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’s Foreign branch, in December 1912 Kell’s side cost £472 and Cumming’s £810, although this included two months’ payments of £125 to H2O. Cumming’s salary and that of his five home-based staff came to just under £200 a month, less than half the cost of overseas agents. By December 1913 the annual budget for both branches had risen to £15,572, and the proportion of expenditure going to Cumming’s side had increased slightly with Foreign getting £841 per month and Home £428. Although spending on Kell’s branch increased a little during 1914, on the eve of war it was still significantly less than that for Cumming’s. All this was about to change. Over the war years the size of both branches and their budgets would grow exponentially, as perhaps could have been predicted, even in 1914. But how well Cumming’s side would respond to the challenges of the next few years, and even whether it would survive as an autonomous institution at all, remained to be seen.

During the early summer of 1914 there is no sense of the imminence of war in Mansfield Cumming’s diary. The assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June, and the ensuing July Crisis, pass unremarked. Only from the very last day of July is there an impression of unusual activity. That day Cumming had a meeting with a new recruit, Major Cecil Cameron, the agent AC and two others. Taking codes provided by Cumming, Cameron was to cross the Channel that night, meet a contact in Paris and go on to Dinant at once, before basing himself at Givet on the Franco-Belgian frontier. On 2 August he gave more codes to another colleague, who having borrowed a car and driver ‘started off for Brux[elles], via Dover & Ostend’. Intelligence from inside Germany inevitably continued to be a high priority. At the end of July Cumming got Admiral Oliver’s sanction to send a woman agent to Berlin and agreed to pay her £100 for a month’s work there. What precisely she was to do is not recorded, but the mere fact that Cumming was contemplating such an operation at such a time confirms the suddenness with which the First World War came upon Britain. On 3 August the prospective agent assured Cumming that she could get the correct papers to enable her to travel to Germany, but the next day he had to put her off ‘as she cd show no passport’. The last diary entry for that day, 4 August 1914, was ‘War declared against Germany - midnt’.

PART TWO

THE FIRST WORLD WAR

2

Status, organisation and expertise

Just over a fortnight after the declaration of war with Germany, a British Expeditionary Force of some forty thousand men had been deployed in northern France. It was an astonishingly successful logistical performance and a tribute to the completeness of the plans which the Directorate of Military Operations had been working on for the previous three years or so. Little thought, however, had been given to the higher direction of this force, beyond the appointment of Field Marshal Sir John French as Commander-in-Chief, and the assumption that, subject to some general instructions concerning relations with Allied forces (principally the French), he would have complete freedom of command in the field. Few people anticipated that from the autumn of 1914 the opposing forces would get bogged down in a costly four-year war of attrition along a line of more or less fixed positions from the English Channel to the Swiss frontier. As the British military commitment escalated into a mass, conscript army, and the ‘butcher’s bill’ of trench warfare mounted, the autonomy of Sir John French and his successor, Sir Douglas Haig, came to be questioned in London where civilian politicians (especially David Lloyd George after he became Prime Minister in December 1916) increasingly sought to assert control over war strategy. For civil-military relations in Britain, the consequence of ‘total war’ and the necessary mobilisation of all national resources was to shift the wartime balance of power away from the armed services (especially the army) and to the political leadership of the country.

The