The excellent German Consular system, which has done so much to help German trade invaders in foreign countries, is openly a spy bureau, and is provided in almost every important centre with its own secret service fund.  Attached to it are spies and semi-spies, hotel-keepers, hairdressers, tutors, governesses, and employees in Government establishments, such as shipbuilding yards and armament factories.  It is a mistake to suppose that all these are Germans.  Some, I regret to say, are natives of the laud in which the Germans are spying, mostly people who have got into trouble and with whom the German agents have got into touch.  Such men, especially those who have suffered imprisonment, have often a grudge against their own country and are easily caught in the spy net.

Part of the system in England before the war was a commercial information bureau resembling the American Bradstreets and the English Stubbs, by which, on payment of a small sum, the commercial standing of any firm or individual can be obtained.  This bureau, which had its branches also in France and Belgium, closed its activities immediately prior to the war, the whole of the card-indexes being removed to Berlin.

It is the German boast, and I believe a legitimate one, that they know England better than do the English. Their error is in believing that in knowing England they know the English themselves.

At the outset of the war, when the Germans were winning, Herr Albert Ulrich, of the Deutsche Bank, and chief of their Oil Development Department, speaking in perfect English, told me in a rather heated altercation we had in regard to my country that he knew the United States and Great Britain very thoroughly indeed, and boasted that the American submarines, building at Fore River, of which the Germans had secured the designs, would be of little value in the case of hostilities between Germany and the United States, which he then thought imminent.

It is typical of German mentality that when I met him in Berlin, fifteen months later, he had completely altered his time as to the war, and his tone was, “When is this dreadful war going to end?” This, however, is by the way.  Herr Ulrich is only an instance of the solidarity of Pan-Germanism.  An English or American banker visiting a foreign country attends to his affairs and departs.  A German in a similar position is a sort of human ferret.  An hotel with us is a place of residence for transient strangers.  The Hotel Adlon and others in Berlin are excellent hotels as such, but mixed up with spying upon strangers; Herr Adlon, senior, a friend of the Kaiser’s, assists the Government spies when any important or suspicious visitor registers.  The hotel telephones or any other telephones are systematically tapped.  German soldiers are granted special leave for hotel service—­that is to say, hotel spying.

When Belgium and France were invaded, German officers led their men through particular districts to particular houses with certainty, with knowledge gained by previous residence and spying.  I know an officer with von Kluck’s army who received the Iron Cross, First Class, for special information he had given to von Kluck which facilitated his progress through Belgium.