Odd People

by Basil Thomson

  Spies in those days were treated with remarkable leniency. Robinson, a French spy arrested in London, was imprisoned for six months in the Tower in 1757 and was then released. Dr Hensey was arrested in London in June 1758 and sentenced to be hanged, but it is not certain that the sentence was carried out. This unusual severity was sufficient to frighten the other agents of the business.

  It must not be supposed that no German spies in England went undetected. We learned of the operations of two or three after they had left the country and they were wise enough to attempt no second visit, but if one may judge from the character of the information supplied by those who were arrested the intelligence they gave to the Germans cannot have been of great value. Probably the spy who brought them the most useful information was a certain American journalist.

  As the activities of German agents in America were gradually unfolded the American government began to take more drastic action. They opened the safe of von Igel and found there documents of extraordinary interest. To me the most interesting was a letter from the German Consul General at Shanghai to the Foreign Office in Berlin, in which he deplored his ill-fortune and gave an accurate account of the German Secret Service activities in the Far East, for there was nothing in the document that we did not know before; it might have served for a précis of German activities written in any British Intelligence Office.

  The Germans made great use of sabotage in America. Unquestionably, they would have done the same in England if they could, but it would not be safe to say that none of the accidents that took place during the war was caused by sabotage. The difficulty was to know how much was due to criminal carelessness, how much to fanatical pacifism among our own people and how much to German agents or to Sinn Fein. I remember one case where matches were picked up in the mixing machine of a high-explosive factory. If even one of them had gone down into the mixer many hundreds of people would have lost their lives. The man who found the matches brought them to the foreman and received the thanks of the manager, but the police inspector who was sent down to investigate was a sceptical kind of person and insisted upon the finder of the matches re-constituting the crime by placing matches in the exact position in which he found them. The extreme uneasiness of the workman confirmed the inspector’s suspicions and after a prolonged interview the man confessed that he had put the matches there himself and had taken them to the foreman in order to win credit and promotion from his employers.

  From time to time bolts and hammer-heads were found in the crank cases of aeroplane engines, where they had evidently been placed by design. It is hard to believe that the man who put them there intended deliberately to send an airman to his death; perhaps all he aimed at was to wreck the machine during its bench test. The criminal in this case may have been a discontented workman or a fanatical pacifist of the ‘stop-the-war committee’ type.

  It must certainly have been a man of this type who dropped a hammer-head into the gearing of a new tunnelling machine which was designed to bore tunnels 5 feet in diameter far underground. Fortunately, the obstruction was found before it had time to do any damage.

  The propaganda carried on by the opponents to conscription during 1916 and 1917, particularly among the engineers and electricians, was certainly disturbing. Some of the electricians in one of our filling factories had been heard to enunciate violent revolutionary sentiments and their technical knowledge was such that they could at any time have contrived an accident which, while destroying the factory, might have caused no loss of life if it were so timed as to take place when the hands were at home.

  In October 1917 there was a fire and explosion at a large factory in Lancashire which caused the death of ten people and enormous devastation. Sabotage was suspected, particularly as the factory was situated in a part of the country where Sinn Fein influences were strong, but nothing was ever proved.

  At five minutes to seven on the evening of 19 January 1917, I was at a house in Kensington when the Silvertown explosion shook the house to the foundations. Our first thought was that a bomb had fallen quite near; our second that a gasometer had exploded. People in the street suggested an explosion at Woolwich Arsenal. The telephone cables had been cut by the explosion and it was some time before we knew what had happened. I visited Silvertown, the scene of the explosion, on the following afternoon. The devastation was extraordinary. For quite a mile before we reached the spot we drove through streets of broken windows and here the explosive had shown its usual caprice, for many panes of glass much nearer to the scene were intact. The firemen located the buried mains and coupled up their hose with wonderful rapidity and they soon had the fire under control. Meanwhile, the guards had carried out the very dangerous duty of searching for bodies. Forty-five persons were known to have been in the works at the time of the explosion, but practically no traces of them were to be found.

  The fire had broken out in an upper storey, where a man and a woman were employed in feeding trinitrotoluene (TNT) into a hopper. Two women on the ground floor called up to ask whether they had sufficient explosive for the next twenty minutes and on hearing that they had they left the building for about a minute. As they came out the whole floor burst into roaring flame.

  Now, it is known that a piece of a certain chemical substance no larger than a Brazil nut introduced into TNT will lie in it innocuous for months, but that on the application of heat it ignites the whole mass. The TNT was falling from the hopper into a temperature of 130 Centigrade: a small piece of the chemical would not have been noticed by the people feeding the hopper. This particular batch of explosive had been brought by train from the north of England and at any stage of its journey it would have been possible to introduce the chemical into one of the bags. But while the facts were consistent with sabotage there was no proof and the case of Silvertown must remain among the mysteries of the war. If it was sabotage surely eternal justice demands that some special place of chastisement be reserved hereafter for the fiend who caused it.

  If the explosion at Arklow during the previous September, in which a number of people lost their lives, was not due to sabotage, the coincidence was remarkable, for threatening letters had been received by the management, but in that case it is probable that the Germans were not concerned.

  There were many dramatic and a few amusing incidents during the examinations of suspected persons. The Germans had been using as spies people belonging to travelling circuses and shows, as being less likely to invite suspicion than the pseudo-commercial travellers, of whom we had taken a heavy toll. Consequently, a sharp look-out had been kept for messages from such people. One day a telegram to a world-famous American showman announced that the sender was ready to book his passage to New York. He was invited to call, the stage was set, the chair was ready – and there walked into the room a blue man! His face was a sort of light indigo set off with a bristling red moustache. He was a really terrifying spectacle. If we were surprised we did not show it. All we dreaded was what would happen to the stenographer when she would steal a glance at the object sitting beside her. Then the moment came. She leaped a foot from her chair with a little sob. He turned out to be an ex-cavalry sergeant who had turned blue after his discharge and now got his living honourably as a blue man. The stenographer was accustomed to men of colour, but never to that particular shade.

  Among the curious persons who drifted into my room was a Dutch socialist Member of Parliament who had been admitted to the country on 19 May 1916, on condition that he gave an account of his intentions at Scotland Yard. As it turned out, he had been sent over to study food legislation in England, for the Dutch were in the uncomfortable position of having to contend with high food prices without a corresponding rise in wages and the government was attempting to regulate the maximum retail prices for all commodities, without much chance of success. He was astonished to hear that the only controlled commodities in England were sugar and coal. He was very indignant with the Amsterdam Telegraaf, in which Mr Raemakers’s cartoons were being p
ublished. He said that the paper was trying to force Holland into war. ‘We are a tiny country crushed between two giants.’ He was very contemptuous of the official socialists in Germany, who he said did not represent their Party. They were elected over and over again as a matter of routine and when the government squared them, as it always did, the Party itself remained unaffected. In his opinion Liebknecht had a very large following even in the army itself. He said that the food riots reported from Germany were more serious than was generally supposed.

  A few days later a Dutch socialist journalist came in. He was cheerful but very dirty and when I hinted that people were suspicious of him he said that it proceeded from envy and lack of principle. As for him, he lived by principle: he was an anti-smoker, an anti-drinker, a vegetarian and he wore no socks – all from principle. At this point he pulled up the leg of his trousers to prove his case, much to the scandal of the lady stenographer who was present. If I felt inclined to ask whether he went unwashed from principle I restrained myself.

  It was about the same time that a mysterious person calling himself Colonel Dr Krumm-Heller was taken off a Danish steamer at Kirkwall. He must have expected that this would happen because he had been sending anticipatory protests by wireless all the way over. He claimed to be the Mexican military attaché in Berlin and to be well known in Mexico for his scientific, literary and philosophical works. His mission, he said, was to study schools in Scandinavia and not to become military attaché until he entered Germany: his real mission, we felt sure, was propaganda. When I told him that he might have to go back to Mexico he began to cry and said that Carranza would most certainly dismiss him. It became known to me a little later that he was carrying a letter from Bernstorff to the German government, but that when he found that he was to leave the steamer he had passed it to a Russian for delivery. The next day Colonel Dr Krumm-Heller offered to make a bargain with me. If I would not send him back he would reveal a new German plan and would thus save the Allies thousands of lives. But when it came to the point he had nothing at all to tell and back he went. In due course a demand was made upon the government for £10,000, at which he assessed his ‘moral and intellectual’ damages.

  All this time England was seething with excitement about the battle of Jutland. The editor of a certain daily newspaper called on an officer of the Admiralty and said, ‘We are not satisfied with Admirals Jellicoe and Beatty.’

  ‘Who is “we”?’ asked the officer.

  ‘The public.’

  ‘Oh,’ said the naval officer,

  then you are one of those people who, if you had lived a hundred years ago, would have said, ‘Who’s that one-eyed, one-armed beggar in charge of our Fleet? Have him out.’ Now, look here, supposing you and I had a row in this room and you knocked my teeth out and I kicked you out of that door and you stood cursing in the passage, not daring to come in, would you say you had won a victory?

  The same officer, when questioned by a pressman as to why the German fleet had come out, replied, ‘They came out to get a mutton-chop for the Kaiser. I believe there were some other reasons, but these I am not at liberty to tell you.’

  We were busy talking about the end of the war as early as October 1916, so busy that some satirist circulated the following rhyme:

  Accurate evidence have I none,

  But my aunt’s charwoman’s sister’s son

  Heard a policeman on his beat

  Say to a nursemaid down our street

  That he knew a man who had a friend

  Who said he knew when the war would end.

  One of the most romantic incidents in the war experience of Scotland Yard was the arrival in England of an educated Jew who had, against his own will, been closely associated with Djemal Pasha, the Commander of the 9th Army in Palestine. According to his account, there had been attempts on the lives of both Djemal Pasha and Enver. In one attempt Djemal had received a bullet in the cheek. He gave a very curious account of the relations between Enver and Djemal. According to rumour, though they kiss one another on both cheeks and travel in the same car, each man has his hand upon his revolver as they sit side by side. The popular rumour at the time was that Enver had 600 men specially told off to protect his life and in 1916, when a plot against him was reported, he executed forty-two people merely on suspicion without any trial.

  This man was a native of Haifa, in Palestine and was therefore a Turkish subject, though his parents had come from Romania. As a young man he had taken to scientific research work in agriculture and had gone through a course in Berlin. He was director of the Jewish Agricultural College. Djemal used to apply to him for advice on agricultural and economic matters. He said that all the Jews and Christians had been put into a labour battalion, where they were employed in road-making, on very slender rations. In some places they were under German direction, but in others under Turkish officers. In 1915 there had been a locust plague and in 1916 they had the worst harvest that had been known for thirty-five years and the population of Palestine was in dire straits. He believed it to be the policy of the Turkish government to allow them to starve, for Djemal Pasha did not approve of open massacres, but preferred starvation as a means of purging the population of what he regarded as its undesirable elements. He said there was great friction between the German officers and the Turkish and it was common talk in the German mess that they were more likely to fall from a bullet in the back than in the front. Very few of the Turkish officers seemed to believe in success. They talked of this campaign as their last fight and that they wanted to fall in it like men.

  He had for some time been trying to get out of the country. He must have played his cards well, for in the end he obtained leave from Djemal Pasha to go to Berlin en route for Denmark for scientific agricultural study and from Copenhagen he succeeded in obtaining leave to come to England.

  I heard afterwards that this man had been out to Egypt and Palestine, where he had put his local geological knowledge to good use. A year later he came to see me and he was convinced that from El Arish northward there is a water zone where water can be tapped at semi-artesian depths. This he had discovered when he was Agricultural Adviser to the Zionists. Borings in this area produced water, which rose to within 30 feet of the surface. He was a great reader and he told me that his attention had been first called to the water question through reading Josephus, who describes Caesarea as being surrounded by gardens for an eight hours’ walk in every direction, whereas now it is a sandy desert right up to the walls through the encroachment of the sand. He said that he had tried very hard to persuade our engineers to try the experiment, but when at last they did there was an abundant supply of water and it was no longer necessary to bring tanks by rail from Egypt. He was convinced that experimental borings in the Sinai desert would produce water in the same way and thus the Mosaic miracle of striking the rock with a staff may be performed again in the twentieth century.

  After the Armistice I saw this man again in a new capacity. He was a member of a deputation of Zionists to the Peace Conference. He had a tragic end. He took an aeroplane to fly to London on some urgent business; the machine came to grief and he and his companions plunged into the Channel and were lost.

  CHAPTER 17

  THE END OF RASPUTIN

  SEVERAL ACCOUNTS HAVE been published of the assassination of Rasputin, differing in detail. This event had so much to do with the collapse of Russia that I took pains to collect evidence as to what actually happened.

  As everyone knows, during the autumn of 1916 Rasputin had succeeded in gaining complete ascendency over the Czar and Czarina. He was a person who could have existed only among the Russians. He gloried in being a peasant of the grossest and most common clay, but, just as a filthy fakir in India can acquire a reputation for holiness by his self-imposed penances, so a Russian moujik can do the same if he has personality, cunning and a smattering of ecclesiastical lore. Rasputin had all these and he was, besides, a creature of immense physical strength and physical temperament
. His doctrine was that the cure for all human ills was humility and he set out to humble the great ladies of the court. He had some curious magnetic power which he exercised more successfully over women than over men, but even men felt it. His influence over the royal family was such that he was able to persuade the Czar that the only medical attendant to whom he should listen was the Tibetan herbalist, Batmaef, whom Rasputin described as a doctor appointed by God. The story in court circles was that Batmaef administered herbal decoctions to the Czar himself and, by this means, weakened his will-power.

  In the late autumn there were rumours that Rasputin’s influence had been bought by the Germans to persuade the Czar to make a separate peace and Youssoupov, one of the young nobles, determined to worm himself into Rasputin’s confidence in order to ascertain the truth of these rumours. After some weeks he succeeded in winning his confidence and at last, in an interview lasting for two hours, Rasputin revealed the whole plan to him. A separate peace was to be proclaimed by the Czar on 1 January 1917 and it was then the second week in December. There was, therefore, no time to lose.

  Rasputin was the most ‘protected’ person in Russia. He was said to be watched over by two German detectives, a detective appointed by a group of bankers and an imperial detective who was responsible for his personal safety. The little group which was resolved upon his death believed that they were under the direction of a Higher Power because everything fitted in so perfectly and easily with their design. Rasputin seemed positively to cultivate the society of Youssoupov, who called upon him a day or two before Christmas and said that he was about to leave for the Crimea to spend Christmas there and that as Rasputin had never set foot in his house, he had come to invite him to drink tea with him that evening: he would consider it the greatest honour. Rasputin did not demur at all. He said, laughingly, that he would tell the detectives he was going to bed and that they were free for the evening and he invited Youssoupov to call for him in his car at the back door in order to give the slip to any detective who might remain on duty.