Spy’s Honour

WHITEHALL COURT
18

“It is very good of you to see me,” Lord Erith said, smiling gently as he looked around for a place to put his silk hat. In fact, it was very good of him to say that, because the Commander had had no choice but to see him. He could fend off politicians and diplomats by threatening to tell them secrets, but Lord Erith came – at least on this occasion – from the Palace, and saying No to him would be saying No to the King.

“I suppose,” Erith went on, “that since your Bureau does not exist, neither does this room. A most remarkable illusion of reality.”

The Commander found a space for Erith’s hat and gloves between a model of a futuristic warship and an experimental chronometer on the work-table. The whole attic room was cluttered with such things, together with a shelf of technical books, a row of telephones, and a flock of maps, charts and seascape pictures roosting on the walls.

It looked, as the Commander had intended, like the office of the Chief of the Secret Service Bureau.

Erith seemed about to flick invisible dust off the padded dining chair kept for visitors, but then just sat, draping the skirts of his frock coat away from his thighs. He had a face that was very fashionable at the time, virtually just a profile with a thin beaked nose, high forehead and sharp chin. Senior diplomats, generals and some admirals all wore it, although not so many politicians; perhaps the voters needed some way of telling them apart. Erith’s version was balder than most, but with a fuller moustache.

“Are you to be involved in Monsieur Poincare’s visit?” he asked politely, but rather hoping not, if the Commander would be wearing what appeared to be a mechanic’s uniform. Whoever had designed the Naval officer’s working dress had held a bitter grudge against sailors.

“No, My Lord, no reason for me to be embroiled in pomp and circumstance.” The Commander pulled his own chair out to sit beside rather than behind his desk. He didn’t mind looking like a mechanic, but never like a blasted banker.

“And I trust that none of your, ah, agents will be doing anything interesting in France at the time of the visit?”

The Commander lowered his brows and reached for his briar pipe, rather like a man instinctively resting his hand on his sword hilt. “None of that got into the newspapers, not even the French ones.”

“So we were pleased not to see. But your profession seems to be rather in the public eye at the moment, with the Colonel Redl affair in Vienna, and now the release of … dear me, I forget the names – ”

“Brandon and Trench.” Three years ago these two, one a Marine, the other a Naval officer, had been imprisoned for snooping round the forts of North Germany. Last month they had been released as a gesture when the King went to Berlin for the wedding of the Kaiser’s daughter. The British press had made quite a fuss of the two men; the Admiralty had not.

“I know they were none of your responsibility, but still …”

The Commander growled: “Damned Naval Intelligence sending out total amateurs who think it’ll be a jolly jape to spend their leave doing a bit of spying. Mind, the Army can be just as bad.”

“My dear Commander, I do so agree with you (please light that pipe if you want to). For years I’ve been arguing for a secretariat that wasn’t dominated by generals and admirals to handle cooperative planning and intelligence.”

The Commander knew that was true. Somehow Erith, holding just some obscure post in the Royal Household, and with no background as soldier, sailor, diplomat or governor of this or that, managed to be in the centre of everything, including, from its inception, the Imperial Defence Committee. Too fastidious to be a leader, too intelligent to be a docile follower, what he clearly enjoyed was being an Influence.

I wouldn’t be surprised, thought the Commander as he squinted through his pipe smoke, if I wasn’t looking at a happy man. Remarkable.

“And what we got,” Erith went on, “was your Bureau. A big step but not, I’m sure you’ll forgive me, a seven-league stride. What do you feel the next step should be?”

“The right men and more money,” the Commander said promptly.

“Hmm. I was afraid you’d say that. Aren’t you forgetting our national custom of giving the means to do the job as a reward for having done it without them?” He smiled gently. “Now, if you could achieve some earth-shaking – but of course quite confidential – coup, such as discovering the secret fleet with which Germany plans to invade us …? Indeed, I recall that collecting and giving an independent assessment of such invasion rumours was an argument we used for setting up your Bureau. May I ask how the invasion is coming?”

The Commander gave a pained smile. “Apart from a dozen shilling shockers, about the same amount of wordage masquerading as journalism and a successful stage play – no, I have no evidence of any coming invasion at all.”

“Then let me ask this: could you produce evidence that such an invasion is not coming?”

The Commander waved his pipe in a helpless gesture, leaving an S of smoke drifting in the air. “Evidence of a negative? Can I produce evidence that a witch is not about to fly down the chimney and turn us both into toads? I can offer reasoned argument, but to those of your Committee determined to believe in witches …”

Erith’s nod encouraged him to go on anyway. He clasped both hands on the bowl of his pipe and said firmly: “Can we start by forgetting this secret fleet of shallow-draught barges being built in the Ostfriesland creeks? It simply isn’t necessary. All that’s necessary to invade Britain is to sink the Royal Navy. If you can do that, you can invade; if you can’t, you can’t. It’s that simple.

“And may we also forget the notion of distracting the Navy just long enough to sneak an invasion ashore somewhere? An invasion isn’t an assassination, one-shot-and-away; it’s just the start of a campaign – one that needs reinforcement and resupply just as any other. What happens when the Navy wakes up and cuts the supply line – which would have to be a regular steamship service across two hundred miles of open sea? You’d have tens of thousands of Prussians stranded in Norfolk or Lincolnshire, running out of ammunition and not a decent Bierkeller or brothel within miles.”

Erith frowned. “I beg you, this is a serious – ”

“I am being quite as serious as those Committee members who persist in believing in an invasion without, apparently, believing that the Navy would have to be defeated first.”

Erith sighed and gazed out of the window at the already smoke-stained cupolas of the new War Office building across the street. “You’re quite right, I’m sure.” His voice and thoughts seemed distant. “But there is some excuse for those military and naval gentlemen who have cried ‘wolf!’ without really believing in invasion at all. The public at large does not see why we might have to become involved in a Continental war. But it does believe – thanks to those shilling shockers – in the wolf of invasion (uneducated literacy has much to answer for). And we must be thankful that they accept increased expenditure on the Army and Navy for any reason, right or wrong. But now …”

“Now, the wolf having scared the taxpayer into emptying his pockets, you want my agents to hunt it down?”

“Not kill it, by no means kill it. But cage it, tame it, at the very least get it out of the hands of the Lords of Admiralty. Have you heard their latest ploy?”

News of the misbehaviour of his nominal masters at the Admiralty always cheered the Commander up. He grinned impishly. “Usually I have, by this time of day, but please continue.”

Men of Erith’s age – past sixty – and dignity did not spring to their feet, but he rose impatiently. “They want two whole divisions – forty thousand men – out of the seven we plan to send to the Continent in the event of war, left behind to guard against invasion. Forty thousand of our best men, nearly a third of our whole regular force!” He stalked himself restlessly round his chair. “And when no invasion comes? – then, I wager, the Admiralty will affect to notice those troops for the first time and say: ‘But we can’t have these fellows standing idle, let’s carry them off on an invasion of our own. On the islands of Heligoland or Borkum, or even the German coast itself.’”

The Commander leant back puffing contentedly. “Well, I hope they remember to sink the German fleet on the way. Jackie Fisher’s been hawking schemes like that for years – or is it young Winston wanting a cavalry charge by sea if he can’t get one by land?”

Erith sat down again and said sombrely: “I grant you this isn’t a new idea of the Navy’s. The new idea is how to lay hold of the troops. Forty thousand of them!”

“Unless I can cage the wolf. I can submit another report …”

“It would have to be convincing enough for the Army members to over-ride the Navy’s dire warnings. I’m afraid that simply rephrasing the old lack of evidence of invasion won’t do it.”

“What you need is a new lack of evidence? That my agents have scoured the German coastline within the last few weeks and found nothing?” The Commander frowned. “There is one problem to that.” He thought carefully, then said: “Whenever I go on a picnic, I try to remember to take a near-empty jar of jam or honey along. This I half fill with water and set aside for the wasps. They swarm in to reach the jam, fall into the water, and drown. And I am left to eat my hard-boiled egg unstung.

“The Germans know all about our obsession with invasion from the sea. They also know that any invasion, theirs or ours, involves just eighty miles of their coast, from the Dutch frontier to the mouth of the Elbe. It’s a coastline that’s well worth our attention, since it holds three major naval harbours, most of their shipbuilding yards, one end of the Kiel Canal and all those fortifications that Brandon and Trench got caught looking at. But …” He paused to relight his pipe. “… but I sometimes wonder how many German invasion rumours that so excite your Committee are pure jam, spread deliberately to get my agents – and the Navy’s – swarming in to drown themselves. And not in trying to learn something useful about their battle fleet or the Kiel Canal, but just pottering about looking for a non-existent invasion armada in some muddy creek. That is the problem.”

Erith sat very still and silent. He hadn’t thought of that at all. And to do him credit, he was thinking very hard about it now.

Finally he said: “Thank you for pointing that out. I shall most certainly pass it on to my colleagues.” And if the hints I drop to certain admirals and cabinet ministers that they may be dupes of the German counter-espionage system are not phrased delicately enough … well, doubtless they will let me know.

“So,” he added, “you do not propose to send our agents pottering up those muddy creeks?”

“Not of my own choice, My Lord.”

Erith’s circle of influence was probably wider than any in the country; men who would defy the King might defer to him. But in the end, it was only influence, not power. He could give orders to nobody but his own servants, and the Commander had just shown he knew it; had in effect said: “Find someone who can give me orders, and influence him.”

He sighed to himself. Was powerlessness the price of influence? Well, he had been offered power often enough, as minister, editor, governor, but had shied away from the hurly-burly of command. He had chosen; he could live with his choice.

He stood up and let the Commander pass him his hat and gloves. “With the situation in the Balkans, the storm could break on us almost any day now.” It was one last dignified plea.

“Indeed,” the Commander said, just as gravely. “I shall need all my men – and more – on that day.”

When he had escorted Erith to the more public part of the building, the Commander pushed his chair back behind his desk and took out a sheaf of papers hidden under a Naval logbook. He read each one carefully, then signed it in green ink, a single bold letter: C.

He enjoyed that signature.