Graham Greene (33 page)

Ames was the king-pin, the snowy-petalled marguerite, the star-bright looloo of the rewrite men. He saw attempted murder in the pains of green-apple colic, cyclones in the summer zephyr, lost children in every top-spinning urchin, an uprising of the down-trodden masses in every hurling of a derelict potato at a passing automobile. When not rewriting, Ames sat on the porch of his Brooklyn villa playing checkers with his ten-year-old son.

Ames and the “war-editor” shut themselves in a room. There was a map in there stuck full of little pins that represented armies and divisions. Their fingers had been itching for days to move those pins along the crooked line of the Yalu. They did so now; and in words of fire Ames translated Calloway's brief message into a front-page masterpiece that set the world talking. He told of the secret councils of the Japanese officers; gave Kuroki's flaming speeches in full; counted the cavalry and infantry to a man and a horse; described the quick and silent building of the bridge at Suikauchen, across which the Mikado's legions were hurled upon the surprised Zassulitch, whose troops were widely scattered along the river. And the battle!—well, you know what Ames can do with a battle if you give him just one smell of smoke for a foundation. And in the same story, with seemingly supernatural knowledge, he gleefully scored the most profound and ponderous paper in England for the false and misleading account of the Japanese First Army printed in its issue of
the same date.

Only one error was made; and that was the fault of the cable operator at Wi-ju. Calloway pointed it out after he came back. The word “great” in his code should have been “gauge”, and its complemental words “of battle”. But it went to Ames “conditions white”, and of course he took that to mean snow. His description
of the Japanese Army struggling through the snowstorm, blinded by the whirling flakes, was thrillingly vivid. The artists turned out some effective illustrations that made a hit as pictures of the artillery dragging their guns through the drifts. But, as the attack was made on the first day of May, the “conditions white” excited some amusement. But it made no difference to the
Enterprise,
anyway.

It was wonderful. And Calloway was wonderful in having made the new censor believe that his jargon of words meant no more than a complaint of the dearth of news and a petition for more expense money. And Vesey was wonderful. And most wonderful of all are words, and how they make friends one with another, being oft associated until not even obituary notices them do part.

On the second day following, the city editor halted at Vesey's desk where the reporter was writing the story of a man who had broken his leg by falling into a coal-hole—Ames having failed to find a murder motive in it.

“The old man says your salary is to be raised to twenty a week,” said Scott.

“All right,” said Vesey. “Every little helps. Say—Mr Scott, which would you say—‘We can state without fear of successful contradiction', or ‘On the whole it can be safely asserted'?”

O. HENRY

W
hile we were collecting material for this book I went one day to a second-hand bookshop in London which specialises in old detective stories and thrillers. I asked the girl in the shop if they had any spy stories in stock. A look of suspicion came over her face. “What foreign government do you represent?” she asked.

I told her that I only represented myself and with some difficulty extracted from her the story behind her question.

They had had an order from the agent of a foreign government for any book they could provide, fact or fiction, which so much as mentioned a spy. The result had been between forty and fifty large parcels, which brought them in about £150 and completely cleared out their stock of spy books.

“I hope,” I said, “that they are enjoying the books in Moscow.”

“It wasn't the Russians,” she replied. “It was the Germans.”

Remembering an incident in the Cicero case, I said I hoped the Germans would get some good ideas. For instance, they might consider the formation of a Waiters' Underground as described in E. Phillips Oppenheim's
The Secret.
“That,” she said rather unhappily, “was one of the books we sold them.”

So now, one can believe, parcels of William Le Queux, E. Phillips Oppenheim and many other authors represented in these pages are being opened by puzzled German Embassy secretaries and other less official agents all over the world. L. C. Moyzisch in
Operation Cicero
describes how one day soon after he had made Cicero's acquaintance he received by carrier post from Berlin a somewhat surprising present.

“It was a huge parcel which, when opened, turned out to be an almost complete collection of books dealing with the more celebrated cases of espionage in the twentieth century. There
were various White Papers and official files, together with quite a few works of fiction. I had not ordered these books and had neither the time nor the desire to read them. There was a covering note, in which I was more or less tactfully informed that a thorough study of these books would help me in handling Operation Cicero. I shoved them all firmly into the back of the bottom drawer of my desk and there they remained, an unread monument to German thoroughness.”

No doubt such parcels in the future will always include at least one copy of
The Spy's Bedside Book.

HUGH GREENE

GRAHAM GREENE was born in 1904. While at Balliol College, Oxford, he published his first book of verse. He continued to write throughout his lifetime, and is the author of
The Third Man, Our Man in Havana, The Quiet American,
and
The End of the Affair,
in addition to many other novels, short story collections, plays, essays, travel books, and film scripts. During World War II he served with the British Secret Intelligence Service. He died in 1991.

HUGH GREENE was born in 1910. He came to prominence as a journalist when he was made a chief correspondent in Nazi Berlin. During World War II he served in the RAF. Greene went on to join the BBC and was made Director-General in 1960. He died in 1987.

1. John Buchan:
   Greenmantle
   (Hodder and Stoughton, 1916)
   
2. Report of the Royal Commission to investigate the facts relating to and the circumstances surrounding the communication, by public officials and other persons in positions of trust, of secret and confidential information to agents of a foreign power. June 27, 1946
   (Ottawa, Edmond Cloutier, C.M.G., B.A., L.Ph., Printer to the King's Most Excellent Majesty, Controller of Stationery, 1946)
   
3. W. Somerset Maugham:
   Ashenden
   (Heinemann, 1928)
   
4. L. C. Moyzisch:
   Operation Cicero
   (Allan Wingate, 1950)
   
5. Sir Robert Baden-Powell:
   My Adventures as a Spy
   (C. Arthur Pearson, 1915)
   
6. Bernard Newman:
   Secrets of German Espionage
   (Robert Hale, 1940)
   
7. William Le Queux:
   The Hunchback of Westminster
   (Methuen, 1904)
   
8. T. E. Lawrence:
   Seven Pillars of Wisdom
   (Jonathan Cape, 1926)
   
9. William Le Queux:
   Secrets of the Foreign Office
   (Hutchinson, 1903)
   
10. Herbert Greene:
    Secret Agent in Spain
    (Robert Hale, 1938)
    
11. Dennis Wheatley:
    Mediterranean Nights
    (Hutchinson, 1942)
    
12. William Le Queux:
    Revelations of the Secret Service
    (F. V. White, 1911)
    
13. Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov:
    Empire of Fear
    (André Deutsch, 1956)
    
14. Peter Fleming:
    Invasion 1940
    (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1957)
    
15. George Griffith:
    The Outlaws of the Air
    (Tower Publishing Company, 1895)
    
16. Fenimore Cooper:
    The Spy
    (G. and W. B. Whitaker, 1822)
    
17. W. H. Auden:
    Poems
    (Faber and Faber, 1930)
    
18. See 9 above
    
19. Graham Greene:
    The Basement Room
    (Cresset Press, 1935)
    
20. See 14 above
    
21. Anna Seward: “Monody on Major André”,
    Poetical Works,
    edited by Walter Scott (James Ballantyne and Company, Edinburgh, 1810)
    Richard Garnett: “André, John”,
    The Dictionary of National Biography,
    Volume 1 (Clarendon Press, 1917)
    
22. Joseph Conrad:
    Under Western Eyes
    (Methuen, 1911)
    
23. Max Pemberton:
    Pro Patria
    (Ward, Lock, 1901)
    
24. See 12 above
    
25. Sir Paul Dukes:
    The Story of ST. 25
    (Cassell, 1949)
    
26. Belle Boyd:
    Belle Boyd in Camp and Prison
    (Saunders Otley, 1865)
    
27. Maurice Paléologue:
    My Secret Diary of the Dreyfus Case
    (Secker and Warburg, 1957)
    
28. Ian Fleming:
    From Russia with Love
    (Jonathan Cape, 1957)
    The Schellenberg Memoirs
    (André Deutsch, 1956)
    
29. Lechmere Worrall and J. E. Harold Terry:
    The Man Who Stayed at Home
    (Samuel French, 1916)
    
30. Arthur Morrison:
    Martin Hewitt, Investigator
    (Ward, Lock and Bowden, 1894)
    
31. Compton Mackenzie:
    Greek Memories
    (Chatto and Windus, 1939)
    
32. Colette:
    My Apprenticeships
    (Secker and Warburg, 1957)
    
33. Edmund Blunden:
    Undertones of War
    (Cobden Sanderson, 1928)
    
34. See 9 above
    
35. Rudyard Kipling:
    The Years Between
    (Methuen, 1919)
    
36. Alan H. Burgoyne:
    The War Inevitable
    (Francis Griffiths, 1908)
    
37. Richard Harding Davis:
    Once Upon a Time
    (Duckworth, 1911)
    
38. Robert Browning:
    Men and Women
    (1855)
    
39. See 5 above
    
40. See 9 above
    
41. E. Phillips Oppenheim:
    The Secret
    (Ward, Lock, 1907)
    
42. See 9 above
    
43. See 28 above
    
44. Ian Fleming:
    Casino Royale
    (Jonathan Cape, 1953)
    
45. See 16 above
    
46. R. H. Bruce Lockhart:
    Memoirs of a British Agent
    (Putnam, 1932)
    
47. Eric Ambler:
    The Mask of Dimitrios
    (Hodder and Stoughton, 1939)
    
48. See 21 above
    
49. Sir Basil Thomson:
    Queer People
    (Hodder and Stoughton, 1922)
    
50. Hugh Kingsmill:
    D. H. Lawrence
    (Methuen, 1938)
    
51. Thomas Mann:
    Joseph and His Brothers
    (Secker and Warburg, 1956)
    
52. William Blake:
    Letters,
    edited by Geoffrey Keynes (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1956)
    William Blake:
    The Writings of William Blake,
    edited by Geoffrey Keynes (Nonesuch Press, 1925)
    
53. Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
    Biographia Literaria
    (1817) Mary Moorman:
    William Wordsworth
    (Oxford University Press, 1957)
    
54. Intimate Journals of Paul Gauguin
    (Jonathan Cape, 1923)
    
55. Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918–1945.
    Series
    D, Volume X. The War Years 23 June–31 August 1940 (H.M. Stationery Office, 1957)
    
56. See 27 above
    
57. Guy Chapman:
    The Dreyfus Case
    (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1955)
    
58. Thomas Hardy:
    The Dynasts
    (Macmillan, 1910)
    
59. See 27 above
    
60. Lt.-Col. F. M. Bailey:
    No Passport to Tibet
    (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1957)
    
61. Ian Fleming:
    Moonraker
    (Jonathan Cape, 1955)
    
62. Roger Lancelyn Green:
    A. E. W. Mason
    (Max Parrish, 1952)
    
63. See 5 above
    
64. H. R. Berndorff:
    Espionage
    (Nash and Grayson, 1930)
    
65. See 46 above
    
66. William Le Queux:
    The Great War in England 1897
    (Tower Publishing Company, 1894)
    
67. See 27 above
    
68. See 64 above
    
69. William Le Queux:
    The Czar's Spy
    (Hodder and Stoughton, 1905)
    
70. Admiral Sir William James:
    The Eyes of the Navy
    (Methuen, 1955)
    
71. See 29 above
    
72. George Griffith:
    The Great Pirate Syndicate
    (F. V. White, 1899)
    
73. O. Henry:
    Whirligigs
    (Hodder and Stoughton, 1916)
    The frontispiece and the illustration on page 84 are taken from William Le Queux:
    Spies of the Kaiser
    (Hurst and Blackett, 1909)
    

F
or permission to reprint copyright passages the editors and publisher wish to express their gratitude to all the living authors concerned, and to Mrs George Bambridge, the Boy Scouts Association, Jonathan Cape Ltd, Cassell and Co. Ltd, Chatto and Windus Ltd, The Clarendon Press, Curtis Brown Ltd, J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd, André Deutsch Ltd, Doubleday and Co. Inc., Gerald Duckworth and Co. Ltd, Faber and Faber Ltd, Samuel French Ltd, Robert Hale Ltd, William Heinemann Ltd, Hodder and Stoughton Ltd, the Hutchinson Group, Macmillan and Co. Ltd, Methuen and Co. Ltd, the Arthur Morrison Executors, Max Parrish and Co. Ltd, A. D. Peters, Putnam and Co. Ltd, Martin Secker and Warburg Ltd, the Trustees of the Thomas Hardy Estate, the Tweedsmuir Trustees, Ward, Lock and Co. Ltd, A. P. Watt and Son, and Allan Wingate.