he made all preparations for the war of 1870, and made them so thoroughly that it is common knowledge now how the German invaders knew the country in which they were fighting better than did Napoleon’s own troops. He worked quite independently of the diplomatic corps, established his own agencies in France, and set up his “fixed posts,” in a manner which has survived to some extent up to the present day both as regards France and other countries. At this time the work which he was in process of organising was a thing so new that it received little attention from the French authorities of that day, and the system may be said to have reached its zenith of perfection with the war of 1870, when in every French town and village of the north-east was a “fixed post,” or, in plain English, a spy in the pay of the German secret service. So complete was the information furnished that the personal histories of individuals, their failings and eccentricities, were catalogued, and scandal was tabulated in the archives of Berlin for use in case it should be required, while fortifications and districts were mapped out with a thoroughness such as the military surveyors of France could not excel. When the war came the Prussian troops marched through the country and knew its resources and difficulties even better than the inhabitants themselves. How this was accomplished will be shown later in detail.
Meanwhile Stieber, as privy councillor and confidant of Bismarck, gradually overcame the antipathy of the military caste—an antipathy which his useful work in Bohemia had gone far to allay. According to the account given in his own Memoirs, he discovered that an attempt was to be made on the life of the Czar Alexander when the latter attended a grand review in company with Napoleon at Longchamps. It was Bismarck who conceived the idea of not only letting the attempt take place, but of frustrating it and having the would-be assassin arrested, since, as Bismarck planned, French justice would not impose the capital sentence for the merely attempted crime. The result justified the forecast, for the assassin was not executed—and Alexander remembered, when 1870 came, that France had let off lightly (from a Russian point of view) the man who would have murdered him. In consequence, Prussia had nothing to fear and Napoleon had nothing to hope from Russia when the war began. Stieber could have stopped the attempt at assassination, had he chosen; but, by allowing things to fall in the fashion that they did, Bismarck made certain that there would be no Franco-Russian alliance. It was characteristic of Prussian diplomacy and Prussian methods, and it was a trick after Stieber’s own heart, as his Memoirs show.
With this brief and necessarily incomplete sketch of his career up to 1870 the personal history of Stieber as a man may be said to end, as far as the present German spy system is concerned, for from that point onward the system became of more account than the man. So far, his work was all personal in character; he conducted his own campaign in Bohemia, and he organised the French espionage by personal work, but after 1870 he became so great a power that the system went on and expanded with him as its head—it was no longer a matter of a man and his work, but a department and its control. Its efficiency is largely due to him, even now, and there is no doubt that he brought into working the most perfect methods of espionage ever known.
His Memoirs must not be taken too literally; it is necessary to read between the lines, for Stieber was a man of inordinate vanity—though this never interfered with the efficiency of his work—and, if he is to be believed, there was nobody in all Prussia of so much importance as himself. He had no moral sense—it was a quality missed out from his composition altogether, and the Memoirs show him as a criminal by instinct, able to gratify criminal impulses by protected acts. For in no other way can be explained his obvious pleasure in the commission of what, under any other circumstances, would rank as crimes, fraudulent and despicable to the last degree. The “syndicalism” of the present day is a realisation of a dream that Stieber dreamed—not for the purpose of benefiting the working classes, though, but with a view to rendering an enemy powerless against Germany in case of war; the division of the German secret service into two branches, known respectively as the department of political action and the department of espionage proper, was intended by Stieber to set up a section, under the former title, which should take advantage of the working classes in France—and in England as well—by causing them to act innocently against the best interests of their country in the belief that they were following out their own ideals and winning freedom for democracy. Espionage proper is concerned with more purely military enterprise, and was the earlier creation of this arch-spy.
Stieber died in 1892, full of honours, and much regretted by those whom he had served. He had done more than any other man to sow dissension between France and Russia; he had contributed largely to the humiliation of France, and had made possible the subjugation of Austria in a seven weeks’ war; he had served his country well, having given it the most effective system of espionage that the world has ever known. If the principle that “the end justifies any means” be accepted, he had done well for Prussia before 1870 and for Germany after—but his place is among the criminals and perverts of the world, not among its great men.
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