An amazing story, illustrative of the fatuous methods of the
French General Staff, is narrated with the utmost circum- stantiality of detail by a correspondent of the Daily Chronicle in Wednesday's issue. Of late years the notorious "second bureau" had left England outside the scope of its espionage, but on the emergence of the Fashoda crisis last September, and in face of the fact that nothing was known of the topo- giaphy of Great Britain beyond what could be obtained from maps and English reports "which no one read," it was decided to despatch immediately a secret mission to survey the English coast from Sheerness to Penzance. To make matters worse, the War Office could not find a single officer in Paris sufficiently acquainted with the English language to undertake the task without betraying his nationality. Finally, they were reduced to entrust the command of the mission to a non-commissioned artillery officer, the son of a Communist refugee in London, and placed under his orders three Captains and nine Lieutenants. The work was done—somehow—in a fortnight, without taking a single photograph, and the artilleryman has now returned to his battery. The story would be incredible if it were not for such uncontested facts as that Colonel Henry, when appointed chief of the Intelligence Department, did not know a word of German. One wonders whether these amazing spies all wore blue spectacles and false beards during their stay in England.
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