Spies and Secret Service. Hamil Grant
goes, in any given episode, but above all to be known to integral outsiders as having played the rôle of a fractional insider in any cause—this is an acute mania with a larger part of the human race than is commonly suspected. Megalomania of this kind goes a far way to explain the reason why men fitted for success in the unspectacular and prosaic careers of life will deliberately devote themselves to what must ever be considered as among the most disreputable of trades.
It may be objected that at least it is a business which requires courage and that all successful exponents of the metier of spying have been men of undoubted courage. While admitting the boldness of men like Le Caron and Schulmeister, it may be said that they displayed audacity rather than courage, and the two qualities spring from entirely distinct motives. Often the audacity which passes for courage arises either from a lack of imagination, or else from a blind fatalism, and in neither case is there any display of real courage. Duty, presumably, is the fundamental motive of courage, and until your spy can be shown to have engaged in the perilous business of espionage out of purely conscientious devotion to task and principle—Le Caron, it is only right to say, claims all of this—he must be classed with that type of individual who enters into the business of unrighteousness "for all there is in it," to use an American phrase, and well knowing the tolls and penalties which failure will inevitably exact. It is impossible, in perusing the private correspondence of the loud and boastful Stieber, not to divine the presence of a spirit of active maleficence, the measure of whose humanity is to be found in the number of cold-blooded executions for which he was responsible in his capacity as an agent of Bismarck's lust for conquest. And Stieber's congeners were as a rule no worse and no better than himself, the only difference being that the German held a larger stage on which to enact his rôle and had correspondingly greater opportunities. The most charitable argument that one can employ to excuse the existence of the spy is that by which Napoleon sought to explain his leniency towards them: They are a species of humanity which is by nature base, and to that extent only are not responsible for their characteristics.
II
THE SPY THROUGH THE AGES
The spy, as we have seen, has been given mention in the Old Testament, Joshua, David and Absalom having employed their services, and most of us remember that passage in Genesis in which his brothers answer Joseph saying: "We are true men, thy servants are not spies." The protracted peregrinations of the Israelites necessarily called for the employment of emissaries who should learn the qualities and dispositions of the many peoples whom they encountered on their way to the Promised Land, and your anthropologist might possibly not be far wrong in concluding that it was the experience gained in the course of his ever-perilous wanderings which made the Jew so apt an exponent of the arts of spying as he most certainly proved himself to be in the days of consular and early imperial Rome. In the New Testament, too, we hear of the spy when the high priests, having Christ under suspicion, sent forth spies who should feign friendship with Him for the purposes of extracting information. Every commander of antiquity was accustomed to employ the services of spies, as the Greek historian Polyænus tells us in the course of that marvellous compilation of his in which he gives details of some nine hundred stratagems, serviceable, it is noteworthy, not only in war, but also in civil and political life. If we are to judge by what the Romans say of themselves, their character was incapable of stooping to the baseness of common spying or studied treachery of any sort. The view is, of course, open to criticism, and when we reflect upon the treatment which triumphing generals were wont to accord to their most illustrious captives, not easily acceptable. One of the most formidable spirits of antiquity, Mithridates, King of Pontus, a prince regarding whose exploits writers have been strangely neglectful, was himself the chief spy of his army, and for the purposes of this work had made himself master, Pliny tells, of some five and twenty languages and dialects, by means of which, as well as fitting disguises, he was enabled to penetrate every region of Asia Minor. It is written that from the time of his succession to the throne of Pontus at the age of fourteen, he spent seven years wandering through and spying out the countries which he eventually conquered, and for the possession of which he waged a lifelong war against the power of Rome.
In the course of a work entitled Stratagems, Frontinus, a military writer in the time of Vespasian, records how Cornelius Lelius, having been sent by Scipio Africanus in the capacity of envoy to Syphax, King of Numidia, but in reality for the purposes of espionage, took with him several officers of high rank in the Roman army, all disguised. A general in the camp of Syphax, recognising one of these companions, Manlius, as having studied with him at Corinth, and well knowing him to be an officer in the Roman army, began to put awkward questions. Thereupon Lelius fell upon Manlius and thrashed him, declaring the fellow to be a pushful valet and nothing better. On the same occasion, the envoy allowed a high-spirited and richly caparisoned horse to escape from his suite in order to be given the opportunity of going through the camp to recover it. Again there was Tarquin the Proud who, failing to capture the city of Gabii to which he was laying siege, had his son flogged till the blood ran from his body and then sent him a refugee into the midst of the enemy, with instructions to procure by bribery the surrender of the place, all of which the youth accomplished. Polyænus tells how Sertorius, the Roman general in Spain, was the owner of a white fawn that he had trained to follow him everywhere, even to the steps of the tribunal which the animal had been taught, at a given signal, to approach as Sertorius was about to deliver sentence in judicial cases. The commander allowed it to be made known that he derived much information from this fawn. Meanwhile his spies were very active all over the country and the tribes all marvelled at the knowledge of the general, who attributed it to the little beast for which he claimed supernatural powers.
Polyænus also teaches the necessity of "psychologising"—a term not unknown to American experts in that form of police torture which is known as the Third Degree—the leader to whom one may be opposed. "One must exert oneself," says the Greek, "to find out the character of one's enemy as well as his disposition; whether he is impetuous and spirited at the first shock, or patient and apt to await the onslaught." Every general should know all there is to be known about the business of opponents, and he goes on to tell the tale in point, showing that what we know to-day as the Black Cabinet—that is, the spying of private correspondence in the post—was practised by Alexander the Great who lived some three hundred years before Christ. "Being in Carmania, he was informed that the Macedonians and Greeks in his army were speaking badly about him. Alexander thereupon assembled his friends and told them that as he intended writing home they should do likewise. Accordingly, they all wrote home and Alexander saw to it that the couriers were recalled with the mails before they had gone very far on their journey." Recurring to the same authority, we learn that cipher was well known to the Greeks under the name skutate and to the Romans as scutula, meaning a wooden cylinder around which an inscribed papyrus was rolled. He also records the story of Histiæus, a tyrant of Miletus who wished to incite Ionia to rebel against Darius; fearing however to send letters to the Ionians in those perilous times, he thought out the ruse of having the head of a trusted slave clean shaved and a message written on the scalp, addressed to Aristagoras in the simple words: "Rouse Ionia to revolt." The slave was then sent on his way to Ionia, and, his hair having grown over the fateful message by the time hostile camps were reached, he passed safely through to Aristagoras, who had the poll shaved once more and so learned his general's design. Altogether it would seem that during antiquity, ruse rather than real ability was the cause of many loud-famed successes and victories. Frontinus tells how the Consul Hirtius used to send carrier-pigeons to his friend Decimus Brutus, and Justus Lipsius is responsible for the statement that swallows were trained for purposes of military and other espionage, the same authority informing us that it was the custom among Eastern nations for birds to be trained as long-distance messengers, more especially between lovers. It may be certain, too, that postal communications were not all entrusted to the famous relay runners, regarding whose marvellous stamina the Roman records tell us.
Hannibal, it is certain, could never have performed that wondrous march from the edge of Andalusia right up through Spain, over the Pyrenees, across France and beyond the Alps into the plains of Piedmont, where he fought his most artistic battle in 218 B.C., at the Trebia,