all the spy-revealing signs and make-knowing phrases had been changed on the outbreak of war? On me--on Heine--will you try these subterfuges!

“I do not speak your language, madam,” I said, shaking my head; “_harla usted Espanol_.”

I saw a shade of disappointment dim for a moment the brightness of her eyes, then she laughed.

“I don’t know why I thought you spoke German,” she said coolly and speaking in perfect English; “but somehow you reminded me of a man I once knew in New York--a gentleman called by his friends, ‘Heine.’”

She was watching me closely, but I never so much as blinked.

“I am indeed fortunate, madame, even to resemble one whom you have remembered,” I said; “but I have never been to New York except on one occasion, and then only for a few hours.”

“Then I’m sorry to have bothered you,” she smiled, and her smile was a radiance. “I saw you at dinner the other night and I was almost sure that you were the friend of other days who had sung ‘Es stehen unbeweglich.’”

I could have laughed! Again the old song and the old “code of recognition”--a code which had been changed for six months.

“My dear lady,” I said gently, “I have never sung in my life.”

She was baffled and showed signs of distress. She stood biting her lips and frowning into the fire until, recovering her self-possession, she smiled, shrugged her shoulders and offered me her hand.

“I am afraid you must think I am very stupid,” she said frankly, “but I could have sworn I knew you.”

I took her hand and conducted her to the corridor and to the lift, and summoned Posser.

Briefly I retailed all that had happened.

“There is no doubt about it at all,” said Posser; “she came to trap you. We must get out of Manchester to-night, and we must take with us the specifications.”

At eleven o’clock that night we slipped down the canal, Klein at the bow and myself at the stern.

Fortunately it was a dark night, with a thin fog, and we moved silently and unchallenged to our destination. Klein had made a very careful survey of the wharf and he guided the canoe to one of the big supporting piles up which ran a steel-runged ladder.

Klein made a reconnaissance. Looking along the wharf, we could see the little glass-windowed hut and the night-watchman standing before a small fire, evidently boiling his kettle. We tied the canoe to the ladder and moved noiselessly across the wharf.

The factory was in darkness, but we had no difficulty in discovering the records office, a small, dark building thrown out as an annex to the main machinery warehouse. To open the outer door was the work of a few seconds. We entered and closed the door behind us and found ourselves in a little wooden vestibule from which opened yet another door. To my surprise the inner door was not locked but still ajar.

Down the centre of the building ran a corridor and from this various doors led to offices. Our objective was the last on the left and quietly we crept forward and reached the door. I gently turned the handle in order to secure a grip and was inserting my skeleton key when I felt the door give. All my nerves were on edge. Things were going much too easy and I pulled my gun and slipped down the safety catch.

Now, as I pushed the door gently open I could have sworn I saw the faint reflection of a light, such a reflection as you would expect from the varnished matchboard-lining to the office, if some person had incautiously shown a light for a second. I hesitated on the threshold. The office was in darkness. There was no sound, no sign, and I thought that the light I saw must have been a reflection from one of the street lamps on the other side of the canal, until I remembered that the fog was quite thick enough to veil any of the outside lights. I stepped forward cautiously toward the safe, felt for and found the handle, and had replaced my pistol in my jacket pocket and was feeling for my electric lamp, when Klein whispered fiercely in my ear:

“_There’s someone in the room!_”

Almost as he spoke we heard a quick rustle and swish, and a figure dimly seen flashed across the room and through the door. At that moment I felt the safe-door swing back in my grasp, and I realized that we had come too late.

I was out of the office in a trice, flashed my lamp along the corridor, and caught just a glimpse of a woman’s figure as it disappeared through the door at the other end. She fled across the yard, we behind her, and disappeared in the gloom. There was no time to search for her. We had to consider ourselves. We scurried down the ladder and heard the hoarse challenge of the watchman. By this time we were in mid-stream and paddling furiously. It was too dangerous to keep to the canal, and at the first opportunity we found a landing place and reached a street, an ill-favoured, dingy slum, which suited our purpose very well.

Ten minutes rapid walking brought us to one of the main thoroughfares where we found a taxi-cab, and in the brief space of time between this discovery and our arrival at the hotel, I gave my instructions to Klein.

“She is evidently a member of the secret police,” I said, “and she got to know that we were after the specifications to-night and forestalled us. I think Manchester is a little too hot for you and me, Klein, and we will fade away.”

We dismissed the cab at the hotel and walked into the brightly-lighted vestibule, and came face to face with Miss Harrymore!

There was no doubt in my mind. There she stood, her face flushed with triumph. I could see the mud on her shoes, I recognized the fur-edged coat, and I realized my danger. She probably had a motor-boat waiting for her and had taken the short-cut back to the hotel in time to confront and denounce us.

In that moment all the latent genius of our race came to the surface. We Germans make our decisions quickly, boldly. With such rapidity did I act that I even surprised myself. Extending my forefinger I pointed at Miss Harrymore.

“This woman,” I said, “is a German spy. She has in her possession certain specifications and plans of a new and secret weapon.”

I said this in a loud voice and a quiet-looking man who had been sitting reading dropped his paper and springing up edged his way through the little crowd which had collected about us. I saw the girl go pale. I knew that she could not betray herself as a secret agent and that, found in possession of the plans, she would not be able to explain how she came by them.

The quiet-looking man moved to her side and caught her arm. “I am Inspector Lovell, of the Manchester Detective Department,” he said, “and on this gentleman’s accusation I shall take you to the Central Police Station.”

He told us to follow, and led Miss Harrymore out of the hotel. I gave a sign to Klein, and we followed, but not to the station.

Our big Mercédès was waiting round the corner and dawn found me in London, so changed in appearance that I doubt if the admirable Inspector Lovell would have recognized the man who had trapped Miss Harrymore.

So far this comedy goes and now comes the tragedy. I found in London, waiting for me, a code message from Berlin.

“Reference Polygay bomb. Fraulein von Liebmann of the Secret Service is in Manchester under the name of Miss Harrymore. She has love affair with manager and reports she can secure specifications. Assist her all you can. Instruct her in new code.”

It was signed by the High Chief of the Admiralty Intelligence. For an hour I was prostrate and then I coded my reply to Admiralty, Potsdam.

“In spite my efforts, Fraulein von Liebmann arrested in possession of specifications, which she carried against my wishes.”

I think it was an admirable explanation. As for the fraulein, it will be many years before she will be able to supply her personal narrative!

Chapter IV. The Affair Of Mister Haynes

In February, 1915, there occurred an event which I cannot pretend did not give me a certain amount of satisfaction, tragic and ever-to-be regretted as that event proved. I had constantly urged both upon the naval and military Intelligence Departments in Berlin that the work in England should be left entirely in my hands, and that I should not be badgered or embarrassed by amateurs being sent to operate in my territory, independent of my control and very often without my being acquainted with their presence or purpose.

I have already shown how lamentable can be the results if the illustrious Excellencies who direct our operations (in a manner, I hasten to add, which reflects the greatest credit to themselves, and brings the greatest profit to the Fatherland) take the work out of the hands of the skilled and intimately-understanding officials who have made Great Britain a life-long study, who appreciate the psychology, and have an insight into the habits and customs of the people whom Paoli (and not Napoleon) described as “Sono Mercanti,” or “a nation of shopkeepers.”

For I pride myself that I understand not only British character but British institutions. I am deeply intimate with the political sects and with the system of British journalism, and although the affair of Mister Haynes may seem to dispose of this latter claim, yet I think my friends, for whom this memoir is designed, will agree that the circumstances in the case of Mister Haynes were unusual. The event I refer to was the arrest of Herr Blaumberg, who was sent from America without my knowledge to secure an accurate list--“accurate” mark you!--of the warships which the British were laying down, especially in reference to the super-X battleships which were destined to prove Mr. Churchill’s happiest experiment.

Herr Blaumberg had no sooner landed than he was arrested. I received an inquiry from Wilhelmstrasse which was the first information I had of Herr Blaumberg’s foolish attempt to meddle in matters which he obviously did not understand. The second intimation was the official notice in the English papers:

“This morning a man, tried and convicted of espionage at the Central Criminal Court, was executed in the Tower of London.”

This, I believe, was Herr Blaumberg, and in my note to my superiors I could not refrain from urging the unwisdom of entrusting delicate and important work to any but those tried and trusted officials, who were acquainted with every move of the game and able not only to circumvent, but to anticipate the action of the official police.

Of course, the people in Berlin very emphatically restated their old parrot cry that there was a formidable secret service in existence and they sent me a cock-and-bull story (as the British say), that Herr Blaumberg had been shadowed from the moment he left America to the moment he arrived in the Mersey; that all his documents had been scientifically burgled and the fullest particulars of his mission had been transmitted by wireless long before he had reached England.

Thus do incompetent bureaucrats excuse their own lack of foresight!

I was in London when the news came, firmly established in my rôle of Chilian importer, and so well did I play my part, that I had secured certain little Government orders and was even assisted by Government officials, all unknowing, you may be sure, to the pursuit of my investigations.

It was on the very day that I read this doleful news of Herr Blaumberg’s sad end, that I made the acquaintance of Mister Haynes. I saw him standing on the corner of Bouverie and Fleet Streets--a tall, young, unshaven man, wearing pince-nez, and a very shabby suit. With one quick, comprehensive glance I sized him up. The bundle of various coloured pencils and the fountain-pen in his left-hand waistcoat pocket, the absence of watch and chain, the hat carelessly balanced on the back of his head, the hands thrust into his trousers pockets, the drooping cigarette and the listless eyes, which watched the traffic passing up and down, told me as plainly as though his biography had been handed to me, all the history I wished to know.

His linen was not clean, his collar was two or three days old, his boots were down at heel.

With that decision which has always marked my actions I walked up to him with a smile.

“I think I have met you before, have I not?” I said.

He turned his head and looked at me from the crown of my hat to the soles of my boots.

“I daresay,” he said.

“Come and have a drink,” said I briskly, and he obeyed with alacrity.

We turned into the private bar of a public house, ordered our drinks and withdrew to a little round table and a couple of chairs in a corner of the saloon bar.

“I don’t remember your name,” said I, “but I know you are a newspaper man and if I remember rightly you have not had a great deal of luck lately?”

“You have a good memory,” he said, “and if mine was as good I could tell you your name, your age, the place of your birth and the state of your banking account, but, unfortunately, my memory is a little groggy.”

He lifted his drink with a shaking hand. I saw the whole story.

Here was what is commonly called in England, a “liner,” or a free-lance, a man not attached to any newspaper but contributing whatever stories, interviews or articles that come his way. They are not so common in Fleet Street as they used to be when I first came to London. The great news agencies have killed them. The new system of journalism has passed them by. But occasionally you meet a man with that hungry, hard-up look, with a grievance against the world, and a pretty taste in whisky-and-soda, and this was such a one.

Under the genial influence of a second drink he confirmed my diagnosis. He had a grievance against all the papers and admitted that he was on the black-list of three or four for sending in contributions which were not exactly true.

I asked him why he had not enlisted and his lips curved in a sneer. He said he was an Irishman, and that he hated England anyway, and that he hated the army more poisonously than he hated anything else. He hated the war, he hated the Northworths and a long string of other newspaper proprietors, but most of all he hated Fleet Street, its editors, sub-editors, reporters, advertisement managers; in fact, his hatred extended to the very newsboys on the streets.

This was the man for my money. I explained to him that in addition to being a Chilian importer I was running a Chinese news agency to collect and distribute news pertaining or of interest to Europeans in China, and when I told him that I was short of a reporter for news collection and offered him £6 a week, he nearly jumped into the air with delight.

In engaging him I was putting into practice a plan which I had long formed. Here was an opportunity for collecting news without arousing suspicion. A newspaper reporter can ask questions which none of my agents would dare to frame. He can go up and down the country without exciting suspicion, and the mere fact that he is a reporter, is sufficient to give him an entrée into circles, admission to which we could only risk at grave danger to ourselves. An ordinary reporter might have been valueless, but a man with a grievance, a man who was “broke to the wide,” to use Mister Haynes’s own expressive idiom, was especially valuable.

I took him down to the news agency office, and there he had tangible proof of the solidity and bonâ-fides of the agency. The two rooms in Fleet Street, which I had fitted up, were well furnished. The name of the agency was painted on the windows and on the glass panels of the office door, the files of the newspapers were carefully kept by the boy I employed. There were telephones and a “tape machine”--in fact, it was the most convincing environment that German forethought could design. I never saw a man so content as he was when I sat him down at a new desk within reach of the telephone, handed him a £5 note on account of expenses, and outlined the plan of inquiry.

“Do you speak any foreign language?” I asked.

He said he spoke French indifferently and German not at all, which was excellent news.

“My principals,” I explained, “are very anxious, of course, to receive news of the war. The London hospitals are filled with wounded, and I have no doubt that you would be able to obtain admission to the wards and collect the personal narratives of the men as they come home.”

“I get you, Steve,” he said. “You want stories of heroism in battle?”

“Exactly,” I said, “but don’t dwell so much upon the romantical side of the war. Encourage the men to speak not of their own battalions but of the gallant fellows who were fighting on their left and on their right. Find out what other regiments are in their divisions. Learn something about their officers. Who are the most popular and who are the most unpopular. What sort of men are their colonels. We want to see the war at a new angle,” I went on hurriedly, for he looked a little dubious and disappointed, “and we can only do that if we get off the beaten track. When you have written your matter you will hand it to me and I will embody it in my weekly letter to--er--China.”

From the very first my scheme was a success. Not a day passed but Mister Haynes brought into me precisely the information which Headquarters required.

You must understand that unless you take prisoners it is almost impossible to discover what is your enemy’s order of battle. Once you have discovered where certain divisions fit in and what places particular battalions take, you will no longer be in the dark in any subsequent actions in which those divisions take part. For instance, if the Wessex are on the right of the 99th Division and the Royal Hertfordshires are in the centre, and you know the positions of every other battalion, you have only to pick up one prisoner from one battalion at any point of the line to know exactly the disposition of the others.

And here is another matter. A soldier coming back wounded from the front will perhaps tell you that whilst his battalion stood the brunt of an offensive, the battalion on his left did not resist with the same resolution and he will probably give you the reason for this. It may be that the weak battalion has a weak commanding officer, or that the discipline is slack, and once our staff know this they also know where to thrust the arrowhead of subsequent attacks.

The information which was given to the Great General Staff by the indiscriminate publication of soldiers’ letters cannot be exaggerated, and I for one deeply regretted the decision of the English War Office to prohibit their publication.

Mister Haynes brought information of the first class, but nothing so enthralling as that which he brought one afternoon about three weeks after he had started working. I remember the occasion so well. I can see him almost as tangibly as though he stood before me leaning against the desk, his rusty hat on the back of his head, his hands as usual in his pockets.

“I got a queer story from one of those chaps at the London Hospital,” he said, “I don’t know whether I can use it.”

“What is it?” I asked carelessly.

“This man said that every night our front line near Bois Grenier is evacuated to save the men from the effect of the German shelling. As soon as it gets dark the whole line on a front of six miles is withdrawn to the support trenches, and he said he was wounded through being ordered back to the front line before the German’s artillery strafe had finished.”

“That is very interesting,” said I, “on a front of six miles you say?”

“That’s right,” he said, “from Bois Grenier down to Festubert. Do you think I had better use the story?”

“I think not,” I said shaking my head, “I don’t think it would be patriotic. Those horrid Germans might get hold of the information and use it to destroy our brave soldiers.”

“That is what I thought,” said Mister Haynes, though he did not seem very enthusiastic, and indeed, as he told me, his reluctance to impart the information had less to do with the safety of the soldiers than with his own. “I don’t want three months’ hard labour under the Defence of the Realm Act,” he said.

You may be sure that I was not very long in coding this news, though it was some time before I could get my telegram to Stockholm. Apparently the British Government were holding up all messages for forty-eight hours, but this did not worry me so long as it reached its destination eventually.

Naturally I received a reply in a much shorter space of time. In fact, Berlin acknowledged my message within twelve hours of its receipt.

You will remember that in the first week of February we Germans delivered a sudden and fierce attack upon the British front line positions between Festubert and Bois Grenier. Owing to some unhappy and unfortunate change of plan the front lines of the English position were filled with soldiers, but this was probably due to the carelessness of General von Klaus who had assembled his troops for the offensive in broad daylight under the eyes of the British airmen. Von Klaus himself denied this, but that is the theory which I have formed, because Mister Haynes afterwards told me that he had had his story confirmed from three independent sources, and gave me the names of his informants, and even showed me the photograph of one of them.

Klein, who was up on a brief visit to London--he was very busy in South Wales on propaganda work with his friend Mr. Craigmair--was anxious that I should send Mister Haynes to the West of England where certain experiments were being made with a new kind of armoured car. He had attempted to get into the camp, which was guarded as carefully as any prison, and had narrowly escaped being arrested.

It is a well-known fact that long before the famous Tank--that atrocious and unfair weapon which the English used, contrary to the laws of the Hague Convention--came upon the scene, secret experiments were being made. Potsdam had heard of these, and I had received instructions to prosecute my investigations with the greatest vigour.

Naturally rumours were rife, and there were many mares’ nests before, by a lucky chance, our good Klein heard of this experimental camp. I had no difficulty in concocting a story for Mister Haynes. My suggestion was that he should write an article on the marvellous mechanical contrivances which the genius of Britain had brought into being and I despatched him, with Klein, hot upon the scent to investigate and report.

They left by the night train from Paddington and I saw them off. Klein was very decorous, the picture of an English gentleman in his check cap and his long travelling coat, his neat-gloved hands and his English magazine, and Mister Haynes, as untidy as ever, curled up in the corner of the carriage and, I should imagine, asleep before he left the station.

What happened was told me by Klein on the telephone. It was a happening so disconcerting, so mysterious, that I must confess that I regarded the unlooked-for outcome of this adventure with more than ordinary disquietude, even had there not been the more terrible sequel.

They reached their destination, a small West Country town, in the early hours of the morning and went to their hotel where they were joined by Posser, who was working with Klein, and who, deeply conscious of the importance of finding out details of this particular machine, had been spending that day in making judicious inquiries.

They had breakfasted together the next morning, when, of course, no mention was made of the camp or the new armoured car, Klein introducing Posser as his secretary. I might explain that Klein was posing as a Swedish mining engineer who had a patent for sale connected with coal haulage. I had sent Mister Haynes on the same train and in company with Klein, on the pretext that, as Mr. Klein was a friend and was going to the same town, they might travel together and that Mr. Klein might possibly give my reporter certain introductions which would be useful.

Mister Haynes spoke about his mission quite openly, though Klein advised him, laughingly, not to mention his business if he wanted to secure the information he required. Apparently Mister Haynes met with little success, and came back to the hotel to dinner and said that all his efforts to induce any of the soldiers attached to the camp to give him information or to secure admission had been fruitless.

Klein was not greatly perturbed. In fact, he was very much elated because Posser had told him secretly that he intended making his way into the camp that night in the guise of one of the waiters at the officers’ mess. They all ostensibly went to bed soon after ten o’clock. Mister Haynes went to his room and Klein went to his, though not to sleep. He made himself comfortable and took up a book and began reading. Presently he heard a scraping on his door, and smiled, for it was the agreed-on signal that Posser was stealing out into the night to secure his information.

The house was wrapt in sleep at eleven o’clock, and Klein read on.

At one o’clock he heard a tap on the door. His room was next to Mister Haynes, and thinking that Posser could not have returned at so early an hour and that it was Haynes who was knocking, he opened the door. And to his amazement and delight, for he saw success shining on his comrade’s honest face, he admitted Posser.

“I’ve got it!” whispered our good Posser.

“Wait,” said Klein, in the same tone, and kicking off his slippers he went into the corridor, softly opened Haynes’s door and listened. He heard the regular breathing of the reporter, closed the door as softly and came back.

“Now tell me,” he said quickly.

Posser explained how he had walked boldly into the camp in the darkness, and how he had reached the shed, crawling through the sentries, and had seen “the most remarkable machine that the war has produced.”

“It is a triumph, my dear Klein,” he said, his eyes shining, “I have in my head,” he tapped the good, broad German forehead, “the whole construction of this engine. In twelve hours I will give you a drawing and notes which----”

“Hush, hush,” said Klein, for in his natural excitement, Posser’s voice had risen.

“Here is the rough idea.” Posser rapidly sketched a now familiar shape briefly, outlined with rough squares and oblongs the position of the engine and the guns.

“I will keep this,” said Klein. “You must get to work at once, my dear fellow, and give us a more detailed drawing. But first we will drink mutual congratulations.”

Klein got out a bottle of champagne, pulled out the cork, and these two fine fellows, true and loyal sons of the Fatherland, drank in a whisper to the destruction of civilization’s enemy--England!

Klein accompanied Posser to his room. They pulled down the blinds before they switched on the light. Quickly the drawing pads, the rulers, the T-squares and the compasses were taken out of Posser’s suit-case and arrayed on the table.

“Now I will leave you,” said Klein, shook hands heartily with the hero of that night’s adventure and left the room, as he said, without a sound.

He had scarcely got into his own room and shut the door when he heard the click of the lock on Posser’s door and smiled his approval. It was at a quarter to two when he went to bed and at half-past seven the maid brought him a cup of coffee and some biscuits. He drank his coffee and rose, slipped into his dressing-gown and went over to Posser’s room anxious to know what was the result of the night’s work. He tapped at the door. There was no answer. He tapped again. There was still no answer. He tried the handle, remembering at the same time that Herr Posser had locked the door. He was a little surprised to find that the door yielded.

The room was in semi-darkness, the blinds were still drawn and he walked to the window and let the blinds up with a crash.

What he saw, or rather what he did not see, struck him with amazement. The bed had not been slept in. All the drawing material had been cleared. Posser’s trunks were still in the position where he had left them, but there was no sign of Posser.

He went back to his room and rang the bell. The night porter was summoned, but neither he nor any of the servants had seen Posser, who from that moment vanished from the earth as completely as though the ground had opened and swallowed him, and not only vanished but had taken with him whatever drawings he had made.

In his perturbation Klein went to the room of Mister Haynes, who was still in bed and sleeping soundly.

“Get up!” said Klein testily; “have you seen Mr.----my secretary?”

Mister Haynes sat up, rubbing his eyes and yawning.

“What’s the time?” he asked.

“Confound it,” said Klein angrily, “what does it matter what the time is? Have you seen my friend?”

“Why should I have seen your friend?” growled Haynes. “What has happened to him?”

“He has disappeared,” said Klein.

“Gone out for a walk, I expect; it is a beautiful morning.”

“On the contrary, it is raining and blowing,” said Klein angrily; “why should he go out on a morning like this?”

Haynes rose and dressed himself leisurely, spending an unconscionable time in the bathroom for a man whom I never suspected of washing, and turned up at breakfast, wholly unconcerned in his callous English fashion as to what had happened to poor Posser.

Klein, who was all nerves, could eat nothing. He had questioned everybody in the hotel, but nobody had heard a sound in the night and the night-porter supplemented his previous statement, declaring that it was impossible for Posser to leave the house except with his knowledge.

Klein was not satisfied and made an examination of the outside of the hotel, hoping to pick up some trace of his comrade.

Outside Posser’s window he made a discovery. A line of bushes grew within a foot of the house-wall, and beneath Posser’s window these had been broken as though by some heavy body having jumped or fallen upon them. Moreover, he discovered a small pair of dividers which he recognized as Posser’s.

Pursuing his investigations beyond the grounds of the hotel, he came upon the track of motor-car wheels which he followed to the outskirts of the town where he made another discovery. The road here was undergoing repair and owing to the wetness of the morning the night watchman was still on duty, not having been relieved as usually is the case at the hour when the men started work.

This old man Klein questioned.

“Yes,” said the watchman, “I saw a motor-car. It was an ambulance with green lights. It went past here a little after one this morning and came back a little after two. It stopped very near the hotel, because I could see its tail lights and I saw it turn round.”

Klein went back to the hotel with his nerves shaken and his usually well-ordered mind in a condition of chaos.

“I am going back to town by the ten o’clock train,” he told Mister Haynes. “I suppose you will be staying?”

“No,” said Mister Haynes with another yawn. “I shall go back, too. There is nothing to be got out of this place.”

And so, much to the disgust of Klein, who in his state of mind would have preferred to have been alone, they went back together.

They had to change at Basingstoke, and there finding that he would have half an hour to wait, Klein crossed to the nearest hotel and got me on the ’phone.

It was in this way that he related to me as far as he could with safety the extraordinary happenings of the previous night.

“It is inexplicable, my dear Heine,” he said, speaking in Spanish. “I am bewildered, stunned.”

I no less was agitated.

“Did he not communicate anything to you?” I asked.

“Yes, thank our good Gott!” said Klein’s voice; “he gave me a rough sketch which may be sufficient. Whatever has happened to him the good fellow’s work is not fruitless.”

Then suddenly his voice sank and he spoke hurriedly.

“I cannot say more,” he said, “that infernal reporter of yours is outside the box. Does he understand Spanish?”

“He understands no language except bad French,” I replied, and heard the click of the telephone receiver being hung up.

So distressed and puzzled was I that I went down to the station to meet my friend.

I walked along the platform as the train came to a slow standstill, and the first person I met was Mister Haynes, looking more untidy than ever.

“Where is my friend?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said Haynes, yawning; “he went over to the hotel to telephone to somebody at Basingstoke and left before I did. In fact, I had to run to catch the train,” he explained. “He is here somewhere.”

But there was no Klein. If he had been left behind he would have telephoned me. I made inquiries of the guard.

“A gentleman in a check cap and a long ulster?” said that official. “Yes, I remember him. He got on to the train at Basingstoke, first-class passenger, wasn’t he? I particularly noticed he was in a carriage by himself and was reading. This is the carriage,” he said, pulling the door open, “here is his magazine.”

On the rack above was Klein’s suit-case. It was evident that it had been rifled because the collars and night-shirt, brushes and combs, were all mixed together in confusion.

I stared at Haynes and Haynes looked at me.

“How extraordinary!” said Mister Haynes.

It was not until that night that Klein’s body was recovered, lying in a ditch by the side of the railway, shot through the heart, with every pocket turned inside out, and yet, curiously enough, with all his money, his watch and the rings left intact.

Of the rough drawing which he had promised to deliver me there was no sign. Close at hand was his revolver with one chamber discharged.

Mister Haynes was in the office when the news came. He had been out all the afternoon and had, he said, met with an accident, for his arm was bandaged and in a sling. I was so upset by my anxiety over Klein that I had barely noticed Mister Haynes’s injury, but now I looked at him narrowly.

“What is the nature of your injury?” I asked.

He laughed.

“Mr. Cannelli,” he said, “I don’t know very much about you. You may be a very honest man, the tool of very dishonest men.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“It may be,” he went on, without taking any notice of my question, “that you are being duped and that it is only coincidence that you have friends who pursue extraordinary inquiries. All the records we have of you,” my heart gave a throb and I could feel my hands trembling, “all the records we have of you,” he repeated, “seem to be in good order. I will give you two pieces of advice. The first is to be careful in your choice of acquaintances. The second is to refrain from allowing your very natural anxieties to lead you into further inquiries as to the fate of Mr. Adolph Klein, alias Simpson, and if I would add a third,” he said, looking out of the window and speaking in his slow drawl, “it is to advise your friends in communicating with you to avoid both the telephone and the Spanish language. Good afternoon.”

He picked up his hat and went out, the picture of a broken-down journalist, and I did not see him again until one day in Whitehall I passed an officer, wearing the badge of the Intelligence Department, who smiled and waved his hand to me. It was my reporter.

Chapter V. The Man From The Stars

It is an axiom of mine that news has no value unless it is based upon somebody’s misfortune. Take your newspaper and scan its close-set columns. Is there any item in these many pages which does not derive its importance from a calamity which has overtaken somebody?

Your police courts, your divorce courts, your war--they yield interest in ratio to the misfortune of one party or the other. Our great victory is your great defeat, the liberation by the Divorce Court of this woman is the exposure of that, startling crimes attract only by the measure of the anguish they impose. In war, when neither army is destroying the other we vote the news dull, and so I think would you describe the faithful record of my commonplace days when all went as smoothly and as evenly as the routine of a well-organized business.

And, after all, the spy’s work is more often than not the most dull and boring of work. One of my men spent eight weeks in timber yards, checking the supplies of box-wood and keeping track of its destination. When a certain noble lord in charge of a great national factory bought up all the box-wood, we knew by the extent of his purchases that the work which was being done in his well-guarded factory was shell-filling on a vast scale.

Here then was a form of “espionage” without adventure, humdrum, soul-destroying and to all appearance unprofitable. There is no material for narrative here, good friends. There is nothing of the bizarre, nothing of the flash, the sparkle, and the thrill of the work. Therefore, I do not offend you with the banal trivialities of my profession, otherwise I might present what was little more than a catalogue of appointments. As for example:

March 3rd.

10 o’clock.--Saw Hefferich and took report of spare ties and sleepers held by G.W. & C. Ry.

10.15.--Phone message from Stael to say that there was a case of bubonic plague reported at Gravesend (East India liner _Ratapore_.)

10.20.--Phone from Casey _re_ proscribed meeting at Connemara.

10.30.--Phone weather report from Aberdeen.

10.33.--Phone weather report from Llandudno.

10.35.--Weather report from Southsea.

10.38.--Saw van Heerden _re_ butter shipments for February.

and so and so forth. Yes, I was a weather bureau, and daily transmitted the barometer reading to Germany--useful information for our air service.

Many informative isobars would have been absent from the German meteorological charts but for the industry and organization of Heine! I have my critics and my enemies. Particularly do I single out amongst the latter, Trade-Councillor Karl Wesselsmanns, of Hamburg, on the staff of _Vorwarts_, who had the impertinence to write in his crude language and un-German spirit that “the work of the Secret Service in England was distinguished by bungling and stupidity. Whoever was in control of that work seemed to spend his time getting Germans into trouble and produced very few satisfactory results that are worthy of notice.”

It is true that I did not blow up munition works. It is true that I did not sink battleships like the heroic Weddigen, and that I did not drop bombs on the Houses of Parliament. That was not my duty. That that duty was ably performed I can prove by documents in my possession, notably one from the illustrious and High Admiral von Tirpitz, signed by his own hand, and I also adduce the statement of that saviour of Germany, the excellent and illustrious Prussian Field-Marshal von Hindenburg, who on one occasion mentioned me by name, as I can prove, and stated that for all he knew I might be one of the most useful men in the German service. All these things have been said to me and I only repeat them in self-defence. I do not boast. We Germans never indulge in frivolous talk nor do we use sport-terms. Otherwise I would say that these attacks by the gutter scourings of Altonia were not bally cricket, to use an English expression. I admit there have been lamentable errors, and possibly in the course of these memoirs I shall have to admit others by which _interfering and unofficially appointed amateurs have fallen a prey to their own arrogant ill-informedness_.

As for me I can look the whole world in the face and say humbly that with no thanks for reward, and no hope of gain, facing an ignominious death from hour to hour, I have served the Fatherland. It does not matter to me whether I receive the Order of the Red Eagle, as I have been half-promised, or whether I do not. I feel my superiors must make some acknowledgment of my whole-hearted services on an inadequate and miserably insufficient salary.

And if you dare to suggest, as this ink-slinging rascal on the _Vorwarts_ has done, that I have made large sums of money out of the expenses which the empire allow me for propaganda work, I fling the accusation in your teeth. I admit I am well off, but that is due to my private speculations on the Stock Exchange in the year 1914.[6] But to return to my work and to an adventure which was, to say the least, out of the ordinary.

In the summer of 1915, I received a request from Berlin which somewhat surprised me. I was instructed to send to Holland as many good maps of London as I could buy, and I was told also to prepare one special map, marking the areas the street-lamps of which had been darkened. This was followed (or it may have come in the same dispatch, I forget) by a request that I should instruct my men to discover how it was that the British Government knew we contemplated an air-raid on London.

I myself wondered what information the British Government had secured, and how they had secured it. For months the streets had been lit as gaily as in pre-war days. The theatre signs glowed and flashed, the West End streets were bathed in radiance, and then, almost as by a touch of the magician’s wand, London “went dark.” Street lamps were shaded, the light signs outside the theatres were extinguished, and it was almost impossible to pick your way through the streets.

I suppose my excellent friend, the High-Born Baron von Hertz-Missenger, would have said, “English Secret Service.” He reminds me of a character in Charles Dickens, the great English poet, who invariably thought that his head was the head of King Charles II!

The explanation I offered was, that some of our too impetuous airmen must have betrayed the fact by shouting with haughty insolence to the English airmen they met in the air. As this has never been denied, it is probably true. At any rate I set myself to work upon a map. It was a long business, and very unsatisfactory, because the whole of London was dark, and no place was more light than another. This I reported, forwarding the maps by special courier.

And then I received a request from our Headquarters that I should arrange light-signals which should be seen by Zeppelins. The idea was to post three lights so that they formed a triangle, one near Albany Park, one near Maidstone Road, and a third in the east, near Shepherd’s Junction. The triangle thus made would contain all the valuable city area which it was our Zeppelins’ intention to utterly destroy.

Of the first raid in September, it is not necessary for me to tell. Of how the cowardly Englishmen trembled beneath the midnight hail of bombs, you have read.

I myself did not witness the raid, because, on receiving information in the afternoon, Zeppelins were due, I had left London for Cornwall. Since it was impossible for the brave fellows who piloted our good Zeppelins to distinguish between a patriot and a hateful enemy, I thought that in the interest of the Fatherland, it was necessary that I should be as far away as possible when the dread visitation came.

I returned to London the next morning and arrived at eleven o’clock. O what consternation there was. O what vile language these unkultured Londoners used, what epithets, what adjectives, the A’s, and B’s, and C’s, and D’s, they called us--but of that anon!

I was in some anxiety before my journey’s end was reached as to whether I should have to walk a part of the journey, and I was greatly relieved on questioning the conductor to learn that Paddington Station had escaped the holocaust. When I arrived at Paddington everything was going on as usual. To my amazement buses were running and cabs were plying for hire.

“Where was the raid?” I asked.

“In the East End and the City,” was the reply.

So, I thought, my triangle had proved efficacious, and calling a cab, I said:

“Will you please drive me to the ruined area?”

The poor, ignorant fellow thought at first that it was the name of a public-house, and I had to enlighten him.

“Where the bombs struck,” I said.

“Oh, yes,” he said, brightening up, “I will ask a policeman where they fell.”

“Do you mean to tell me,” I inquired, “that you don’t know? Perhaps you haven’t been to the City?”

“Yes, sir,” he replied in the true boorish cabman spirit. “I’ve been to the City three times, but I ain’t seen no place where the bombs fell.”

This of course was “eye-wash.” For my part I had removed all my archives from my office, and as that was on the edge of the City, I drove there first and was pleased to find that my office had not been touched. I drove up Ludgate Hill and apparently everything was as usual, and it was not until we had driven farther on and had penetrated a side street that I saw the wreckage of a house. It was pleasing and yet disappointing. A number of windows had been smashed, one house was in ruins and there was a big hole in a court-yard, but the damage was such as might have been caused by an explosion of gas.

It took me a long time before I found the second place where a bomb had fallen, and here again the results were not as I expected. I spent the whole of that day wandering about looking for devastation. I went east and south, and north, and although I saw some damaged houses, the results of our gallant Zeppelins’ visit left much to be desired.

Returning to my office I was called on the ’phone and a code message was sent through to me. As I expected, it was from Berlin asking for full particulars of the damage done, and very faithfully I described what I had seen, coded it and passed it on to the proper quarters.

To my wrath and humiliation, the next evening brought a peremptory demand from Berlin. It had been sent by radio, picked up off the coast by a little steamer flying the flag of----, and was brought to me from an East Coast port by one of the couriers we employed for that purpose.

The message was, as I say, peremptory, and there were tears in my eyes, tears of sorrow and injury as I read it.

“Cannot understand your message. Our pilots report Westminster Abbey was bombed. Whole streets of the City are in flames, Houses of Parliament partly destroyed, also London Bridge and Tower of London. Several ships in docks hit and sunk. Please personally investigate and report.”

Of course there was a chance that these cunning English had, by means of scene painters and workmen labouring through the night, removed all sign of the destruction, but I walked over London Bridge without any difficulty, and as far as I could see the Tower of London was uninjured.

I reported the same, and three days later, had this message back:

“Be on south side of Three Mile Wood, north-north-east Saffron Walden, at eleven o’clock on the night of October 7th.”

I could not understand this message, and my new assistant, who had arrived from America, Herr Wilhelm Peters, was as much puzzled as I.

However, on the 7th of October, I journeyed to Saffron Walden, which is a little town in Essex, and by studying a map I discovered that Three Mile Wood was inaccurately named because it was about seven miles from the town. I decided to walk, and arrived in the neighbourhood of the wood at about ten o’clock at night. Having ascertained by consulting my compass which was the south side, I made my way across fields and muddy ditches to a big meadow which was exactly placed to the south of the sparsely-wooded little forest.

It was a clear night with a thin ground haze and was rather cold. I had brought one of those walking-sticks, the top of which forms a seat, and this I found very comfortable; for the inner man I had a flask of brandy and some liver sandwiches, and I settled myself down to my vigil, wondering what on earth had induced Headquarters to send me upon this wild adventure.

Then suddenly my heart began beating at a tremendous rate as I divined the reason! It was intended this night for our airships to reach London, and they desired that I should be a witness. What folly! What folly! What incomparable insanity to risk the life of a high Officer of Intelligence, to place him in such horrible jeopardy.

I felt myself grow pale, but then with an effort I braced up. I was a German! We Germans fear God and nothing else, and, besides, I thought there might not be an air-raid after all.

But what satisfaction I got out of that thought was quickly dissipated. Suddenly an ominous sound came to me. A double “boom!” far away and to the east, was followed by three staccato explosions. Another bomb fell, and suddenly the whole of the eastern sky was illuminated by the tracing fingers of searchlights.

“Boom!” the sound was growing nearer and my mouth was dry. I felt choking. I loosened my collar and wiped the sweat from my forehead and stood up, my knees trembling.

I have thought the matter over since and I have come to the conclusion that my agitation might be explained in this way, that I was trembling with pride in the fearless exploits of our gallant airmen, those intrepid messengers of death who sailed the midnight skies fearless of foe; that I perspired because the liver sandwich was perhaps a little too highly flavoured. Anyway, the cursed things were coming closer and who knows what mistakes a blundering fool of a pilot might make. The searchlights were suddenly extinguished, the guns were silent, and for ten minutes I heard no sound save a faint but ever-growing-nearer hum of an engine in the sky. Then there was a shrieking whistle, a crash that seemed to shake the very earth, a blinding fan of flame and then silence. In my rage I shook my fist at the sky.

“Stupid jackasses, miserable, bat-eyed swine-hound!” I cried. “Have you not the highest instructions in your pockets to avoid bombing an Intelligence Officer?”

The cursed thing passed overhead. It was roaring like a railway train passing through a tunnel. I saw the bulk of it outlined against the stars and then I saw something else, a little black dot that moved and swayed against the sky.

I thought it might be some infernal machine and I nearly fainted.

Understand that my chief thought was of Germany. I had no fear for myself. I was merely a cog in the wheel of the great machine and stood ready at all hours and all days to sacrifice myself for our dear Deutschland.

Fortunately, there was a fallen tree in my neighbourhood, and under this I crept, looking out from time to time to see what had happened to the strange thing in the air. Then I heard a thud, a rustle, and an oath, and I jumped up, bruising the back of my head against the tree-trunk, and ran toward the sound, for that oath was in good German.

“Whars dar?” called a sharp voice.

“It is I, Heine,” I replied.

“Oh, good,” said the voice in German. “You are on the spot, I see. Help free me from this doubly rotten parachute.”

I made my way to him and helped unbuckle some of the straps that fastened him, and presently he was free.

“Have you got a pocket lamp?” he asked. “No, perhaps you had better not use it. Where can I put the parachute?”

I suggested the tree under which I had been--I won’t say hiding, let me rather say taking cover.

“Have you a car?” he asked.

“No,” I replied.

“You are an ass,” said he; “why haven’t you a car?”

I knew by the imperiousness of his tone that he was a true German gentleman, probably highly born and connected by many social ties with an old family of Prussia.

“I am the Baron von Treutzer,” he said, as though answering my thoughts, “and I have been sent here to survey the damage that was done in the last raid.”

“Your Excellency will discover that I have spoken nothing but the truth,” I said humbly.

The sound of the Zeppelin’s engines, which had diminished, was now increasing in volume.

“Is the airship returning?” I asked.

“Yes, yes,” he said testily.

He took from his pocket a small electric lamp and flashed it three times in the air and immediately after three tiny sparks of light showed in the sky.

“They won’t be dropping any more bombs, Herr Baron?” I asked carelessly.

“Good heavens! What does it matter if they do?” he boomed--he was a booming kind of man, born to command, typical of our virile aristocracy which has placed Germany in the forefront of world-nations.

“I only asked,” I said. “I am a mere observer.”

“We only dropped a few bombs,” he said, “just to explain our presence. The real business of our visit is here.” I heard him slap his chest in the darkness.

“I did not know where the raid was intended,” I said, “or I would have arranged for a leader.”

“A leader?” he asked. “What the devil do you mean?”

“Evidently Herr Baron is not a member of the Zeppelin crew,” I said humbly, “or he would know that the Zeppelins are ‘led’ to their destination by motor-cars with strong head-lamps.”

“Of course I am not a member of the Zeppelin crew,” he said in deep disgust, “I am a Royal Lieutenant of the 31st Regiment of the Prussian Guard.”

“Does your Excellency intend staying here very long?” I asked, as we trudged along the country road.

“For a week,” he replied, “after that I return----”

“By----?”

“That is my business,” he replied, “if a Zeppelin can bring me here, a Zeppelin can take me away.”

Though I had never heard of parachutes that go up, I know all things are possible owing to the inventive genius of our nation, so I questioned him no further. Outside Saffron Walden we stopped whilst I went to the hotel to collect the handbag which I had left there.

Needless to say the people in the hotel were in that condition of cowardly funk which our Zeppelin always inspires. The children were crying because they had not seen the airship, and again I heard in the common bar of the hotel those terrible words which my modesty would only allow me to designate by using certain letters of the alphabet.

I rejoined the Baron and we made our way to the railway station, which was in darkness. Fortunately the train which came in was also darkened and remained that way until we reached London and I was able to bring the Baron to my flat without observation.

He was a tall, handsome gentleman, dressed in civilian clothes of a noble cut and rich texture, and over a glass of whisky he graciously unbent and told me that he had come to England by this curious method to discover the extent of the damage, not only of the first raid, but of a raid which was projected and by which it was hoped to lay London entirely in ruins.

“On what day will that occur?” I asked.

“You will be notified in due time. It may be to-morrow, and it may be the next day,” he replied.

“I only asked,” I said carelessly, “because it is necessary for me to see one of my agents in North Devon one day this week, and I should not like to miss the raid.”

“You will stay here until I go. That is an order. Why are you looking so pale?”

“It is the pressure of work, your Excellency,” I replied. “I am afraid I have rather taxed my strength. My doctor suggested that I ought to go away at once to Cornwall or perhaps Scotland.”

“We hope to bomb Scotland,” said the Baron thoughtfully. “It would not be a bad idea if you were there.”

“When I said Scotland,” I said hastily, “I should have said that my doctor suggested I should go to Scotland in the spring. This of course is the very worst weather. Are you likely to bomb Wales?”

“We cannot reach there. It is beyond our reach,” said the Baron.

“I only ask,” I said, “because he also suggested that I should go there.”

“When the raids are over you can go to the devil. I only want your assistance while they are on.”

“Did you say raids or raid?” I asked.

“There may be two,” he replied callously.

The next morning he expressed his intention of going through the City and the East End to photograph the worst of the damage. I did not offer to accompany him, and indeed, had he suggested that I should do so, I should have firmly declined. Fortunately, he knew London very well, for he had been an attaché at the German Embassy a few years before the war broke out, so he had no need of my assistance or guidance.

He left the flat at eleven o’clock and I arranged to meet him at a restaurant in Piccadilly for lunch. I need hardly say that he was armed with a passport; not only very completely filled in, but endorsed with an exact imitation of the rubber stamps which were used in those days by examining officers at Folkestone when passengers landed.

I was waiting for him at one o’clock, but he did not arrive. Half-past one came, a quarter to two, two o’clock, and I began to feel seriously alarmed, and was thinking what an excellent text his arrest would provide for a letter to Potsdam on the futility of sending amateurs, when he came through the swing doors. He uttered no word till we were sitting at the table, and the waiter had served the soup.

“These English people are very clever,” he said at last.

“In a way they are clever,” I said, “but by the side of the German----”

“Don’t talk nonsense. Our German people are merely slavish imitators of everybody else in the world. If Germany was not a nation of slaves we should never have an army.”

This put an end to the easy flow of conversation, but presently I ventured to ask:

“Why does your Excellency think the English are clever?”

“I am referring to the way they have cleared up the mess we made and have run up new buildings.”

He looked up at me curiously as he spoke.

“Don’t you agree?”

“Naturally,” I said heartily, “I have reason to believe that hundreds of thousands of workmen have been working day and night to restore the damage.”

He laughed.

“In addition to being a fool, you are a liar,” he said, and I could only smile at the good humour and buoyant frankness of this high-born officer who was in all probability in the entourage of the All-Highest himself and, at any rate, as I have since learnt, had frequently dined with that exalted Prince whom we call the Hope of Germany.

“No,” Baron von Treutzer went on, “the Zeppelin did little or no damage. It caused nothing of the smash that we expected it would. We will see what to-night’s raid brings out.”

“To-night?” I said, half-rising from my seat.

“Did I say to-night?” he said in an off-hand way. “Well, whenever it happens.”

But I knew that in a moment of incaution he had spoken the truth.

“By the way, I shall want you with me to-night,” he said.

“To-night?” I repeated. “I am very sorry but this is the one night I cannot be with your Excellency. I have an important messenger coming from Ireland with particulars of a rising, and the Foreign Office has particularly asked me----”

“I shall want you to-night,” repeated the Herr Baron, “and you will meet me at ten o’clock, let us say, in St. Paul’s Churchyard.”

“Himmel! Herr Baron!” I exploded, “that would be in the very centre of the raid!”

“Did I ever say that it would not?” he asked coldly, “of course it will be in the centre of the raid. You understand, at ten o’clock. The War Office require a detailed account by eye-witnesses of the damage which is done.”

“But my messenger arrives at Fishguard to-night,” I said with a tremor in my voice. “Forgive me if I am agitated, Herr Baron, but I realize the terrible importance, the absolute necessity, of meeting that boat.”

“At ten o’clock you will be in St. Paul’s Churchyard,” said the Baron.

How I loathed and hated this tyrant. We Germans are naturally lovers of freedom. We despise the sycophant and the toady. Tyranny to us is a pestilential disease to be stamped out with an iron heel. Woe to those who endeavour to enslave the German, for they are biting on grani