#18 ‘Spies of the Kaiser’ -
Ep 2 WW1: how much was it Britain’s fault?

Anti-German hysteria in Britain 1906-1909. The British publishing phenomena of 1906 was The Invasion of 1910 (by Germans), serialised in the Daily Mail and marketed by men walking around London in Prussian uniforms. This chimed perfectly with the anti-German clique at the foreign office.

In the years before the First World War, Britain’s key strategic problem was Russia’s expansion south into Persia and the land routes to India. One obvious solution was for the British to ally with the Germans – who shared a European border with the Russians and were equally alarmed by their expansionist plans. But since the end of the 1890s, and particularly since 1905 or 1906, the Germans had popularly come to be seen in Britain, not as the solution to Britain’s strategic difficulties, but as serious threat in themselves.

Instead of being seen as the strategic key to solving the Russian problem, Britain’s old German friends had, in a few years from 1905 or 1906 come to be seen themselves as an even bigger problem.

In 1909 German tourists consulting railway timetables or buying phrase books had been reported to the police as spies. In Sevenoaks, Kent, German campers were arrested for using torches. The Daily Mail was demanding a ban on foreign pigeon-flying near Army bases and Naval Dockyards.

Where had this bizarre hysteria come from? The first place, according to historian John Ramsden, was a fictional thriller, the publishing phenomena of 1906 by half-French author William Le Queux, [Le Kew]. It was called The Invasion of 1910. Le Queux imagined the Germans marching through England, leaving bodies swinging from telegraph poles, and massacring passengers at London’s St Pancras Railway Station. He included several supposedly genuine documents, including the surrender signed by the Mayor of London. After H.G. Wells, Le Queux was the most popular writer in Britain, commanding the same writer’s fee as Thomas Hardy.

So why did Le Queux imagine the Germans invading Britain? After all, Germany was normally Britain’s best trading partner, and the two had plenty of common cultural and strategic interests.

Well, Le Queux had already written an invasion novel, back in 1897. In that one, The Great War in England, Britain was invaded by its traditional enemy the French, backed by their allies the Russians. The book had done very well and we can imagine that Le Queux was hoping to write another.

But after Britain – for reasons to do with various issues scattered around the Empire – had signed an Entente with France and a Convention with Russia, Le Queux was in need of a new enemy. Spain, Italy and Austria were too distant or too feeble. Out of the European powers who might believably be imagined invading England, that only left Germany. 

Le Queux made his books as realistic as possible. If his invading Germans staked out a bell tower in a village church, Le Queux made sure it was a real bell tower in a real village. He had his imaginary German invasion plans checked out by Britain’s most senior soldier, the elderly Field Marshal Lord Roberts, a veteran of the Boer War. Creating a German invasion scare happened to suit Roberts who was touring schools lecturing on the threat of Germany. For him it was a clever way to drum up recruits for the Army and support for his campaign to introduce conscription. Roberts made the threat of a German invasion sound even worse than Le Queux did. In fact, he really believed it might happen. His lectures accused German civilians in Britain of being ‘almost all trained soldiers,’ adding that there must be at least 80,000 of them. Well, that was extremely unlikely, since there were only 50,000 Germans in Britain, including women and children.

Most people usually imagine Britain would always be invaded through Kent. But the last time that occurred was 1066. Roberts knew that Kent’s high cliffs and difficult marshes would make invasion extremely difficult for a modern army. Hitler’s Wehrmacht came to the same conclusion in 1940 as we see in our series on the Battle of Britain. Back in 1906, following Roberts’s strategic advice, Le Queux had the Germans land in the flat lands of Essex. It made the book seem much more realistic (though only, of course, if you omitted to mention the insurmountable obstacle of the British Royal Navy. A government inquiry of 1903 had shown conclusively that the Royal Navy was so utterly dominant that no army had any chance whatsoever of invading Britain).

The owner of the Daily Mail, Lord Northcliffe, took the decision to serialise Le Queux’s tale. Northcliffe, like many in Britain’s traditionally rather right-wing press, believed the average Briton warmed to ‘a good hate.’ Germany was his own particular favourite. (Northcliffe died in 1922 believing the Germans had poisoned him with ice cream.) From 19 March 1906 Le Queux’s Invasion came out in the Daily Mail in daily instalments.

On the route through Essex Roberts had originally worked out, the Germans sneaked to London almost unseen. That was no good for Northcliffe. He told Le Queux there was no point in the Germans marching through what he called ‘one-eyed’ Essex villages where he wouldn’t sell many papers. So in the Daily Mail version the Germans spread out and proceeded to terrorize every town from Chelmsford to Sheffield. The newspapers carried maps of each day’s German advance and were marketed by men walking around London in Prussian uniforms. It was all an excellent joke. The novel and its serialisation in the Daily Mail was a huge hit. Eventually the novel sold one million copies worldwide.

Everyone in Britain now seemed to be talking about Le Queux, even though few people knew how to pronounce his name, which was spelled Q-u-e-u-x. He became known as ‘the man who dared to tell the truth.’ Boys’ Own magazine warned its million young readers that German holidaymakers were all spies. You could tell because they wore Prussian boots (which, as we saw last time, probably, in fact, came from London’s Jermyn Street.)

Le Queux followed up in 1909 with a new novel, Spies of the Kaiser. He informed his readers he was part of military intelligence and had only changed details in his books to protect his sources. It was a straight lie. He had no formal contact with intelligence, only with a collection of amateur agents who styled themselves the ‘voluntary Secret Service Department.’ He ended his new book with a warning. ‘What will happen? When will Germany strike? WHO KNOWS?’

The Daily Mail now began receiving letters from members of the public who had read Spies of the Kaiser and had German spies to report. Thousands of the letters arrived, which was not surprising since the Mail had promised ten pounds (an enormous sum in 1909) for each one it printed. Many of the letters were clearly written as a joke. But Le Queux sent them to a friend, Lieutenant Colonel James Edmonds, head of a ‘Special Section’ for intelligence at the War Office. Astonishingly Edmonds took them at face value, ‘regretting that newspapers committed more resources than governments to finding spies.’ 

What might have gone down in history as an amusing publishing phenomenon, now became something altogether more bizarre. Christopher Andrew, author of the official history of British Military Intelligence, has shown that Edmonds took these Daily Mail letters, fakes, jokes and all, to Richard Haldane, the War Secretary. There he used them to campaign for an official inquiry into German espionage. Even more surprising, Edmonds succeeded. You couldn’t make it up.

‘What turned the scale,’ Edmonds later wrote, was a letter from Francis Bennet-Goldney, the Tory Mayor of Canterbury. The mayor reported two Germans he had found ‘wandering in his park.’ He meant of course his own private estate. He had invited them to dinner and, after drinking a good deal of his port, they had told him they were spies reconnoitring for a German landing in Margate and other seaside towns, leading up to an attack on London. These wandering Germans were clearly playing, comments Andrew laconically, a very ‘British practical joke.’ But the mayor took them at their word. So, of course, did Lieutenant Colonel Edmonds. Even the Secretary of State for War, Richard Haldane, began to believe that a German spy network might in fact be operating in Britain.

If all that seems far-fetched, it makes more sense when you discover the shocking things that had been going on behind the scenes in the Foreign Office. 

By 1909 the press was screeching in full hysterical voice about the threat of German spies. You have to remember that Britain has historically always had a fundamentally right-wing press. And the government in 1909 was Liberal. So the press would use any stick with which to beat it. And German spies proved exceptional popular with the newspaper-believing public.

On its own, this press craze might not have led to the killing and wounding of the 37 million in the First World War. But the anti-German newspaper headlines chimed all too chillingly with what was going on inside the Foreign Office. Back in 1969 historian Zara Steiner showed that, in the 1890s, there was a significant break in continuity in the Foreign Office. A clique of civil servants there, and also in the War Office, began working to turn British foreign policy against Germany. According to Steiner there never seemed to be a specific reason for these men’s dislike of Germans. What most of these shadowy Whitehall men found disagreeable seems simply to have been what they saw as the Germans’ unpleasant tone of voice.

The clue is perhaps in their education, something hardly any historian has investigated. One later head of the Foreign Office, Sir Robert Vansittart, wrote that he had first come across the Germans when he was reading the ancient historian Tacitus at Eton. Tacitus, wrote Vansittart, "admired [the Germans] in some ways, but found them disquieting neighbours. He says that “they hate peace….” Their whole history [can be summed up in one] phrase, they “think it weak to win with sweat what can be won by blood.”’ [Roi, 21, quoting V, Black Record 1941] If that was the way Tacitus was being taught at Eton, it’s no wonder that so many of the Foreign Office bureaucrats were anti-German. In the years just before the first world war, when Vansittart joined the Foreign Office, three quarters of those who arrived with him had been educated at Eton. [Otte Old Diplomacy 21] At the end of the previous century, the proportion was apparently even higher.

The Foreign Office was then a very small place – around 50 ‘first division’ clerks, the men who had any say in making policy.

[Although they were working harder than they had, the foreign office was still described as ‘more of a gentleman’s club’ than a professional department of government. (Otte 31). Its clerks, said one wag, were like the fountains in Trafalgar Square – they played from ten until five. It was the last place, said another, where ‘administration [was] pursued as a sport.’]

Until 1905 Vansittart and every single other man who got a job at the Foreign Office had been pushed through the entrance exams by a certain Mr Scoones, who ran a crammer next door to the Garrick Club. This was a tiny, introverted and cocksure elite. Once the fashion for bashing the Germans had taken hold among a certain clique of this little set, it quickly and easily became very influential.

Now, generations of British school children have been brought up on the belief that the Germans were a very real and present threat to Britain in the years before the First War. But is it true?

Certainly Germany had become an industrial giant that was alarmingly outpacing the United Kingdom. And it was impossible to miss a certain German enthusiasm for war, if not among bankers, industrialists or the public at large, then among certain high-profile German intellectuals and political activists. Novelists like Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse seemed to think a good war would cure what they saw as Germany’s bourgeois complacency, its ‘dull capitalist peace.’ Sexologist and gay campaigner Magnus Hirschfield openly looked forward to a time when men wore uniforms and carried guns. Retired Prussian General Friederich von Bernardi announced in his book Germany and the Next War that it was ‘world power or decline’ and called excitedly for ‘the total destruction of France.’ His book, which of course had no official status, went through six editions in a year.

Even German liberal politicians and academics were airily lecturing about the future break-up of the British Empire and the chance that Germany might profit from this ‘legacy.’ Right-wing Pan Germanists in the German press and the Reichstag took up the Social Darwinist notion that the races of Europe were in competition. Sooner or later Germans would inevitably have to fight a ‘preventative war’ with Russian Slavs, French Romans and British Anglo-Saxons. Kaiser Wilhelm was infamously talking an aggressive foreign policy and discoursing about a ‘racial war.’

Most historians, however, nowadays conclude that all this was a mixture of crackpot, turn-of-the-century philosophy and insecurity. German politicians were deeply divided and the German economy badly stretched by the Kaiser’s wild schemes. Wilhelm himself was in fact much more interested in signing a treaty with the British than trying to compete with them.

There is certainly no evidence at all that the Germans had any plans for expansion into western Europe. Rather the opposite. What exercised German politicians and military men most at the turn of the twentieth century was that their new nation, united only in 1871, might not survive. War might be necessary in order to prevent Germany’s enemies from overwhelming and destroying her.

Perhaps it is above all the ‘Schlieffen Plan’ that has persuaded succeeding generations that the Germans were set on world domination. This was the German General Staff’s bold – not to say daft - scheme to knock France out in forty-two days by a lightening march across Belgium. Of course, looked at from a British - not to say French or Belgian – perspective, it looks like a plan for a war of naked aggression.

But German-Canadian historian Holger Herwig has argued that we have misunderstood the Schlieffen Plan. We need to look at it the other way round, from the German end. This was not an arrogant military blueprint for occupying Belgium and France – for which the Germans had made no provision at all. Instead, it was a last desperate attempt to secure Germany’s western border before turning to face what looked to German analysts at the time like a vast, inevitable and almost certainly unwinnable war against Russia.

Many in the German army knew that the Schlieffen Plan was unrealistic. It had originally been worked out in the 1890s by Count Alfred Schlieffen, Chief of the German General Staff. His predecessor had warned that a war would last seven years and perhaps as many as thirty. Schlieffen’s own Quartermaster concluded that modern war would be siege warfare, ‘a tedious and bloody crawling forward, step-by-step.’ The Schlieffen Plan was a desperate attempt at a short cut – to prevent a long war by means of a lightning strike. It was not the aggressive gung-ho fantasy of a war-hungry German military elite, bent on global domination. It was a despairing gamble, hedged about with ifs, perhapses and hopefullys. Looked at from the German perspective, it was a grim last throw, a last chance to prevent Germany being sucked by Russia into a cataclysm that would destroy her.

What lay behind all these German demands for war, then, was a German feeling not of strength but of weakness. And above all fear in the face of the awakening of Russia. Fuelled by French money, Russia was starting, very slowly and painfully, to emerge as a monstrous industrial and military machine. Better, many Germans believed, to take the Russians on sooner rather than be steamrollered by them in the end. If therefore there was some German enthusiasm for a military conflict, it was because of the Germans’ deep-seated fear that, before much longer, the Russians would actually wipe them out. 

Now, as we saw last time, German fear of Russia coincided strikingly with Britain’s long-held and growing mistrust of the Russians, and of their obvious plans to expand into the middle East and central Asia. It made Germany and Britain natural allies.

But to some Foreign Office civil servants that counted for nothing. Instead of making common cause with the Germans, all they saw was the menacing buzz of German factories and the ominous rattling of German sabres.  Without any actual evidence – as we’ll see - they convinced themselves that the Germans were bent on an aggressive war not to defeat Russia, but to dominate Britain, Europe and maybe even the world. Germany was not a possible solution to Britain’s tricky foreign policy challenges. Germany was the problem.

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