Edwardian Spy Literature and the Ethos of Sportsmanship: The Sport of Spying

The Advent of British spy literature at the turn of the twentieth century is often thought to have reflected a shift in the tone of British popular literature, and British culture generally, from optimism to pessimism. International developments such as Britain’s surprising difficulty winning the Boer War, as well as the increasing armament of rivals such as Germany, made Britons less confident in their country’s ability to prevail in international conflicts. Popular literature duly reflected this anxiety with a new focus on the secret plans of the enemy—usually France, Russia, Germany, or a combination, depending on where the public’s fears were focused at the time—to exploit Britain’s weakness by spying on her, invading her, or both. The British public tended to be depicted in such literature as weak, too complacent to see the sinister elements in their midst; this was true not only in works warning of hidden foreign spies, but also in works warning of hidden anarchists and other revolutionaries, most famously Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907). In Michael Denning’s words, where popular literature had once been dominated by “an assertive, confident, and expansionist genre,” that is, the imperial adventure story, this gave way to “an increasingly insular, even paranoid, genre stressing vigilance and protection against invasion”¹—the spy story. Increasing literary pessimism continued within the spy genre itself, which as it matured portrayed Britain’s prospects as bleaker and its enemies as more monstrous. Samuel Hynes exemplifies this chronological view when he writes of Erskine Childers’s relatively optimistic spy novel, The Riddle of the Sands (1903), that it “obviously belongs to an early stage” of spy and invasion literature,² one that would be superseded by darker narratives.

This timeline of the literary mood is accurate in its broad outline but inaccurate in some of its particulars. No doubt rising tensions in Europe and Britain did contribute to the rise of pessimism and paranoia in popular literature as the Edwardian age progressed. However, simple chronology fails to explain why optimistic spy narratives, though outnumbered by their pessimistic counterparts, continued to be published up until and during the war, some by authors who had previously written pessimistic works. Furthermore, the change in mood from Victorian optimism to Edwardian pessimism was never as linear as these critics imply, since Victorian society contained its share of xenophobic anxiety. For instance, Childers’s novel was published almost ten years after the novel that introduced the foreign spy to British literature, William Le Queux’s decidedly pessimistic The Great War in England in 1897 (1894), and almost thirty years after the story that made the invasion narrative a Europe-wide literary phenomenon, George Chesney’s “The Battle of Dorking” (1871).³ In fact, in his preface to the 1910 edition of The Riddle of the Sands, Childers himself seemed more optimistic than he had been in 1903, not less, as he “express[ed] the hope that nobody will read into this story ... any intention of provoking hostility to Germany, with whom, happily, far friendlier relations have recently been established.”⁴ It seems that the difference between optimistic and pessimistic spy stories was due to more than a linear change in the national mood.

That difference between the pessimism and xenophobia of some spy stories and the optimism and open-mindedness of others is primarily a difference of genre, one that has thus far gone largely unnoticed in studies of early spy literature. Many critics refer to all fiction about spies during this period as “spy fiction” or some variant, but during the Edwardian period, there were actually two genres of fiction focused on spies: spy stories, which featured British spies operating in foreign territory, and counterspy stories, which featured patriotic heroes striving to expose and thwart foreign spies, preventing foreign invasion.⁵ The counterspy story, by far the more common of the two genres during the period, was essentially a variant on the invasion story, recounting as it did the enemy’s “secret preparations” for invasion.⁶ It is this genre that gives Edwardian spy fiction its reputation for the paranoia already described. By contrast, the narratives that centered on British spy heroes tended to encourage understanding across national and cultural boundaries, despite dealing with the same serious subjects as the counterspy novel. A comparison of these genres reveals a contemporary divide in the question of Britain’s response to foreign threats: counterspy and invasion literature advocated a stance of suspicion, even paranoia, while spy literature advocated meeting these threats with the English virtues of cleverness, courage, and honorable competition, best represented by the tradition of sportsmanship.

Edwardian counterspy fiction is chiefly characterized by its almost universal portrayal of a Britain threatened from without by foreign powers and weakened from within by feckless leaders and a soft, emasculated populace. These sentiments were widely held by the right wing during the period—Hynes characterizes them collectively as “Tory pessimism”⁷—but the counterspy narrative, by supposing a host of villains hidden among the unsuspecting population, added to this xenophobic attitude a dose of what Clive Bloom describes as “totalized paranoia”: “there is no knowing who is the enemy (therefore presume all are the enemy).”⁸ “All” very often meant “all foreigners,” especially immigrants. In William Le Queux’s episodic Spies of the Kaiser (1909), literally every German the heroes encounter—a waiter, a landlord, a conglomerate of businessmen—proves to be an enemy spy, no matter how innocuous he initially appears.⁹ Such a formula would seem to be lacking in drama, but Le Queux’s books sold very well,¹⁰ and not only the public but also the British government was very responsive to his message: improbable reports of spy encounters that he and his readers submitted, along with Le Queux’s stories themselves, became much of the evidence used to support the creation of Britain’s Secret Service Bureau, first codenamed MO(t), then MO5(g), and, from 1916 on, MI5, the designation it bears today.¹¹

It is clear that Edwardian Britain was hungry to read about villainous foreign spies, which may help explain why they were so much more common than British spies in the popular fiction of the period. Spy fiction also faced a hurdle that counterspy fiction did not: the resistance of the Edwardian public to the spy as a heroic figure. Spies and their tactics—stealth, fraud, forgery, treachery, and even more underhanded methods—were seen as dishonorable and villainous, and popular fiction reflected this. In prewar popular fiction, writes I. F. Clarke, “Espionage represents the depths of villainy on the other side, for the spy always appears where he can do a country the greatest harm.”¹² Such fiction presents an absolute world in which only the other side uses spies: “During this period it was a convention with writers of imaginary wars to describe in detail the despicable behavior of enemy spies.... This attitude to espionage is one of the bigger hypocrisies of the literature before 1914. Civilization, truth, and justice are for the purpose of the story identified with Britain...; and in this situation the spy has a special role to play, since he can be used to point a moral and reinforce the sense of national virtuousness in the reader.”¹³ In such works, the villainy of both the enemy’s leadership and its people in general is reflected in its espionage service. The great number of Germans supposedly employed as spies against Britain (writers like Le Queux generally set the number in the thousands) impresses on the reader how many Germans are willing and able to perform such scurrilous work for pay, and so deceit is made to seem a German characteristic. To dwell on the Britons engaged in the same work on the other side of the Channel would be to sacrifice this moral superiority. As the spy author Eric Ambler notes, faced with a public distaste for the spy, “writers ignored the creature,”¹⁴ except as a conveniently sinister antagonist.

In such an environment, those narratives that did portray heroic British espionage felt compelled to justify their heroes’ practices. At the beginning of The Man from Downing Street (1904), one of the few William Le Queux works in which the spy is British rather than foreign, the hero is almost apologetic about his profession and appeals to necessity to defend it: “There is, I know, something repugnant to the British mind where the secret agent is concerned; but it must be remembered that England’s enemies nowadays keep up a whole army of unscrupulous spies.”¹⁵ Espionage is justified here both as a necessary response to a severe foreign threat and as a tactic that the other side already employs.

One could also defend the spy hero directly by giving him positive qualities to offset his profession’s reputation for deception and treachery. Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts, does this in his book My Adventures as a Spy (1915), an embellished account of his own espionage work: “[I]t is well to disabuse one’s mind of the idea that every spy is necessarily the base and despicable fellow he is generally held to be. He is often both clever and brave.”¹⁶ The ambivalence felt in Britain toward British spies may be best expressed in this equivocal sentence from Le Queux’s German Spies in England (1915): “Germany has spies in England; we, too, have our friends in Germany.”¹⁷ Given the public’s resistance to the figure of the spy, it was incumbent on spy authors to make those “friends” as friendly as possible in order to keep the audience’s sympathy, and so the heroes of spy fiction contrast sharply with the heroes of counterspy fiction, who tend to be unapologetic and deadly serious.

However, the difference between the spy story and the counterspy story is not merely a difference in character or tone, but a difference in attitude: the very nature of the conflict between Britain and its rivals is transformed by the change in genre. This difference may be seen most clearly by comparing two thrillers by the author and journalist Max Pemberton: Pro Patria (1901) and Two Women (1914). The former novel, concerning a French plan to attack England via a secret tunnel under the English Channel, is an invasion novel rather than a counterspy novel, since it includes no enemy spies. Nevertheless, it does concern the theme of foreign infiltration, and the villain is a treacherous Englishman posing, spylike, as a Frenchman. The French are depicted in the novel as arrogant, craven, and hateful of England; the one exception, an honorable French general, is ostracized by his countrymen for his opposition to the invasion, and at the end of the novel he gladly moves to England and changes his nationality. The novel’s underlying message is that friendly relations with foreign rivals are impossible, and it scorns “the clap-trap peace-mongers, the faint hearts, the ‘will-not-sees,’ ... coming forward to cry, ‘There is no warning here. We must trust France....’”¹⁸ Reconciliation is futile; isolation and war are the only options. Thinking of the Channel tunnel, the hero reflects darkly, “the day was near when England would be an island no more, but linked by this mighty passage to the Continent which so long had feared her enmity.”¹⁹ The sort of paranoid projection being ascribed to “the Continent” here is representative of invasion and counterspy literature during the period.

Two Women also concerns a foreign plan to invade England—this time it is the Germans who plan to attack with airships—but the plot is not discovered by chance, as in Pro Patria, but through the espionage of the hero, a patriotic English spy named Reggie Ainsworth, who is captured upon making his discovery. Given that the novel was published in the year that war with Germany broke out, we would expect its Germans to be, if anything, more villainous than the French of Pro Patria. Yet the opposite is true. The Germans Reggie encounters are gentle and understanding, marked as unthreatening: the “kindly old judge” who regretfully sentences Reggie to ten years’ imprisonment;²⁰ the “quite unaggressive little general” and the “pleasant little doctor” who receive him when he arrives at the fortress.²¹ These Germans reciprocate Reggie’s respect, treating him as a man of honor, despite his being a spy: the general offers him generous privileges during his imprisonment if he will promise not to attempt escape, an offer Reggie respectfully refuses. “‘All the officers have told me that they liked the frank way you admitted everything,’” the doctor’s wife tells him; “‘frankness seems to be one of the only virtues left nowadays.’”²²

Indeed, the Germans respect Reggie, not despite his spying, but because of it; it is seen as a sign of his good character. “‘You soldiers do such brave things and then you suffer,’” the doctor’s wife observes. “‘There are thousands of Germans in England doing just what you have done. In secret we admire you very much.’”²³ Here and in the novel in general Pemberton emphasizes the presence of German spies in England, and yet Germany’s spies, like its plans to invade, are not treated with panic or resentment. Spying, then, is the difference between a paranoid work like Pro Patria and a sympathetic and levelheaded one like Two Women, as espionage actually connects rather than divides Britain and its rival.

Two Women is a lighthearted novel, and while spying (and, tangentially, the Germans’ war plans) is at its heart, the beginning and end of the novel are more concerned with the romantic vicissitudes of the women of the title. This gives some explanation for the lack of antagonism the novel shows toward the Germans—some, but not all, for the Germans receive the same sympathetic treatment in two other, more major thrillers featuring English spies operating abroad: Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands and John Buchan’s Greenmantle (1916).²⁴ The same dynamic applies in these novels as applies in Two Women: the seriousness of Germany’s plans against Britain is mitigated by the improved understanding of and connection with the enemy that spying provides.

The Riddle of the Sands, like Two Women, is about Englishmen investigating German plans for an invasion of Britain. Unlike Reggie Ainsworth, the two heroes are not professional spies—the narrator, Carruthers, is a civil servant in the Foreign Office, and his friend Davies is an unaccomplished office worker—but the novel leaves no doubt about the nature of their activities: “at heart we were spies on a foreign power in time of peace.”²⁵ The novel begins when Carruthers is unexpectedly invited to join Davies on a supposedly innocent yachting trip in the Baltic and North Seas late in the season. After a while, it becomes clear to Carruthers that Davies has ulterior motives for his journey, and the latter admits that he is spying on German military operations along the sands of the coast of Friesland. Carruthers agrees to join him, and the two discover German preparations for a naval invasion of England.

Unlike Pemberton’s novel, The Riddle of the Sands treats the prospect of German invasion with grim importance and is clearly intended to be believed. Davies and Carruthers spend much time worriedly discussing Britain’s military preparedness, and the novel’s epilogue consists of a nonfiction treatise by Childers on the subject of Britain’s naval defenses. However, while the invasion is treated with gravitas, the characters’ discovery does not embitter them toward the Germans who are planning it, as their ability to travel among the Germans means that those planning the invasion are known to them, rather than manifesting as an anonymous, fearsome Other. In the German officer von Brüning, their chief foil, Carruthers and Davies face a dangerous adversary; nevertheless, Carruthers concludes: “I liked the man and I like him still.”²⁶ The Kaiser (who makes a brief, unspeaking appearance in person during the novel’s climax) receives the most admiration of all; Davies refers to him as “‘a splendid chap’”²⁷ and “‘a fine fellow’”²⁸ for his efforts to make Germany a world power.

The most dramatic example of the change in genre from counterspy to spy narrative may be John Buchan’s Greenmantle. Superficially the sequel to The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) in that it also features the hero Richard Hannay, it differs significantly from its predecessor both in plot and setting—Hannay is no longer a freelance spy-hunter defending his homeland, but a spy officially dispatched to Germany and Constantinople—and in its attitude toward the enemy. While Germany is still portrayed as an aggressor that will stop at nothing to win the war, the novel is sympathetic to Germany at several points, sympathies that seem gratuitous unless we consider that Hannay’s role as a spy not only allows but also requires him to face the realities of war in enemy territory.

Like The Riddle of the Sands, Greenmantle features an appearance by the Kaiser, but where the former novel kept him in the background, Hannay is able to actually meet and converse (albeit incognito) with him early in Greenmantle. Hannay describes him, not as brutal or rapacious, but as a tragic hero: “I felt that I was looking on at a far bigger tragedy than any I had seen in action. Here was one that had loosed Hell, and the furies of Hell had got hold of him.... [T]his man ... paid the price in war for the gifts that had made him successful in peace.”²⁹ Buchan forbears to be truly neutral in this passage; the Kaiser is still described as the sole begetter of the war and as atypically human for a German. But if Hannay’s political views are absolute, his psychological assessments are not. His personal encounter with the Kaiser requires a more nuanced portrayal of the ruler than, for instance, that of Walter Wood’s counterspy novel The Enemy in Our Midst (1906): “‘I will crush them as a nation! They shall feel the heel of the War Lord of the World!’”³⁰ Rather than exhibiting a stereotyped malice that is comforting to the anti-German reader, the spy narrative allows for and even demands a more novelistic rendering.

If Buchan portrays the Kaiser with relative sympathy in Greenmantle, he portrays ordinary German civilians with real pathos. Later in the novel, on the run from the Germans who have uncovered his identity, Hannay takes shelter in the cottage of a German woodcutter’s wife whose husband is away at the front. Observing the conditions to which the war has reduced her family, Hannay has a revelation about the conflict between nations, one that undercuts any bellicosity the novel as a whole might imply:

That night I realised the crazy folly of war. When I saw the splintered shell of Ypres and heard hideous tales of German doings, I used to want to see the whole land of the Boche given up to fire and sword.... But that woodcutter’s cottage cured me of such nightmares. I was for punishing the guilty but letting the innocent go free.³¹

The distinction between innocent and guilty is not made in Le Queux’s contemporaneous nonfiction book, German Spies in England (1915), in which he proposes “to make a clean sweep of all Germans and Austrians [in Great Britain], naturalized or not, and confine them in concentration camps until the war is over.”³² Nor is it made in Buchan’s own The Thirty-Nine Steps, in which, for instance, Hannay rejects a Liberal politician’s suggestion “that, but for the Tories, Germany and Britain would be fellow-workers in peace and reform.... A giddy lot [the enemy spies] cared for peace and reform.”³³ In the counterspy story, to speak of innocent Germans is merely naïveté. The spy story, however, requires understanding and differentiation between supposed enemies simply as a practical demand of the narrative.

However, while the spy story is markedly more tolerant and less paranoid than its cousin the counterspy story, it is not more pacifistic. It joins the other genre in depicting a world fundamentally based on nationalistic competition and essentialist national and racial categories. In The Riddle of the Sands, Davies’s fair-mindedness toward the Germans is still based on an adversarial model: he does not suggest that the Germans do not want to beat the English, but rather that they are entitled to try, and that England should respond with appropriate militarization rather than complacency or hatred:

“It’s not the people’s fault. We’ve been safe so long, and grown so rich, that we’ve forgotten what we owe it to. But there’s no excuse for those blockheads of statesmen, as they call themselves, who are paid to see things as they are.... By Jove! We want a man like this Kaiser, who doesn’t wait to be kicked, but works like a nigger for his country, and sees ahead.”³⁴

Carruthers and Davies are not seeking to prevent a war between Germany and Britain, but to make sure that Britain is adequately prepared for one. In Greenmantle, the humane portrayal of the Kaiser and other Germans is balanced by that of Colonel von Stumm, Hannay’s monstrous antagonist; lest readers think that Stumm is an extreme outlier, he is given as “the real German”³⁵ and Germany as “a nation of Stumms.”³⁶ The chief ideological difference between the genres of counterspy fiction and spy fiction, then, is not over whether or not England is in conflict with its neighbors and rivals, but the nature of that conflict: the counterspy narrative sees international conflict as absolute and existential, whereas the spy narrative sees it as a respectful, if not friendly, competition based on sportsmanship. By understanding the contemporary conception of sportsmanship, therefore, we gain insight into the values with which the spy story operated.

During the Victorian period, it was generally accepted that sports were vital to the health and defense of the nation. Sports had been seen as foundational to Britain’s military and imperial strength at least since the Duke of Wellington supposedly said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, and this belief was still widely held at the beginning of the twentieth century. According to one military expert, speaking in 1904, sports actually functioned as preliminary military training for boys and young men: “Situations may arise in a good cricket or football team requiring a quick decision, perhaps a shade quicker, than a company commander with his line of skirmishers in the field.”³⁷ Around the turn of the century, however, this optimistic view of a British Empire sustained by future generations of Britons trained by sport was confronted with what Hynes calls “Tory pessimism.” Tory pessimists saw sport as a meaningless diversion that diverted the populace from national service, an attitude best represented by Kipling’s famous condemnation of “the flannelled fools at the wicket [and] the muddied oafs at the goals.”³⁸

Consequently, counterspy and invasion literature of the period tends to view the growth of popular sports as another symptom of the growing British interest in frivolous things. In Saki’s invasion novel When William Came (1914), which portrays the occupation of Britain by Germany, sport is just another distraction that helps acclimate the conquered British to the fact of German occupation, and the English hero, Yeovil, observes—contrary to the Duke of Wellington’s purported phrase—that “the German victory was won on the golf-links of Britain,”³⁹ since the game distracted the ruling classes and kept them from adequately defending the country. The same idea is expressed more broadly in Wood’s The Enemy in Our Midst, as the narrator describes how Britain failed to prepare for a possible invasion: “Sport absorbed the enthusiasm of every class.”⁴⁰ Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, too, presents sport as an effete diversion of the comfortable middle class. When at the climax of the novel Hannay confronts the German spies, who have disguised themselves as harmless, middle-class Englishmen, they are playing tennis, “like ... city gents who wanted hard exercise to open their pores.”⁴¹ It is a nice touch, one that leaves Hannay, former colonial and man of action, unable to see the threat behind the façade of “ordinary, game-playing, suburban Englishmen, wearisome, if you like, but sordidly innocent.”⁴²

By contrast, the Edwardian spy novel tends to propound the value of sport for the individual and the nation. The heroes of these stories are frequently sports enthusiasts, and spying itself is portrayed as a particularly challenging and invigorating sport—what Robert Baden-Powell called “The Sport of Spying.”⁴³ In Pemberton’s Two Women, Reggie Ainsworth repeatedly compares war to golf and hunting, and the narrator implies that his sporting background has led him to his career in spying: “He played bridge and tennis with distinction, had shot tigers in India and buffaloes in Egypt; but he was aiming at far greater game.... Plainly stated, he had become a spy in the service of the British War Office....”⁴⁴ Spying, then, is a combination of stimulation and utility, as best seen in Reggie’s reflection on his mission: “It was a rare bit of sport, he thought, and ... somebody had to do it.”⁴⁵ This statement is almost paradoxical, since sport, being recreational, is by definition something that no one has to do, but it is perfectly consistent with the view that espionage, or other amateur service of one’s country, is both exhilarating sport and indispensable patriotism. The chief sportsman of Greenmantle is the Boer hunter Peter Pienaar, a friend of Hannay’s who joins the mission out of his hatred for Germany and also for the fun of it—“He was a wonderful chap for catching on to any game.”⁴⁶ Hannay, too, sees spying as a sport, and he explains the mission to Peter in hunting terms: “‘We haven’t got much of a spoor, but we’ll cast about, and with luck will pick it up. I’ve seen you do it often enough when we hunted kudu on the Kafue.’”⁴⁷ Sporting experience gives Hannay confidence despite his lack of training, and in fact he takes pride in his amateurism. When the professional spy Blenkiron, another ally, reports failure in his part of the mission, Hannay cannot help exulting: “‘... I was mean enough to feel rather glad. He had been the professional with the best chance. It would be a good joke if the amateur succeeded where the expert failed.’”⁴⁸

The consummate portrayal of spying as patriotic sport is The Riddle of the Sands, which is as much a sailing adventure as a spying one. David Trotter has shown how the physical exercise of sailing allows Carruthers to transform himself, both physically and mentally, from a mere bureaucrat to an adventure hero.⁴⁹ However, this transformation is not only portrayed as good in itself, but also as essential for the success of the spying mission. When, late in the novel, Carruthers finds himself traveling through Germany in disguise, “dressed as a young seaman,” he notes that “The transition had not been difficult.”⁵⁰ It is not difficult because a young seaman is what he has already become by living and working on a yacht for more than a month. The credibility of his disguise depends on his reinventing himself through sport.

In fact, in The Riddle of the Sands the sport of sailing and the sport of spying are identical; the second is conducted entirely through the first. Davies chooses Carruthers as his second mainly for his knowledge of German, but also for his sailing experience, and he lures him from England to the Baltic with the promise of sailing and duck hunting. The conflict with the other side is a sporting matter as well. When the antagonist, the traitor Dollman, attempts to murder Davies to protect his secret, he does so with a breach of sailing etiquette: leading Davies’s yacht at unsafe speeds through dangerous waters in bad weather or, as Davies characterizes it, “‘playing his own game’” as a pilot.⁵¹ Even the credibility of the intelligence Davies gathers hinges on his skill as a sailor, in Carruthers’s eyes. “‘... I had lived with Davies for a stormy fortnight, every hour of which had increased my reliance on his seamanship, and also, therefore, on his account of an event which depended largely for its correct interpretation on a balanced nautical judgment.’”⁵²

Whereas the position of the counterspy novel is that it is time for the British to put their games aside in favor of military service, the spy novel portrays the two as intertwined. The skills developed in sport are to be bent to the defense needs of the state, through espionage and otherwise. In The Riddle of the Sands, it transpires that Davies has long wanted to be a naval officer but failed the entrance exam, leaving him with “a fire of pent-up patriotism struggling incessantly for an outlet in strenuous physical expression....”⁵³ His sport of choice is not just a hobby; it is self-imposed training for a chance to serve his country. Spying is a sport of national defense, and based on his experiences in Friesland Davies envisions a naval reserve made up of amateur sailors like himself: “‘local men, with a pretty free hand to play their own game. And what a splendid game to play!’”⁵⁴ Instead of the compulsory military service typically advocated by counterspy and invasion literature, spy literature advocates a system of purposeful amateurism of the kind Davies suggests here: sportsmen who defend their country, and have fun doing it.

In addition to embracing sport’s ability to improve the individual and protect the nation, the spy novel embraces sport’s system of morals, better known as sportsmanship. Sportsmanship in the Victorian period, as today, placed particular emphasis on respect for one’s opponent, as we see in this account from the writer and clergyman Charles Kingsley’s 1874 book Health and Education:

[I]n the playing-field boys acquire virtues which no books can give them; not merely daring and endurance, but, better still, temper, self-restraint, fairness, honour, unenvious approbation of another’s success, and all that “give and take” of life which stand a man in such good stead when he goes forth into the world....⁵⁵

The “unenvious approbation of another’s success” is one of the chief characteristics that distinguish Edwardian spy literature from contemporary counterspy and invasion literature. The latter genres feature almost no examples of even grudging admiration of Britain’s rivals, and at least one such work, When William Came, criticizes the British love of sport precisely because it encourages friendship between different nationalities. The German occupiers count on the bonds of sport to sap British resistance to the occupation: “‘One or two sportsmanlike Germans in a London football team will do more to break down racial antagonism than anything that Governments or Councils can effect,’”⁵⁶ one German commander reassures another. He is proven right at the end of the novel, when, having acquiesced to the German occupation, Yeovil is appalled to find himself united through the bonds of sport with a German officer, “laughing now and then at some joking remark, answering some question of interest, learning something of hunting ways and traditions in [the German’s] own country.”⁵⁷

This sort of mutual appreciation is treated as surrender in Saki’s novel, but as a mark of good character in sportsmanlike spy literature. In Two Women, Reggie Ainsworth is captured when, spying in a German military base, he recklessly and sincerely cries “‘Well hit!’” when the Germans’ antiaircraft gun proves to be a success.⁵⁸ His insuppressible admiration for his foes’ achievements, even when they endanger Britain, is representative of the genre. In The Riddle of the Sands, when the truth of the German invasion plan is uncovered, Davies’s admiration persists: “‘... it’s thorough; it’s German. No other country could do it.’”⁵⁹ The best that counterspy narratives can muster in this regard is the horrified recognition of the enemy agent as a kind of perverted hero, such as Hannay’s startled realization, upon capturing the master German spy in The Thirty-Nine Steps, that “This man was more than a spy; in his foul way he had been a patriot.”⁶⁰ But there are few examples of actual praise, whereas such examples abound in spy literature.

In addition to praising enemy accomplishments, the spy novel, like the spy himself, attempts to understand the enemy’s intentions and motivations. In The Riddle of the Sands, Davies describes German militarism not as motiveless malignity, but as a sensible strategy within a global context: “‘They’ve got no colonies to speak of, and must have them, like us. They can’t get them and keep them, and they can’t protect their huge commerce without naval strength.’”⁶¹ Throughout the novel, the heroes pointedly refuse to criticize either the German people or German militarism as somehow worse than Britain:

“I don’t blame them,” said Davies, who, for all his patriotism, had not a particle of racial spleen in his composition.... “We can’t talk about conquest and grabbing. We’ve collared a fine share of the world, and they’ve every right to be jealous. Let them hate us, and say so; it’ll teach us to buck up, and that’s what really matters.”⁶²

The final sentence, with its endorsement of hostility and defensiveness, may seem to be at odds with the passage’s generally conciliatory tone, but Davies is in fact unapologetically defending a “might makes right” philosophy; he does not think that Britain has been wrong to “collar a fine share of the world.” What Childers advocates in The Riddle of the Sands is not reconciliation between nations, but recognition of the reciprocity of sportsmanship on an international scale: what one nation does, another may reasonably do. In Davies’s claim that enmity will “‘teach us to buck up,’” we see the sportsman’s belief in mutual competition as a positive force, one that keeps nations fit for the exertions—including war—that sometimes result.

There is a noteworthy exception to the rule that the spy novel replaces paranoia with sportsmanship; it is found in the work of Le Queux, the most prolific and the most virulent counterspy and invasion author of the period. He never abandons his paranoid stance, even in his works about English spies—Secrets of the Foreign Office (1903) and The Man from Downing Street. The Continent that confronts Le Queux’s heroic spies, like that which confronts his heroic spy-hunters, sees Britain as weak and yearns to exploit that weakness. In Secrets of the Foreign Office, the French minister Delanne, described as “a rabid Anglophobe,”⁶³ shows no respect for Britain and makes ungentlemanly statements: “‘The English government is like the ostrich which buries its head at a sign of danger. Bluff and bombast are all the English are capable of.’”⁶⁴

Le Queux’s work tends to show that spy literature’s tolerance was dependent on the sporting ethos, for the spy heroes of these novels are not chummy, sportsmanlike amateurs like Reggie Ainsworth or Carruthers and Davies but highly professional agents. Consequently, the rules of sportsmanship do not apply to them. The idea of respectful competition between nations appears only as a pretense in Le Queux’s spy work, as in the episode “The Secret of the Black Bag” in Secrets of the Foreign Office: the spy Duckworth Drew, dispatched to the Continent to acquire the plans for a new rifle about to be sold to France, approaches the rifle’s inventor and claims to be a fellow gun designer employed by Woolwich Arsenal. He suggests a friendly competition between his rival’s gun design and his own, and when the rival’s proves superior he speaks in the language of professional admiration: “‘Marvellous!... Mine is far behind yours, and as for competition—why, the thing is out of all question.’”⁶⁵ But the competition and the sportsmanlike concession are a sham. Drew’s own design is a dummy, which he switches with the real one so that Britain and not France will have use of the superior weapon.

Le Queux created a different kind of spy hero, one who was justified not by his ordinariness, but by his elitism. As David Stafford writes of Le Queux’s aristocratic spies, “we are reassured that English supremacy remains securely based on the broad shoulders of those entitled to rule, the gentlemen who inhabit its clublands.”⁶⁶ In this Le Queux was ahead of his time, since during the Edwardian era most spy heroes were ordinary and approachable rather than aristocratic and professional. Far from being an amateur, such a spy is an early forerunner of James Bond, not only in his professionalism but also in his ruthlessness and his Manichaean worldview.

It is not hard to see why there were far fewer spy heroes than counterspy heroes in the popular literature of the Edwardian period. Counterspy fiction offered comforting dichotomies between good and honest Britain and evil, treacherous, and deceptive foreign powers, whereas spy fiction brought readers into contact with ambiguity, beginning with the hero’s deceptive vocation and continuing to a comparatively balanced portrayal of the enemy. The spy story was an attempt to bring the amateur values of the adventure story into the paranoid and alienated environment of twentieth-century Europe. It is not surprising that these values were often seen as out-of-date by contemporaries; with the benefit of hindsight, however, we may see the spy novel’s sporting approach to its time as refreshingly sane.

That said, we should not let the paranoia of the counterspy narrative blind us to the implications of the spy narrative’s sporting ethos, which makes war more sensible but also more thinkable. Such narratives suppose a framework in which the preparations for war, and war itself, are governed by a system of rules and codes in which respecting the opponent need not conflict with attempting to deceive him and triumph over him. If the Edwardian ethic of wartime sportsmanship argued that war should be treated sanely, it also argued against it being taken truly seriously, and this sporting ethos—an ethos, of course, not solely created or propagated by spy literature—followed British youth into the war. The sporting approach to war sometimes found absurd manifestations, such as the practice of attacking enemy lines while dribbling a football, which became “a conventional act of bravado” during World War I;⁶⁷ after the maneuver was employed at the Somme by a company from Surrey (resulting in the death of their commander), the footballs were preserved and the company commemorated with a poem: “True to the land that bore them— / The SURREYS play the game.”⁶⁸ World War I was the greatest test of the belief that the values of teamwork and sportsmanship were what mattered in war, and the results were conclusive and traumatic. To its credit, spy literature of this period stood explicitly against total war, collective punishment, and national chauvinism, largely based on its conviction that British values and qualities rendered these unnecessary. The sporting values of spy literature are attractive in comparison to the values of counterspy literature; they are less so in light of what international conflict actually entailed.