My days were therefore very full. There came reports from all quarters and some the most unlikely. How, you may ask, did our agents make these discoveries? There are many ways by which information is conveyed. The relations of soldiers are always willing to talk about their men and will tell you, if they know, when they are leaving, the ships they are leaving by, and will sometimes give you other important facts, but particularly about ports and dates of embarkations are they useful. Also officers will occasionally talk at lunch and dinner and will tell their women folk military secrets which a waiter can mentally note and convey to the proper quarters. Our best agents, however, were barbers, tailors, chiropodists, and dentists. English people will always discuss matters with a barber or with the man who is fitting them with their clothes, and as almost every tailor was making military uniforms and a very large number of the tailors in London were either German or Austrian, I had quite a wealth of news. Tailors are useful because they work to time. Clothes have to be delivered by a certain date and generally the man who has the suit made will tell the fitter the date he expects to leave England. Other useful investigators are Turkish-bath attendants and dentists. A man in a dentist’s chair is always nervous and will try to make friends with the surgeon who is operating on him. Of all agents the waiter is in reality the least useful, because writers have been pointing out for so many years the fact that most waiters were German. But the truth is that most restaurant waiters are Italian, and it is amongst the bedroom waiters that you find a preponderance of my fellow countrymen. Another department of my work which kept me busy was the money-lending department. I had initiated a system of inquiry into the financial affairs of officers and I was able to keep track of all officers who were in financial difficulties. This department had been a very great disappointment to us, for in spite of the fact that we had the power to ruin hundreds of careers, we have never been able to employ that power profitably. The British officer is absolutely unscrupulous and has no sense of honour. Often our agents have offered to release them from their liabilities in return for some trifling service and these people have preferred to live under the odium of owing people money, to securing an honourable release from their debts; by some simple little obliging act, such as giving us particulars of their brother officers’ losses at cards, and the like. And that is what is called English honour! Is it not more dishonourable to owe money you cannot pay than to whisper a few little secrets about men who probably are as dishonourable as yourself? However, to return to Alexander and his inamorata.