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in particular’ was ‘shouting for peace’. Both these opinions were over-sanguine. The Russian Bolsheviks overthrew the Mensheviks in the October Revolution, while the Germans were far from beaten, even though war enthusiasm was waning in Austria. As intelligence, moreover, S.50’s reports did not go much beyond the regular kind of reporting which London might expect diplomats to pick up in their normal course of work. Many of the surviving reports emanating from Cumming’s First World War networks covered similar ground, though occasionally some harder, more ‘military’ information was supplied. In January 1918, ‘N.20’ reported from Christiania (Oslo) information from ‘a German commercial traveller’ that factories in Flanders, Aachen, Hanover and Cassel had been ‘hurriedly emptied recently and made into hospitals’. The following month ‘S.8’ quoted a Swede who had ‘served with distinction in the German army’ as saying that the planned offensive ‘probably takes place in about 4 weeks’. The ‘almost universal opinion in Germany’ was that this was the ‘last card and if it fails game is absolutely up because of shortage of men, disorganization, and desperate condition of civil population’.25

Other neutrals

Like Scandinavia, neutral Switzerland appeared to be another handy spot from which enemy countries might be targeted, as is clear from Cumming’s desire to get an operation established there from very early in the war. In August 1914 he appointed a good linguist with business cover working for a ‘firm of shippers’ as his representative and by late November there were four staff in Switzerland. By the beginning of 1915 this man was being given £250 a month for agents, and in March Cumming ‘agreed to let him expand to 300’. But the return was poor. On a visit to London in July 1915, Cumming told the representative ‘that his 6 telegrams in March had cost £50 apiece & were not worth 50/- [£2.50] the lot’. Cumming insisted that payment could thenceforth only be ‘by results’. This seems to have had some effect, as in September the representative told Cumming that he ‘may expect about 15 reports a month from 4 travellers in Tr [Germany] & others, costing about £110 a month’. During March 1915 Cumming had already been considering reinforcing his Swiss operation and in April he sent Major L. G. Campbell out to the French border town of Annemasse, near Geneva, to establish another network, and Major Hans Vischer, a Swiss-born Cambridge graduate and former missionary who had been working in the Colonial Office, to work from a base in Berne. The same month, noting that ‘C’s Swiss system’ was ‘not as extensive as it might be’, Walter Kirke at General Headquarters decided with Cecil Cameron that they should develop their own intelligence organisation in Switzerland, with the result that they sponsored two networks, one headed by Captain John Wallinger of the Indian Police, elder brother of Ernest Wallinger, who ran the WL intelligence organisation out of London. 26

None of these ventures was very successful. The Swiss resented the use of their country as a kind of intelligence clearing-house where spies from every belligerent power engaged in an espionage free-for-all. From the autumn of 1915 the British networks in Switzerland began to unravel. In September Cumming noted that ‘7 or 8’ of Wallinger’s ‘bridge watchers’ had been ‘jugged in Switzerland’ and he also closed down Vischer’s operation. In November 1915, after an Englishman called Peter Wright had been jailed on a charge of spying, it was reported as being the sixty-eighth such conviction since the beginning of the war. One network of German spies had ‘involved 112 persons of various nationalities’. Press reports suggested that the Swiss police were watching a further four hundred people, that the prisons were overcrowded and even that ‘a concentration camp may be formed’.27 The GHQ networks suffered a further series of reverses and even Wallinger’s imaginative engagement of the author Somerset Maugham (who fictionalised his experiences in a collection of short stories, Ashenden: