One crowded hour of glorious life Is worth an age without a name.
British Secret Service during the Great War
THE PROSPERITY OF 1914--AN OMINOUS CALM--MULTITUDE OF GERMAN SPIES--HOW ENGLAND WAS UNDERMINED--SHORTSIGHTEDNESS OF OUR LIBERAL GOVERNMENT--SECRET KNOWLEDGE OF PROMINENT MEN--SIR EDWARD GOSCHEN'S HISTORICAL DESPATCH--RUSH TO THE COLOURS--OUR UNPREPAREDNESS--INTRODUCING JIM--PATRIOTS FROM AFAR--F. C. SELOUS' ROUGHRIDERS--INITIATION INTO THE FOREIGN SECRET SERVICE--ADVISORY TESTAMENTARY DISPOSITIONS.
The year 1914 opened auspiciously. Future prospects looked brilliant. In the past there had been depression owing to political extravagances, but everything pointed to a change in the minds of the people; to an awakening, to future betterment. Money was plentiful and cheap. Labour was an active market with plenty of it. Good business seemed to be in the air. All around there appeared to be a general cheerfulness. Then came the lull before the storm. An ominous calm, a dull, dead, mysterious cloud of invisible, inexplicable, unintelligible danger threatened. No one could penetrate it; no one could fathom what it was; but everyone felt instinctively that something great and terrible was going to happen.
The stock markets sagged and fell away in a most extraordinary fashion, no matter how the Bulls or surrounding circumstances supported them. Buyers of properties suddenly stayed their hands. Speculators by natural impulse held aloof. Rumours began to circulate, strange stories passed from mouth to mouth which none believed, but which left an impression of gloom and impending disaster behind them.
The man in the street, the one and only true barometer of England's real feelings, showed an uneasy restlessness which could not be interpreted.
The multitude of German spies, who swarmed like locusts throughout the British Isles, assured themselves that the seditious seeds they had been sowing so energetically during the past years in the receptive and nourishing soil of Radicalism and Socialism, plenteously manured by liberal administrations from the vast financial resources at their disposal, were at last bearing a rich harvest of rare and refreshing fruit. They assured themselves that revolution would devastate Ireland, perhaps part of England, Wales, and Scotland as well. The Unions of the working classes they knew had been nurtured by their fond attentions until they had grown to mighty proportions. Working men of German blood or of strong Teutonic tendencies had agitated amongst the masses again and yet again, for "less time, more pay, and greater and more extended privileges." German Secret Service money had provided the sinews of an underground labour war. Countless thousands of honest, hard-working British labourers neither knew of, nor recognised, nor even suspected, the traitorous hand which so gently stroked them down the back whilst their ears were being tickled with persuasive suggestions and argumentative reasoning, prompting a greater dissatisfaction the more they were pandered to, and petted, and spoilt, and bribed by the Liberal Government who were the men in power over them. It must not be forgotten that for some years previous to 1914 prominent members of the Government of the day had been roundly rated in the Press for encouraging and expressing pro-German sentiments and inclinations; whilst the Government itself had been accused of shattering the Constitution of the United Kingdom, of muzzling the House of Lords, of trampling on the rights of Democracy, of humiliating the Crown, and of robbing the Church of England.