Chapter XVIII: Conclusion: Bibliography 309 (1)

INDEX 317

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Fouché _Frontispiece_

Henri Le Caron _To face page_ 40

The Duchess of Portsmouth " " 128

Frederick the Great " " 162

The Chevalier d'Eon " " 256

I

THE ETHOS OF THE SPY

The worldly philosophy of the current age bears the name of Pragmatism, the principles of which, so far as they are susceptible of being weighed, constitute a more or less modified view of the doctrine that the end justifies the means, a teaching which has become familiar to us through the pages of Nietzsche and Stendhal, and which is based mainly on the idea that might is the proper measure of right. Taking it, then, that pragmatical notions of this sort have become almost an implicit condition of individual progress, it would seem to serve little purpose seriously to go into the question of the wrongfulness or the rightfulness of spying as a factor in the struggle for complete self-expression—itself the real aim of all ordered and prearranged lives. It is sufficient for us to reflect that the successful spy flourishes to-day, as he has flourished since the beginnings of recorded time, and as in all probability he will continue to flourish till the day of doom. Indeed, it is not an unreasonable presumption that in the very earliest ages of the world, espionage must have been an entirely necessary condition of the struggle for existence among the infra-men who then peopled the caves of the earth and who succeeded in successfully surviving only by virtue of predatory acts and excursions in which the spoils and the plunder went to the strongest, who had also made themselves the best-informed as to sources of supply. Bible history, too, has told us about the Spy. The story of Joshua, the leader of Israel's hosts and the excellent organisation of informers which he controlled, remain like other tales of common human interest in the Scriptures among those that linger always in the minds of the least Biblical of students. Babylon, we are told, was overrun with informers of all kinds, Memphis and Thebes in their turn became what Alexandria proved to be in the time of Tiberius, and what the great capitals of our own day have become—namely, recruiting centres for criminal adventurers of all types, nationalities and classes, and consequently happy hunting-grounds for all in rapid quest of the agents of intrigue, iniquity and maleficence. Those, too, who have read the classical writers will remember that great leaders like Alexander, Mithridates, Scipio, Hannibal, Pompey and Cæsar, laid the foundations of successful campaigns and political achievement upon information previously supplied them by commissioned spies.

According to the Roman idea, spying was accounted a fair stratagem in both war and politics and was, in theory at least, distinguishable from treachery. Between the two acts there is, of course, a real difference, although in works dealing with international law the terms are often confused, some writers treating them as interchangeable, whilst others but loosely differentiate between the act of spying and that of betrayal, the presumption always remaining that the man who is capable of being a successful and voluntary spy also possesses talents which are common to the elemental traitor. The penalty of death, says Bluntschli, should be such as to terrify all spies, and it is the custom accordingly to execute them ignominiously by hanging. Technically the spy has been defined as one who clandestinely goes in quest of information, whilst a traitor is one who spies within his own community and to its undoing. Although most authorities agree in considering espionage as lawful among the ruses of warfare, all, with one exception, concur in determining that death remains the only logical desert of the man who has possessed himself of secrets upon which the common safety depends. Certain international jurists have objected to the employment, in any cause, of spies, as being immoral, or as condoning acts which are of themselves immoral, and the French writer Morin looks upon espionage with particular horror on the ground that it is "usually malice aforethought and is never voluntary," a peculiar enough view. It is especially blameable, he holds, because a premium is placed upon essentially dishonest dealing, although he admits, with some inconsistency, that it may sometimes become lawful—when it is unsoiled by perfidy, as he puts it. Only the last emergency can at all justify it, says Morin, who is singular in declaring that a spy should not be put to death unless caught in the act. Napoleon himself displayed an unexpected leniency wherever possible towards captured spies, and this on the ground, as he said, that the spy is, by his nature, a base character. In the opinion of the great soldier the best spy is the half-breed who is a natural cosmopolitan and is consequently unaffected by ideas of patriotism. His greatest spy, Schulmeister, was a man of decidedly mongrel antecedents and began life as a smuggler. Pedlars he also declared to be invaluable in espionage, and for the reason that they are naturally disposed to vagabondage, itself a trait of degeneracy. It is well known that he would only employ in such work men whose past had been soiled by some act of a disgraceful or criminal kind, and like the great Frederick, it was his custom to propose to actually convicted criminals their enlargement as the reward of a successful piece of spying.

Modern spies of the professional type, more especially those employed by Germany, fully meet the specifications of Napoleon's idea of the race. The accomplished spy of to-day is invariably a man of at least quasi-criminal proclivities, a being entirely lacking in a moral sense, a degenerate briefly; and indeed experts in the secret history of the German special-information departments all agree in declaring that a "white man," to use an Americanism, is worse than useless to the experts at the chief bureau of the Berlin Secret Service. As a consequence, their _corps d'élite_ is mostly made up of men who, if they have not known the inside of prisons, have at least earned an unequivocal right to such knowledge. One of the profoundest technicians in the business of organising spy campaigns, the late Karl Stieber, has stated that the most valuable spy is your born aristocrat with a bad record and a worse reputation. Proof of the soundness of this view would seem to have been fully advanced by the noble interveners in the Dreyfus case, and, in any event, it is known that among the names of the organising staff of Berlin's school for spies, a large number are those who bear the names of famous families, while the remainder, if not all gentlemen by birth, are at least gentlemen by act of parliament, as the saying is. Courage, _aplomb_, the possession of what Americans so aptly term "a good front," easy manners and a genial temperament—of any or all of these qualifications, a man of good birth is only in rare cases devoid. Heredity alone has given him many of the psychic requirements that go to make up the most valuable of actors in a desperate situation, including, perhaps, that philosophy of absolute _insouciance_ which makes of him the most sinister and cold-blooded of all criminal agents.

It would be unfair, however, to accuse the Germans of monopolising all those vicious characteristics which go to form the complete spy. Indeed, it would probably be nearer the mark to declare that it is only because of the elaborate excellence of the German organisation that the Teuton has signalised himself so prominently these later times in espionage. For, in truth, the Teutonic mind is fundamentally lacking, it is well known, in those qualities of craft and imagination which produce the best kind of secret service agent. Perseverance and the philosophy which knows how to wait on circumstances, these conventional enough qualities he undoubtedly possesses in a marked degree above his fellows. Nevertheless, they are not the most important requirements of the master-spy, whose base diplomacy and its results must depend to a great extent upon the exercise of constructive imagination and the forcing of circumstances to suit his particular strategy. The German has excelled his congeners at the business in the opinion of modern men solely for the reason that among the Germans the trade of the spy is not accounted more dishonourable than any other. In all probability, however, the Italian, the Greek, the Kelt, given a highly systematised school and an equal ethical standpoint, would prove abler executants in any mission which called for the employment of deep-set guile, the power of divining motives and the ability to calculate the effect of moves. The essential arts of the diplomatist—has not an ambassador been described as an official spy?—underlie, in respect of the mental operations required, the work of your successful secret service agent, and although men like Bismarck, whose mentality was not of a positively Teutonic cast, may be cited in disproof of the statement, it is certain that the German mind is less adapted and less adaptable to the fine processes of the arts of political negotiation than that of either the Kelt or the Italian.

Women, it is interesting to learn, from high authorities on the arts of espionage, are rarely effective or satisfactory agents in secret service. Not, it must be understood, that woman is incapable of the requisite baseness that is, in the successful spy, an indispensable quality. Far from it. Goethe, who was a competent judge of the sex, has placed on record his view that woman, when intent on turpitude, is capable of sounding lower depths than the vilest of the male species. German experts are, however, unanimous in eliminating to a minimum point the services of women as spies, and that too on the ground that they are rarely to be relied upon if once romantic sentiment becomes engaged in their operations—an ever-present possibility. "Any woman but a German woman" was a common cry of Karl Stieber who may be trusted to have well understood the character of his fair compatriot, for whom love and romance—the purer the better—constitute the only things worth living for in this drab enough world. Indeed, the famous Salic Law is said to have owed its first enacting mainly to the fact that German women were as a rule found to be unreliable, shall we say? where their intimate feelings were apt to become involved, and those who have resided in Germany will not require to be told that a handsome face and a brave air, added to a romantic bent, go very much further with women in the land of beer, love and song than with their sisters in perhaps any other country in the world. The work of the efficient spy involves, it is clear, a peculiar but none the less specific proportioning of analytical and synthetical qualities of brain-work, and while the feminine mind, which works mainly on its intuitions, may be described as wholly of a synthetic calibre, it has, except in the rarest cases, of analytical faculties—the ability for properly appraising and forecasting causes and effects—the very poorest provision.

The elaborate calculations of your Schulmeisters and Stiebers may be said, in nearly all cases, to have worked out with the smoothness of algebraic equations, and it is extremely rare that women display either the self-restraint or the reasoning power which carry to successful solution dragging intrigues with anything like the patient routine and regularity which a series of really unromantic situations calls for. Obviously, the work of the spy, no matter how dramatic it may appear in its co-ordinated whole, must, in respect of its various separate acts and phases, be bared of all dramatic or arresting incident. Were the opposite the case, woman, a natural actor, would find herself in the most congenial of elements. Anything more sordid, however, or more commonplace than the general phase-work of the spy, it would be difficult to imagine, and it is precisely for this reason that woman as a rule fails as a secret service agent. In matters of love or revenge, where her deepest feelings are concerned, she is capable of a sustained effort calling for the application of whatever analytical powers she may possess, but seldom in other cases; for an appeal to, say, her patriotism leaves her almost invariably cold and unenthusiastic, since love of country is a quality which depends too largely on an essentially platonic and impersonal principle to attract and hold for long her undivided interest and attention.

On the whole, a study of the spy, however interesting it may prove in respect of the undoubted variety of its actors and dramatic aspects, must be held to be a criminological study. Even in the cases of Hale and André, whose careers owe much of the halo which invests them to their tragic fate, one is suspicious of fanaticism in the former and pronounced megalomania in the latter, both symptoms of unsoundness of mind. However much the spy may plead disinterestedness in the pecuniary sense, or point to present poverty as a token of his claim to have worked for an implicit moral principle, one is conscious in studying the life of any one of the species in more modern times, that he contained within him all the necessary elements which go to make up the character and personality of that class of degenerate who is prepared to travel any path provided he be given the means to play a more or less spectacular rôle. He is invariably to be found among that type of men who advance the peculiar claim that "the world owes every wight a living," strangely forgetful of the historic retort in point. The application of this principle to all the length to which it is capable of being extended would, of course, justify the struggle for existence of the summer burglar, the swell mobsman, the sand-bag artist and the lead-pipe assassin, to mention but a few members of the big brotherhood which lives by crime. It is undoubtedly true that many successful spies lay claim to be scions of splendid families, and, as we have said, German authorities will not employ men on important missions in espionage who have not at least had the education of gentlemen. The boastful claim of pedigree—obviously untenable in the majority of cases—provides for the writer, at any rate, something of a key to the psychology of the spy. Pride of mythical ancestry is undoubtedly a capital symptom of megalomania, among the conditions of which is the obsession of self-importance, and this would seem to be a widely prevalent disease among the sons of men. The desire to be near important people, to be engaged in no matter how lowly a capacity with men who direct important affairs, to associate in more or less familiar fashion with celebrities, or people highly placed, to count for even an infinitesimal part in the conduct of big events, to have the tips of one's fingers in the particular pie of the moment, to have been "not altogether out of it," as the cant phrase 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, had it not been for an organisation of spies and informers who prepared the way by ruse and diplomacy for the advance of his hordes. Of him Polybius writes: "For years before he undertook his campaign against Rome, he had sent his agents into Italy and they were observing everyone and everything. He charged them with transmitting to him exact and positive information regarding the fertility of the trans-Alpine plains and the valley of the Po, their populations, their military spirit and preparations and, above all, their disposition towards the government at Rome. There was nothing too large in promises that the Carthaginian was not ready to make in return for their support against the hated City." Cæsar too employed spies to the undoing of his adversaries in Egypt, in Gaul and also in Britain, and although in his Commentaries he records his employment of emissaries of this kind, history remains generally blank as to special details, leaving us to conclude that, like Napoleon, he relied mainly on the exigencies of the moment to produce the required information through the bribery of individuals in the opposite camp. In his early political career, especially during his tenure of the office of Pontifex Maximus, it seems clear that he then laid the leading lines, through the employment of many informers, of that vast political network of which he subsequently became the master, while his later association with Marcus Crassus, who mainly owed both wealth and power to the army of spies which he controlled, was in every way to Cæsar's advantage in respect of the means of procuring important information. Had he employed the services of a spy system on his attainment to supreme power, it is unlikely that he would have come to his destruction at the hands of a group of the best-known men in Rome, the fact leaving us to infer that he had ceased to use a secret service after the Civil War.

On the passing of Constantine to the Bosporus in the fourth century, Rome, in the process of the ages, became the centre of a vast ecclesiastical power. The work of the spy then reached the honours of a kind of consecration. Writers like Lachesnaie and Deville emphasise the view that ecclesiastics are especially fitted for the business of spying. Fouché and Talleyrand had been clerics in their early days and certainly both were masters in the business of organising special-information corps. In his works, too, the Prussian General, Karl von Decker, declares that "a secret which cannot be penetrated by a woman or a priest will never be penetrated." To tell the story of Church espionage would exhaust the capacity of a large library, and in this connection it may be said that adversaries of the Church of Rome have ever held that the Confessional was a purely political invention, the object of which was to spy upon the community. Whether this be so or not, it is fortunately not our business to decide; it is fair, however, to mention the prevalence of the view. In any case, clerics have ever proved themselves apt for the work of espionage, and in a collection of ordinances issued and signed by Louis XIV. in 1652, a certain Father Berthoud, "although an ecclesiastic, is authorised to disguise himself in any way he likes in Paris, Bordeaux, Blaye and elsewhere," for the purposes of spy work among the political and social enemies of the Crown. Cardinal Richelieu and his understudy, Père Joseph, practically inaugurated in France the system of opening private communications, a practice which was carried to its extreme under Napoleon, of whose daily budget of private letters, his fourth secretary, Fain, has told us much.

That the system of espionage persists to our own day in Continental colleges and convents under the control of congregational clerics, is a fact which is well known. Each division of a school is invariably placed under the chronic vigilance of a "surveillant," or watcher, who in his turn employs his own corps of spies, privileged boys moving among the masses of their congeners, marking their intentions, noting the relations of the younger boys with the older, getting information as to unlawful programmes to be carried out, ferreting out secret testimony as to the habits of suspect characters and, if possible, intercepting amorous billets which pass between elder boys in other divisions and the younger fry. In regard to these unwholesome _liaisons_ the vigilance of the spies is certainly justified; but the system goes much deeper than this in foreign schools, its objects being to inquire into the most intimate details regarding the private character of a boy—heaven only knows why, if it is not for the pure love of finding out. Indeed, it must be allowed that the baser tendencies which are to be noted in the case of all spies, here display themselves in the form of a pruriency which often touches the indecent and always the unwholesome.

The real founder of the business of organised spying in modern times was Frederick the Great, who was wont to boast that his spies exceeded his cooks in the proportion of a hundred to one. It is impossible closely to read the story of Frederick, or even to study minutely his face as pictured, say, by Meyn, without becoming conscious of the fact that here was a being who realised in his personality the claim of the psychologists that great ability and criminal tendencies are often closely affiliated. Apart from what we know of his perverse eccentricities, it is certain that his deliberate elimination of all the higher ideals of humanity from a place in his political philosophy had the effect of making him as impersonal as an automaton where his material ambitions were concerned, and he knew no other. Like the true pragmatist he was, Frederick considered all things good in themselves which served his ends, and his policies were invariably conceived on his pet principle: "If honesty fails us, we have always dishonesty to fall back upon." He it was who laid the foundations of that policy of Prussianisation of which our story of Stieber tells in its turn, and in which no measure was to be considered too extreme or base, nor turpitude too abhorrent, provided it advanced the interests of his House and furthered its ambition to play in Europe that rôle which had passed to the Habsburgs by inheritance from the Cæsars. For Prussia Frederick sought a permanent predominance in Europe equal to all which Louis XIV. had exercised between 1661 and 1715. An understanding of these facts is really the condition of grasping the significance of the elaborate Prussian spy system of our own time.

Lastly comes the age of Napoleon, in which we find that, for all the essential militarism of the imperial regime, the spy really played a more prominent rôle in the social and political drama than in that of the camp, the great soldier, except in extraordinary cases of long-laid plans, as in the Austerlitz campaign, relying mainly on human cupidity touched by the magic of his gold, to find, as the occasion demanded, willing perverts to provide him with the information necessary to the success of his combinations.

III

LE CARON

Away back in the later eighties, when Ireland was in the throes of her penultimate fight for the principle of self-government, all true sons of Erin had marked out for their particular obloquy two individuals who have since become notorious—namely, Piggott, the forger, and Major Le Caron, the spy. Those whose memories travel back easily to the famous _Times_ Commission will recollect how offensively both names stunk in the nostrils of all who supported the late Irish leader. Among Nationalists, it will be remembered, the spy was invariably spoken of under the name "Le Carrion," and even those who gave him the benefit of a proper pronunciation of his pseudonym were wont to utter it with that peculiarly hissing emphasis with which Irishmen, among all men, seem able to invest the names of those who run counter to their political bias. The positive venom which certain eloquent Nationalists seem actually to instil into the pronunciation of names like "Dublin Castle," "Major Trant," "Lord Clanricarde" lingers long afterwards in the memory of English listeners, just as the rattle of certain snakes is said ever afterwards to linger in the ears of those who have escaped them in the jungle. To hear the late Mr Biggar, for instance, utter the _nom de guerre_ of the famous British spy was a real lesson in the onomatopœic art, and on his lips the name, otherwise inoffensive and, indeed, on English tongues a liquid enough quantity, was made to attain a sibilancy which was truly weird in its effect.

_By permission of Mr. William Heinemann_]

How came the Major by his adopted name, and was it really meant to portend anything? It was humorously said at the time that the spy had taken his pseudonym from the French form of the name of that mythical boatman of classic memory who was wont for a few halfpence to ferry the souls of the damned across the river Styx, Charon, to wit. Le Caron is, however, a common enough French name, and the Major had lived some years in France previously to migrating to the United States, in which country Thomas Beach first became Henri Le Caron. Born at Colchester, Essex, in 1841, Beach belonged to a type of family which was clearly of old-fashioned puritanical stock, and the point is important enough in view of his later claim to have acted the rôle of traitor purely on the ground of moral principle. In his autobiography he tells how from his earliest days he had been brought up to cherish the Bible and to loathe all forms and quantities of alcoholic liquor. His home life was altogether not a very bright one and dull domestic repression soon began to exert its own particular reaction on a character which was already bursting with the spirit of adventure and derring-do. He records it that the routine of his existence grew too monotonous for the larger soul within him, and how he ran away from home and a Quaker's shop at least three times before his sixteenth year, breaking his apprentice bonds and travelling far and wide, yet managing, at whatever town he made a halt, to earn what he calls a respectable living. Like most characters of his obviously crude and untutored kind, in whom the spirit of romance is a considerable, if a somewhat jumbled, equation, there was not a little of the megalomaniac in the boy, and even in those early days his soul thirsted after the big things of life. In young Beach, too, there was a bit of artistry of sorts, and just as it was a chief ambition of Spy Schulmeister to dance like a marquis of the old regime, and a foible of Spy Stieber to accumulate pectoral decorations testifying to his honour, so also the youthful Le Caron discovered a precocious passion for hymns and the music of the church organ. At Colchester he became a leading and decorous choir lad, and according to himself it was his love for psalmody rather than any regard for his puritanical parents which invariably brought about his return, prodigal-wise, to the paternal roof. One is obliged in that spirit of fairness which gives the devil all that is due to him, to insist on what are otherwise prosaic enough details, and all the more so because, to the man's admirers, his piety provides an argument for the rôle he afterwards adopted in life.

Having spent some years in Paris, where he worked as an agent for that now-extinct old worthy, John Arthur, earning a living which enabled him to present a highly respectable figure, he clearly felt a call, he tells us, to join the North in 1861, when the kindling American Civil War made the States a kind of promised land for all sorts of adventurous spirits, most of whom, it may be supposed, were still feeling the influences of the comparatively fresh Napoleonic legend. Taking out a passport in the name of Henri Le Caron, young Beach shipped on the _Great Eastern_, then about to take her maiden trip across the Atlantic, and landed duly in New York, where the military authorities enlisted him as a private in the Pennsylvania Reserves. Le Caron—he was never after 1861 known by the name of Beach—passes over his military career with unexpected haste in his autobiography, it must be said. He was present, he tells, at important engagements during the course of the war, first as an infantry soldier, subsequently as a cavalryman, receiving promotion and being especially detailed for scouting operations. In 1864 he was gazetted second lieutenant and by 1865 had attained the rank of regimental adjutant with the title of Major—a rank which became, it may be said in passing, at the close of the war, so common throughout the States, that humorists were wont to tell how in 1866 it was impossible to throw a brick in any given direction where men happened to assemble without hitting an officer of that standing.

Le Caron, it is interesting to note, records his act of religious faith in the following words:—"We are impelled by some unknown force to carry out, not of our own volition or possible design, the work of this life, indicated by a combination of circumstances to which unconsciously we adapt ourselves." This, it may be remembered, was the religion of the late Prince Bismarck, and it must be allowed that it is a highly convenient and elastic hypothesis of life. It goes far to explain how he came to be associated with Fenianism. Le Caron declares, however, that he was far from having gone in search of the Fenians; on the contrary, he insists, the Fenians came in search of Le Caron. The Major disappoints us rather badly, nevertheless, by failing to show how it was that the Irish in America, even in those days a powerful community, should have sought out the psalmodical soldier who abhorred alcohol in all its forms and possible quantities, and why he, a Briton, of all men, should have been singled out to put life into the Irish-American movement for the emancipation of the Sister Isle. At the head of that movement in 1865 was James Stephens, who directed the organisation both in Ireland and America, while his agents on American soil included some of the shrewdest Irishmen of that age and, indeed, some of the most prosperous. Le Caron explains briefly how he first entered the movement as a spy. A fellow-officer had informed him quite casually that the main object of the Irish-American agitation of that date was the invasion of Canada. This startling bit of news proved more than sufficient to call out the fires of the old puritanical moralist dormant in the Major, who proceeds to inform us in the language of tragic passion which one applies to a tailor who has omitted a minor detail, that he "felt quite indignant at learning what was being done against the interests of my native country." Accordingly, and in order to unload his chest of the perilous secret, he addressed a letter to his father, a local tradesman, at Colchester, informing the sire that an attack was contemplated on the Dominion by a group of bold bad Irishmen. Evidently there was in the Beach tribe a congenital incapacity for holding a secret, for no sooner had the old man read his son's letter than, "startled and dismayed at the tidings it conveyed, he, true Briton that he was," made over the letter to the then sitting member for Colchester, a Mr Rebow. It was this gentleman who was instrumental in procuring Le Caron his salaried commission to act in America as a spy for the British police authorities.

In 1867, Major Le Caron, freed from military service, was looking around him for the means of maintaining his family, and in the course of a visit to England, was instructed by the British Government to ally himself with the Fenian organisation in America, "in order," as he frankly admits, "to play the rôle of spy in the rebel ranks." His adventurous nature welcomed the work as congenial, he says, while his British instincts made him a willing worker from a sense of right. Accordingly, on his return to America, he offered his services as a military man to General O'Neill, who was to lead the anti-British forces in the event of another uprising. On his cordial acceptance by O'Neill, as well as initiation, on his solemn oath, into the Fenian Brotherhood under that soldier's sponsorship, Le Caron returned to his Western home and lost no time "in commencing to lead my double life," as he puts it. At Lockport, Illinois, he set about the organisation of a Fenian "circle" in which he took the position officially known by the title of "center," or commander, a post which entitled him to receive all official reports and communications issued by O'Neill. These reports were duly transmitted to London by the Major and one pauses here to reflect that in this supplementary office Le Caron might not inappropriately have borne the subsidiary title of "scenter." The soul of the Major was clearly one of no ordinary beauty and versatility, for in order to supplement his gains as a secret-service agent, he accepted about this time a comfortable post as hospital steward in a vast gaol in Illinois. Here, he naïvely admits, he felt at home, because, as he writes, "in such a vast assembly of criminals, there were many whose characters and careers formed subjects for very interesting study to me. I was fortunate in being connected with the prison at a time when some more than usually clever and facile scoundrels were temporarily resident there." O'Neill was, however, on the look-out for energetic agents, and Le Caron was not suffered to remain long in the comparatively inactive life of an Illinois gaol. In response to a telegram from headquarters, he proceeded hurriedly—and apparently without giving due notice to his employers—to New York, where he was engaged as "major and military organiser of the Irish Republican Army," at a salary equivalent to £650 a year, a rare exchange for the few pounds he was being paid weekly as a prison official in Illinois. With his commission he received instructions to proceed on an organising tour, in the course of which, the Major learned, to his deep disgust, that he was expected to address public meetings as a sworn advocate of the Irish cause. He knew nothing whatever about Irish politics and was well aware that ignorance of Irish aspirations meant, in the opinion of most Irishmen, wholesale indifference, which was hardly worse than active hostility itself. Once, indeed, he found himself in a tight fix which called for all the undoubted nerve the spy possessed. The occasion was a Convention of the Fenian Brotherhood at Williamsburg. The Major tells the story in the course of his autobiography in the following words:—

"The evening came and with it our trip to Williamsburg. On arrival there in the company of O'Neill and some brother officers, I found several thousands of persons assembled. We were greeted with the greatest enthusiasm and given the seats of honour to the right and left of the chairman. My position was a very unhappy one. I was in a state of excessive excitement, for I feared greatly what was coming. Seated as I was next to O'Neill, I could hear him tell the chairman on whom to call and how to describe the speakers; and as each pause took place between the speeches, I hung with nervous dread on O'Neill's words, fearing my name would be next. The meeting proceeded apace, some four or five of my companions had already spoken and I was beginning to think that after all the evil was postponed and that for this night at least I was safe. Not so, however. All but O'Neill and myself had spoken when to my painful surprise I heard the General call upon the chairman to announce Major Le Caron. The moment was fraught with danger; my pulses throbbed with a maddening sensation; my heart seemed to stop its beating; my brain was on fire and failure stared me in the face. With an almost superhuman effort, I collected myself, and as the chairman announced me as Major M'Caron, tickled by the error into which he had fallen and the vast cheat I was playing on the whole of them, I rose equal to the occasion, to be received with the most enthusiastic of plaudits.

"The hour was very late and I took advantage of the circumstance. Proud and happy as I was at being with them that evening, and taking part in such a magnificent demonstration, they could not, I said, expect me to detain them long at so advanced an hour. All had been said upon the subject nearest and dearest to their hearts. (Applause.) If what I had experienced that night was indicative of the spirit of patriotism of the Irish in America (tremendous cheering), then indeed there could be no fears for the result. (Renewed plaudits.) And now I would sit down. They were all impatiently waiting, I knew, to hear the stirring words of the gallant hero of Ridgeway, General O'Neill (thunders of applause), and I would, in conclusion, simply beg of them as lovers of liberty and motherland (excited cheering) to place at the disposal of the General the cash necessary to carry out the great work on which he was engaged. This work, I was confident, would result in the success of our holy cause and the liberation of dear old Ireland from the thraldom of the tyrant's rule which had blighted and ruined her for seven hundred years. These last words worked my hearers up to the highest pitch of enthusiasm, and amidst their excited shouts and cheers I resumed my seat, with the comforting reflection that if it took so little as this to arouse the Irish people, I could play my rôle with little difficulty."

Fenian Conventions came and passed; the organisation had grown to extraordinary proportions, as is shown by the fact that in 1868, when the Brotherhood made a demonstration at Philadelphia, not fewer than 6000 armed and uniformed Fenian soldiers paraded the city, with General O'Neill at their head and Le Caron among the staff. In the course of his work in the Eastern States, the Major had already distributed, he tells, 15,000 stands of arms and 3,000,000 rounds of ammunition for the prospective raid which promised shortly to be undertaken, on the prime condition, however, that the funds should be forthcoming to finance the adventure. In the spring of 1870 it was decided to make the projected move upon Canada, O'Neill declaring with a Kelt's enthusiasm that "no power on earth could stop it." Le Caron, who was, of course, already in active touch with the Ottawa authorities, met the British agents at Buffalo, giving them full particulars and details as to the Raid which was about to take place. On their departure to make complete preparations for all eventualities, O'Neill arrived at Buffalo, whence, and accompanied by Le Caron, he left for the Front. "O'Neill," writes the Major, "was full of enthusiasm and firmly believed that the Canadians would be taken entirely by surprise, while I myself was laughing at his coming discomfiture." Arrived at the frontier, O'Neill, who expected to find at least 1000 Fenians under arms—the nucleus of an army which was to attract another 500,000 Irishmen from all parts of America—discovered to his dismay that only 250 men had assembled; this number was swelled by the arrival of 250 more on the morrow, when the General, fearful of the effects of hesitation and delay, ordered his force to cross the border from Vermont into Canadian territory. The simple Irishman addressed his troops in early-Bonapartian fashion as follows:— "Soldiers! This is the advance guard of the Irish-American army for the liberation of Ireland from the yoke of the oppressor. For your own country's sake you enter that of the enemy. The eyes of your countrymen are upon you. Forward—March!"

The spy himself, from the crest of a slope, watched the advance of the little band of invaders as it crossed the border-line into British territory, some in Fenian uniform of green and gold, others in ordinary "Sunday" garb. Not a soul was in sight, nor anything like a force to oppose their progress. Le Caron well knew, however, that behind the ridge towards which the Fenian army advanced deployed, cheering wildly and with bayonets fixed, at least 1000 Canadian volunteers were lying in wait. As the invaders touched the slope, the Canadian rifles opened fire, the Army of Liberation ceased forthwith to exist, and the last the Major saw of General O'Neill was that officer's passing in a hackney-coach seated between the two policemen who had arrested him. Le Caron of course fled with the rest of the invaders, and immediately made his way to Ottawa for the purpose, he says somewhat unconvincingly, of personally "reporting" to the authorities as to the raid, the result of which had in all probability been telegraphed to Government House ten minutes after the fiasco. Duly he arrived at the political capital, where he was, he says, received with the honours that usually fall to the carriers of military dispatches. Here a significant enough incident occurred. Wishing to return home at once, Le Caron prepared for the journey only to find at the last moment that he was without funds for the ticket; he thereupon applied to a certain Judge, who wrote him a cheque for the unusually generous sum of £70—generous seeing that the sum was at least ten times the amount of his fare supposing him still to have lived in the West, while the fare from Ottawa to New York State does not exceed fifteen dollars at the farthest. With his usual dispatch in regard to matters in which one's curiosity not unnaturally looks for relief, Le Caron passes from the episode without volunteering any explanation of a satisfactory kind.