CHAPTER IV

THE GERMAN PREPARATIONS FOR WAR

WHEN the Germans had planned an aggressive war against France and Russia with the eventual object of crushing England, they knew at the outset that they must make such complete preparations that they would be sure to win. To fail would be the greatest catastrophe in German history. They simply must not fail. They must therefore calculate upon meeting the worst possible circumstances; they must prepare for every possible contingency; they must be as ready as their enemies were unready. They must begin the war at the moment most advantageous to them and most disadvantageous to their enemies. And they must strike the first blow.

The guarantee of victory was to be the superiority of German organization for war and must be the product of foresight and long years of preparation. All Germans must be made into soldiers, and all soldiers must be equipped with everything that could be thought of. They must be thoroughly trained in all the things that it might become essential for them to do. An army could not be made in a hurry, the Germans claimed, and it would therefore take a generation to get ready. That very fact would make them sure to win, because if their enemies must take as long a time to prepare, they would be crushed before their preparation had been begun.

They trained their men to stand the fatigue of long, forced marches, for they knew that only men who had gone through

extreme fatigue many times would ever be able to execute the sort of a movement on Paris with which they intended to begin the war. Artillery and infantry practiced marksmanship without ceasing, and the cost was enormous, but they did not propose to have the army learn how to shoot after the war began. Every pleasure automobile and taxi-cab made in Germany had the holes ready bored in its chassis for the changes necessary to transform it into a military auto; its new equipment had been prepared ; and its owner and chauffeur had at all times instructions exactly where to take it the moment a certain order was issued.

There would be no time to waste when this aggressive war was launched. For every gun put into army use, a duplicate was made and put in the reserve; for every rifle were made so many thousands of extra rounds of ammunition; for every soldier so many extra uniforms and pairs of shoes. Germany must be ready to begin the war with a rush, but she must not count on ending it at the outset. She must be as well prepared with the material means of continuing it indefinitely as with those for beginning it instantaneously.

Knowing in advance that they were to fight a war with France and with Russia, the High Command decided in advance which officers should lead the troops and then sent men like Hindenburg to study the geography of Poland and men like Von Kluck to study the geography of France. These men could not of course travel as military officers, but the French noticed great numbers of German tourists walking through the country, large numbers of German artists making sketches of the French country, Germans with cameras taking pictures of hills, trees, and rivers. We know what they were doing. Some of them were generals planning their campaigns. Others were artillery officers making the calculations which should tell them exactly how to hit certain

objects with their great guns when the time came. Others were infantry officers who were going to lead their troops across that country.

Quite as important as the complete preparation of the German army would be exhaustive knowledge about the armies of possible enemies. In Berlin they should know more about the French army than was known in Paris, more about the English army than was known in London, more about the Russians than the Tsar's own generals knew. They proposed to learn exactly who the officers of these various armies were, what had been their training, their probable ability. They knew how many more might be enlisted. They not only made lists of the factories making war materials, but also of the factories that might be transformed at the outbreak of the war for that purpose, and the volume of output which they could probably turn out in any given period.

Then skilled workmen would be needed. How many were already skilled in France, England, or Russia in making war materials; how many might become skilled; how long would it take to train them? They must thus find out in advance just how great a force the German army would be likely to meet in the first week of the war, what in the first month, and what in every succeeding month or year. They could then compute the exact size of a German army needed to insure victory. Victory would not be a matter of chance; it would be a mathematical calculation, and, if only the work were well done, it ought to be infallible.

They would then provide at the elbow of every British, French, and Russian general an invisible soldier of the German Empire. In the Councils of the French Premier and of the British Ministry there should be an invisible Councillor of the German nation. These were spies, men who were not known to be in German pay,

selected with the utmost care so that they might send on to Berlin regularly the plans of Germany's enemies. Thus the German leaders would always know what was going on elsewhere, whom they must meet, what was being done to offset their plans. If possible, the spies should steal important military and naval secrets. If a great battleship was being built by the British, they must find out just what its construction would be and if possible get the plans. Should the French invent something, some spy must be detailed to steal the secret.

The cleverness of these spies and the elaborate system which they devised was extraordinary. In order to prevent them from betraying each other, each man knew only the man above him and the man below him in the chain. If one man, therefore, was caught, or sold what he knew, he could not tell much. The men at the top were known to so few and the few were so very carefully chosen that betrayal was not possible. There were German spies, therefore, to be found in the greatest houses in France and England, in the confidential councils of the state, in the army, in the navy, and in business houses. Fashionable men and women were paid to pick up conversation in London and Paris drawing

rooms.

The methods of reporting were extremely complicated. Most of the German spies operated as business agents and would write a letter to some German firm ordering a certain number of steam engines or so many dozen dishes. A hundred dinner plates might mean that one hundred guns were being made in a certain place. An extremely clever letter was constructed by drawing a straight line from one corner of the paper to the other, making a cross. On each one of the lines was written a word and in the middle was written a fifth word. The five together made the message. Then around those five an innocent letter was written dealing with

something else. Invisible ink was also used to write between the lines of letters.

One clever spy, who had stolen a long report about French preparations during the war, was puzzled to know how to get that report back to Germany. She knew she would be searched, that every scrap of paper she had would be taken away from her, tested, and probably destroyed, and every object she had would be examined in the most thorough way. One thing only was safe. She was posing as a Swiss citizen returning home, and the French government had given her a passport to let her through the lines. The passport they would have to leave with her. She therefore copied the document she had stolen in invisible ink between the lines of her own passport. But the French were as clever as she. They put the passport into a bath of chemical to find out whether she had done precisely that trick, and the lady finished the war in prison.

It became indeed so difficult for the German spies to conceal what they were doing that they began to write upon the back of the spy in invisible ink messages too long to be learned. The Allied searchers could then take every scrap of his clothing off, burn all his papers, and the message would still go through. But they soon began to give suspected people baths of chemical, which brought out the invisible ink. So that failed, too.

The Germans thought nothing of going to the trouble of planting a man and his family in a place where they wanted a spy, of creating a business for him and having him live there for ten or fifteen years without spying on any one or reporting anything. This was frequently done in the United States and more commonly in France. By that time they calculated that any possible suspicions the police might have about him would have been thoroughly dispelled by the simple fact that he had done absolutely nothing. Then he would begin his series of reports to Berlin.

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