Horst Goltz - My Adventures as a German Secret Service Agent

I hung my head, sick at heart; but he was relentless.

"Remember also," he said in a pitiless voice, "that men of intelligence never indulge in fruitless gossip, even among themselves. I hope you understand that by now." He paused a moment, as if he remembered something.

"For some time," he went on, in the most casual way, "I have been aware that it will be necessary for me to talk to you seriously. Now is as good a time as any. You know that your training for your future career has been put largely in my hands. I am responsible for your progress. The men who have made me responsible require reports about your development. They have not been wholly satisfied with what I was able to tell them. Your intentions are good. You show a certain amount of natural cleverness and adaptability, but you have also disappointed them by being impulsive and indiscreet.

"Now," he said, "I ask you to pay the closest attention to everything I shall say. Your attitude must be changed if you are to go on and some day be of service to your Government. You must learn to treat your work as a deadly serious business not as a romantic adventure. We were just speaking of von Heiden. I seem to remember vaguely that the last time you were here you had some sort of a cock-and-bull story to tell me of what was it? of seeing some secret maps of French fortifications on the unfortunate young man's table. I could hardly refrain from smiling at the time. Such insanity! You do not imagine for a moment, do you, that if he had proved himself discreet enough to be entrusted with such highly confidential things, he would have been so imprudent as to betray that fact to a mere casual friend of his little brother? I hope you see how absurd such imaginings are."

I groaned mentally as he continued:

"Remember now," my tutor said icily, "every man in our profession is a man who not only knows very much, but may know too much, unless he can be trusted to keep what he knows to himself. There are three ways in which he can fail to do that by carelessness, by accident, and by deliberate talking. Never talk never be careless never have accidents happen to you. Then you will be safe, and in no other way can you be so safe. Keep that in your mind! You will find it much more profitable and useful than remembering what anybody has to say about Franz von Heiden. It was a commonplace quarrel with Captain von Frentzen which killed him. A Court of Honour has said so."

That night at Gross Lichterfelde, after lights were out, Willi von Heiden came creeping to my bed. I was the only intimate friend he had there, and he felt the need of talking with someone about the big brother who had been his hero. Need I go into details of how his artless confidence made me feel? But human beings are exceedingly selfish and self-centred creatures. I had a heartfelt sorrow for my chum and his family in their tragic bereavement. And, blaming myself as I did for it, I was abased completely. Yet there was another feeling in me at least as deeply rooted as these two emotions. It was dread.

Dread was to follow me for many years. I had learned the dangers of the dark secret world in which I lived. Its rules of conduct and its ruthless code had been revealed to me, not merely by precept but by example. And with that realisation all the thrill of romance and adventure disappeared. For I knew that I, too, might at any time be counted among the men who "knew too much."

"CHERCHEZ LA FEMME!"

I am sent to Geneva and learn of a plot How there are more ways of getting rid of a King than by blowing him up with dynamite.

IF at any time in this story of my life I have given the impression that accident did not play a very important part in the work of myself and other secret agents, I have done so unintentionally. "If "has been a big word in the history of the L world; and even in my small share of the events of the last ten years, chance has oftentimes been an abler ally than some of the best-laid of my plans. If, for instance, I had not happened to be in Geneva in the winter of 1909-10; or if a certain official of the Russian secret police the Okrana had not met a well-deserved death at the hands of a committee of "Reds "; or if the German Foreign Office had not been playing a pretty little game of diplomacy in the south-western corner of Europe why, the world to-day would be poorer by a King, and possibly richer by another combatant in the Great War.

And if another King had not kept a diary he might have kept his throne. And if both he and a certain young diplomat, whose name I think it best to forget, had not had a common weakness for pretty faces, Germany would have lost an opportunity to gain some information that was more or less useful to her, a certain actress would never have become famous, and this book would have lost an amusing little comedy of coincidences.

All of which sounds like romance and is merely the truth.

I had spent two uneventful years at Gross Lichterfelde at the time the comedy began; two years of study in which I had acquired some knowledge and a great weariness of routine, of hard work unpunctuated by any element of adventure. Of late it had almost seemed as if, after all, it was planned that I should become merely one of the vast army of officers that Gross Lichterfelde and similar schools were yearly turning out. For such a fate, as you can imagine, I had little liking.

Consequently I was far from displeased when one day I received a characteristically brief note from my old tutor, asking me to call upon him. Still more was I elated when, the next day, he informed me that I had had enough of books for the time being, and that he thought a little practical experience would be good for me. A vacation, I might call it, if I wished with a trifle of detective work thrown in.

H'm! I was not so delighted with that prospect, and when the details of the "vacation "were explained to me, I was strongly tempted to say "No" to the entire proposition. But one does not say "No "to my old tutor. And so, in the course of a week, I found myself spending my evenings in the Cafe de 1'Europe in Geneva, bound on a quiet hunt for Russian revolutionists.

Russia, at this time, had not quite recovered from the fright she received in 1905 and 1906, when, as you will remember, popular discontent with the Government had assumed very serious proportions. "Bloody Sunday," and the riots and strikes that followed it, were far in the past now, it is true, but they were still well remembered. And although most of the known revolutionary leaders had been disposed of in one way or another, there were still a few of them, as well as a large number of their followers, wandering in odd corners of Europe. These it was thought best to get rid of; and Russian agents began ferreting them out. And Germany always less unfriendly to the Romanoffs than has appeared on the surface lent a helping hand.

So it happened that on a particular night in December of 1909 I sat in the Cafe de PEurope, bitterly detesting the work I Had in hand, yet inconsistently wishing that something would turn up. I had no idea at the moment what I should do next. Chance rumour had led me to Geneva, and I was largely depending upon Chance for further developments.

They came. I had been sitting for an hour, I suppose, sipping vermouth and lazily regarding my neighbours, when the sound of a voice came to my ears. It was the voice of a man speaking French, w.ith the soft accent of the Spaniard; the tone loud and unsteady and full of the boisterous emphasis of a man in his cups. But it was the words he spoke that commanded my attention.

"Our two comrades, "he was saying, "will soon arrive from the centre in Buenos Ayres."

"Yes," another voice assented a harsher voice, this, to whose owner French was obviously also a foreign tongue. "In the spring, we hope."