The Outbreak of the First World War

Abstract

The outbreak of war was accompanied by an outburst of British paranoia over German espionage.¹ The Times journalist Michael Macdonagh noted in his diary on 11 August that ‘London is said to be full of German spies’,² and the Daily Mail reported that ‘fully armed’ German ‘Motor Cycle Spies’ had assaulted a signalman at the railway station in Chenies in Buckinghamshire. In September further mysterious attacks on constables were reported to the Home Office, but the ensuing investigation led to nothing.³ Leo Maxse wrote in the National Review: ‘Germany has displayed such genius in the peculiarly dirty business of organising espionage, and employs every stray scoundrel of any nationality who will sell himself for a sufficiently small sum, that we cannot be too careful.’⁴ Individuals with suspicious accents were hunted down all over the country,⁵ and in October the First Sea Lord, Prince Louis of Battenberg, was forced to resign on account of his German-sounding name and his birth in Austria.⁶ Not even British secret service agents were safe from the all-engulfing spy scare; a member of British naval intelligence was nearly arrested by a zealous spy-hunter ‘because the dimmed light of my Ford car glowed a little more brightly’.⁷