It’s a matter of record that on the first day of the First World War, the British authorities rounded up a string of German spies across the country. For all practical purposes, the German espionage threat in Britain ceased to exist, and it was not re-established. It was the first great coup for London’s new Intelligence arrangements (its immediate impact was to allow the British Expeditionary Force to link up with the French Army unreported and thereby help to block the German advance), and arguably their most significant contribution to the war.
Implementation of the Third Irish Home Rule Act was postponed because of the outbreak of war, and then overtaken by the 1916 Easter Rising, by the armed resistance to British rule, and finally by civil war.
The German scheme to exploit Muslim sentiment in the Near East was only delayed by the death of Heinz-Peter Belcredi. The story of his sponsors’ subsequent more dramatic efforts, culminating in the Battle of Erzerum in 1916, is best known in its fictionalized form as one of the great tales of British adventure, Buchan’s Greenmantle.
Albania’s German king reigned for a total of six months, before unrest, the changing calculations of his international backers and the approach of European war made his position impossible. One hundred years later, the international community continues to meddle and manoeuvre in southeastern Europe.
Conclusive technical explanations for the failure of Gustav Hamel’s aircraft and that of a British seaplane piloted by a German officer during the Kiel Regatta have never been advanced – or, at least, have never been made public.
The evidence suggests that Eberhardt Krug was still alive towards the end of the First World War, living in a kind of retirement in Switzerland. The details of his activities and death are not clear from publicly available records. It’s probable that the archive of the Comptrollerate-General for Scrutiny and Survey has more to say on this extraordinary man.
The archive may also fill some of the gaps in the subsequent histories of those who survived the Comptroller-General’s great gambit.
James Cade’s career seems clear enough: he was prompted to return home early in the conflict, with Constantinople increasingly uncomfortable (and, the correspondence would suggest, with his mother increasingly insistent); he fought in 1915, and was wounded; Lloyd-George’s assumption of the premiership in 1916 brought a new style to government, and Cade was given a senior administrative position making use of his organizational skills; he returned to business after the war.
An anonymous donor (one may only guess at their gender) paid for David Duval’s discreet memorial plaque at Golders Green Crematorium, in north London; the pamphlet on the history of Golders Green, full of such anecdotes, says that once a year for ten years after his death a rose was placed next to the stone.
Ronald Ballentyne’s activities during the war aren’t immediately evident from the regular records. The documents of the Comptrollerate-General archive may have something to say on this; the stones of an island in the middle of the Adriatic may have more. Perhaps one can only speculate whether the Countess Isabella’s home offered him a place comfortably to disappear from the world, or a base from which to engage with it.
Academic records and her very discreet public profile show just enough of Flora Hathaway’s activities to suggest that there’s a great deal more to be known. The archive of the Comptrollerate-General appears to be the place to find it.
Hathaway apparently burned almost all of her papers. Among the very few mementoes that she kept and that survived her is a telegram of invitation, to the wedding in February 1915 of Major Karl Immelmann and Gerta von Waldeck. It’s highly improbable that she attended, but a pencilled tick on the telegram hints that at the very least she replied. Major Immelmann was killed in 1918; his infant son died that winter. Gerta’s subsequent career – as a civil engineer in the Middle East, and then as the author of a briefly very fashionable set of meditations on spiritualism and desert peoples – brought her some public renown.
The military career of Valentine Knox in the first half of the war is a matter of record – and of legend; as was described in the introduction to The Emperor’s Gold (retitled Treason’s Tide in paperback), towards the end of the war Knox had become Comptroller-General. The archive that he himself began to re-gather should hopefully reveal more of his activities, and perhaps offer an explanation of his disappearance after the war.
But the identity of the man who was Comptroller-General for Scrutiny and Survey in the period leading up to the First World War, the man who gambled with the future of British Intelligence in order to save it, remains a mystery. The archive shows the name he was using during the Boer War, and shows that it was a cypher. Speculation about who he might have been involves credible figures (Hozier, Melville) who moved in the margins of the ever shifting structures of British Intelligence; but if the archive of the Comptrollerate-General doesn’t reveal his secret, nothing will. He has drifted back into the dust of Whitehall. Indeed – for such is the nature of the dust of Whitehall – in a sense, he’s still there.