In those early days weird people would swim into my horizon. One morning information came to me that a gigantic American had arrived at the Carlton Hotel and had declared his intention of buying a yacht in order to pay a visit to the Kaiser. He thought that a few minutes’ straight talk between them would finish the war. I invited him to call and there walked into my room a very menacing figure. He was well over 6 feet and must have weighed quite eighteen stone. He stood there glaring at me with his hat on, chewing the stump of a cigar.
‘Won’t you take off your hat and sit down?’ I began.
‘I’d rather stand.’
‘We don’t usually smoke in this office.’
‘I am not smoking.’ (The cigar was unlighted.)
‘I hear that you are going to buy a yacht.’
‘That’s my business.’
At this, my assistant, who was almost equally powerful, rose to his full height. I think he expected that my visitor intended mischief. After this unpromising beginning it was useless to question him further and we parted. Throughout the interview he had not relaxed his scowl. Later in the afternoon the American embassy received a cable to the effect that a gentleman of large means, who was mentally unstable and was being looked after by his friends privately, had eluded them and embarked for Liverpool. The name corresponded with that of my friend of the hat and the cigar. I was asked whether I saw any way of restoring the gentleman to his relations. They were ready to wait on the other side with their arms open to receive him if only he could be persuaded to go. It was a desperate venture, but I tried it. I sent a courtly inspector to the hotel with instructions to be mysterious but urgent in an invitation to come down at once to another interview. He came and this time I did not trouble him with preliminaries. I looked round to see that all the doors were closed and then addressed him. ‘I want to give you a word of advice,’ I said.
Ask me no questions, but if you are wise you will do exactly as I say. There is a boat leaving for New York tomorrow morning. Don’t stop to think; just go by it. If the matter had not been so urgent in your own interests I would not have sent for you. Now waste no time.
He looked at me blankly for a moment and left the room without a word. Two hours later inquiries were made at the hotel. He had looked in for a moment to pay his bill and had left without his luggage. A telegram to Liverpool produced the reply that he had gone on board the steamer, booked his passage and had locked himself in his cabin. We heard later that he was met by his friends and that the luggage had been sent on after him.
On one other occasion my companion felt called upon to intervene. A middle-aged man had been asked to call on some quite unimportant matter. He was of fierce and truculent mien. When I asked him a question he glared at me and was silent. I put the question again, whereupon he clapped his hand to some mysterious pocket about his person and began to draw out what my companion thought must be a revolver. He was about to fall upon the visitor when the object was disclosed. He was pulling out a curious little telephonic apparatus which he planted on my table in front of me and connected with his ear. The man was stone deaf. The faintest ghost of a smile flickered across his rugged countenance when he realised our mistake.
Very soon after the declaration of war every public man whose speech was reported in the newspapers received a letter in a foreign handwriting, filled with abuse of the English and extravagant praise of the Germans, who, according to the writer, were chosen by God to sweep us into the sea. The brutality and vainglory of these compositions were tempered with scholarship: the man was an omnivorous reader and had a quotation in support of every boast. The letters were posted from every district in London and bore an address in Loughton which did not exist. Apart from the work entailed in the laboriously ornamental handwriting, the man must have expended time and money in travelling from one part of London to another. Abusive letters injure nobody, but that a truculent Hun should be at large in London in wartime, in the opinion of those who received his letters, reflected little credit on the efficiency of the police. In order to cut this troublesome inquiry short I induced The Globe to publish a facsimile of one of the letters and immediately several people wrote to say that they identified the handwriting as that of their former German tutor living in Dalston. I was curious to see this fire-eating Hun: I pictured him as a heavy, florid, square-headed Prussian. Square-headed he was, but he proved to be a rather diminutive abject person with the wide-staring eyes of a wild animal brought to bay. He was mentally deranged, but in the choice of his pseudonym, in the precautions he had taken in posting his letters, he had shown the cunning of a monomaniac. He had a son serving in the British Army and a very loyal wife who undertook to keep him out of mischief for the future.
As the German tide poured over Belgium we received our daily flood of refugees. The arrangements improvised by the Belgian Relief Committee were a high tribute to the power of organisation which is latent in our people. Naturally there was a little confusion at first because the rush of refugees far exceeded the room for accommodation during the first few days. Considering that the refugees included all the unemployable and most of the disreputable part of the Belgian population, as well as the industrious and the intellectual, it is remarkable, on the whole, how well they behaved. There were one or two amusing incidents. I remember hearing that at one of the receiving stations in London a couple who spoke Flemish but no other language were received late in the evening. The woman was shown into her room and shortly afterwards the supposed husband was conducted to the same apartment. Immediately a fearful uproar arose and the interpreter had to be telephoned for. It then appeared that neither of the couple had ever seen the other before.
Antwerp was being threatened, the Naval Division was pouring in for its defence and I was asked to send a police officer to the city because my officer at Ostend could not possibly leave his post. No officer was available at the time except a middle-aged man with a large family who had done excellent service in advising upon doubtful literature. In fact, he was the greatest living authority upon the kind of literature on which a successful prosecution could be founded. At the call of duty he said ‘goodbye’ to his family and departed. A few days later, when the German siege guns were in position, there came a telegram from him, suggesting that he should be recalled. Events were moving fast and before I could reply to the telegram his arrival at Scotland Yard was announced. I sent for him and said gravely, ‘I had your telegram, inspector, but you left your post without waiting for a reply.’
He bowed in his usual courtly manner and replied, ‘Yes, sir, but a 15-inch shell took the corner off my bedroom, sir and I don’t know how it is, but I think I am getting too old for sieges.’
‘Too old for sieges’ became a byword in my office throughout the war when any one was asked to undertake a job that he did not relish.
There were two sides to the question of interning enemy aliens who were kept in the country. When war broke out there were no internment camps, but there were many Germans who were known to be dangerous. Some place of internment had to be improvised forthwith and for London the obvious place was Olympia. Bedding and blankets were hastily gathered in and a guard was provided from Wellington Barracks. I used to go there daily for a time because some useful information might be gleaned from the civilian prisoners. They were a most unprepossessing lot. During the first fortnight two Austrian ships put into the Thames before they knew that war had been declared. The crews were all marched to Olympia and interned with the Germans. When I arrived the next morning the Austrians had been relegated to the annexe and were roped off from the others. It appeared that they had not been more than an hour with the Germans before a violent quarrel broke out and the Austrian officers formed a deputation to the commandant to request that they might be separated from ‘those German riff-raff’. Among them were four young Austrian students who had apparently taken a voyage for the enlargement of their minds. These young men had very definite and uncomplimentary views regarding their bro
thers-in-arms, the Prussians. On the whole, the prisoners in Olympia gave very little trouble. On one occasion a German waiter became insolent to a guardsman, but the Irish corporal, who had a sense of humour, approached the two while they were in mid-dispute and said to the private in pretended seriousness, ‘Why stop to argue with him? Shoot him,’ whereupon the German waiter dived under a table and was quite polite for the remainder of his stay.
The cry, ‘Intern them all,’ which was taken up by certain newspapers, was very embarrassing. Though, no doubt, it did interpret the public feeling and allayed public alarm, it was the cause of thousands of complaints and investigations. My own view at the time was that we had so full a knowledge of the dangerous Germans that we should confine internment to that class and leave the innocent ones at liberty. Many of them were doing good work for us in munitions and manufactures, some were definitely ranged in their sympathies with the Allies, such as the Poles and Czechs. To ‘intern them all’ would be to invite the enemy countries to intern all our nationals, which, of course, they did, but the real argument against indiscriminate internment was that we had no place ready to receive such vast numbers. This meant that until camps were ready it would be impossible to give the prisoners the accommodation prescribed by the Hague Convention. Complaints would reach the enemy, who would then feel themselves justified in maltreating our prisoners. Nevertheless, it had to be done and every day one might see furniture vans packed with Germans proceeding through the streets to Olympia before being drafted off to such camps as could be improvised.
Some of the Germans brought this fate upon themselves. There was a well-known café in Oxford Street in which the staff – even the manager and the bookkeeper – were all registered enemy aliens. On the afternoon when the news of de Wet’s rebellion in South Africa reached London the waiters and some of the guests began to cheer. I had news of this by telephone and in half an hour the entire staff was rounded up, put into a furniture van and driven off to Olympia. There was an indignant protest from the British directors of the company that evening, but my case was quite unanswerable.
CHAPTER 6
WAR CRIMES
DURING THE EARLY months of 1915 the war spirit seized upon all classes. New Scotland Yard was often mistaken for the recruiting office in Scotland Yard and the policeman at the door was kept busy directing callers to their proper destination. All day long the flower of the nation might be seen marching down Whitehall in mufti on their way to the station. The saddest part of the business was that in those early days we were sacrificing in the trenches what would have been magnificent material for officers of the conscripted army later on, but the sacrifice was not in vain if example counts for anything.
My old friend, Sir Schomberg M’Donnell, was working at this time as Intelligence Officer to the Home Forces. He was past fifty. I found out quite by chance that he was spending his spare time at Wellington Barracks learning his drill and one morning he came to say ‘goodbye’. He had taken a commission and was going to the Front. Not many weeks afterwards came the news that he had been killed in action.
They tell a story of a certain artistic dilettante well known in London who, when he was offered a commission, said, ‘Look at me. Could I lead men? I have never done anything yet but sit and sew.’ (He excelled at embroidery.) He insisted upon going out as a private and when the commissariat broke down in bad weather and the nerves of his comrades were all on edge, he kept them cheerful and contented by a never-failing flow of good spirits. He said he had enlisted because, being ‘the greatest rotter in London’, he thought that if he went others less rotten would have to go too. They relate that when an ill-conditioned NCO, addressing him with ill-disguised contempt, said, ‘And what was your line?’ he replied, ‘Well, they say that I was best at embroidery.’ He returned badly wounded in the hand and when a sympathetic old lady saw him at his own door fumbling with his latchkey, she fluttered up to help, saying, ‘Oh, you are wounded!’
He replied, ‘Oh no, madam, I fell off a bus when I was drunk.’
It is strange now to think that in March 1915 Russia was thought in England to be breathing a new inspiration to the West. It was said that the Crusader spirit was alive again; that the whole Russian nation was inspired with a determination to rescue Constantinople for Christianity and to win again the Holy Sepulchre; that when she came into the war Russia was busy with her own evolution, not revolution and that vodka was prohibited with the unanimous approval of the nation, who had tried prohibition for a month and then approved it as a permanency; that crime had almost disappeared among the peasants, who were now investing in the savings bank the money which they used to spend upon liquor. If they were successful in the war they were told that there would come a struggle between their religious idealism and their high ethical instincts and the monster of western materialism from which, so far, they had kept themselves clean. All this was honestly believed by persons who thought they knew Russia: now, after a short six years, their voices are heard no more.
In the early days of May 1915 the Germans torpedoed an American oil-tanker called the Gulflight and killed the captain. The body was landed in the Scilly Islands. It occurred to a person gifted with imagination that if the body were embalmed and sent over to the United States for burial the effect might be far-reaching, because as long as the submarine attacks upon harmless merchant vessels resulted in the death of Englishmen the real horrors of submarine warfare would never come home to the great mass of Americans. I was asked to find out a man who would consent to go down to the Scilly Islands to embalm the body, but on the very day when the arrangements were completed – 7 May 1915 – at about three o’clock I received a telephone message announcing that the Lusitania had been sunk. After that, of course, the sinking of the Gulflight became insignificant. Of all the many mistakes made by the Germans, the sinking of the Lusitania was the greatest. It split the German-American sympathies from top to bottom and ranged the native American very strongly upon the side of the Allies. I could scarcely believe that the Germans had struck a medal in commemoration of this outrage until I received an actual specimen of it. From that moment every person in England with a German name who entertained his friends was accused of drinking to the sinking of the Lusitania. I can never ascertain that any such accusation was well founded; on the contrary, I believe that many persons of German origin definitely cast off all sympathy with their country from that date. After that they were ready to believe any infamy of which the Germans were accused.
I remember very well the Zeppelin raid on London on 31 May 1915. I was dining with a certain Cabinet minister to meet the new Home Secretary and the new Lord Chancellor, together with Sir Edward Henry, the Commissioner of Police, and several Heads of Departments. I was discussing with Sir John Simon a question that was exercising us very much at the time, namely, the denaturalisation of former aliens who were believed to be hostile to this country, but against whom there was no definite evidence of acts of espionage.
Our conversation was interrupted dramatically. Our host came in from the telephone room, crying, ‘Zeppelins!’ He had been rung up from the Admiralty and told that Zeppelins were coming up the Thames. Our hostess’s first thought was for her small children. Were they to be taken to the cellar? The whole party trooped into the telephone room and grouped itself round the instrument in a wide circle. As one of the guests remarked, it was exactly like the second act of a melodrama. A secretary sat impassive at the instrument and, having got through to Scotland Yard, handed the receiver to Sir Edward Henry, who said very quietly, ‘Dropped bombs at Whitechapel, four or five killed, many injured; then turned north, now dropping bombs on Stoke Newington. Any fires? Oh, a good many fires. Thank you,’ and he rang off. We stood no longer on ceremony. Our hostess and one of the guests ran upstairs to bring the children down and the rest of us trooped off to Scotland Yard, where the telephone room would give us information at first hand. I walked home across the park. It was a lovely, clear night, but there was not
a sign or sound of Zeppelins and the police in Kensington had not even heard of the raid at 11.30. So huge a city is London! I learned afterwards that no one in London saw the airships. Altogether, ninety-two bombs were found, of which thirty were high explosive, generally of small size, with a little propeller attached which turned during the descent and un-screwed the fuse. Attached to each of these was a piece of stuff like a stocking-leg. A good many had failed to explode, but two of them had killed children. Three very large high-explosive bombs had been
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