Royal Engineers

Paris in 1871 after the suppression of the Commune, showing an intact Arc de Triomphe

Edmonds was commissioned into the Corps of Royal Engineers on 22 July 1881. Edmonds spent four years based in Chatham and a year in Malta studying submarine mining, a matter which the Royal Navy could not be expected to undertake.^[1] Edmonds's intellect was recognised with the nickname Archimedes. After returning from Malta, Edmonds was posted to Hong Kong with two companies of engineers to garrison the colony after a Russian invasion scare.^[5] The 33rd Engineer Company, in which Edmonds served, was one of those chosen. When the orders were received the company commander went sick and his deputy requested to be excused as his wife was pregnant.^[6] The two companies reached Hong Kong, one with eight men and the other about thirty; the absentees were either ill, invalid or on attachment and had missed the boat.^[1]

Edmonds found that rocky outcrops just below the surface in Hong Kong harbour had not been charted and were a danger to shipping, occasionally the cause of serious accidents. Edmonds organised their removal by trailing a rail between two rowing boats and lowering a diver to place an explosive charge on the top. The posting was uneventful; in 1888 Edmonds returned to Chatham after three months' sick leave in Japan and sojourns US and Canada, to join the 38th Mining Company as Assistant Instructor. Apparently Edmonds's main duty was to play golf with the Chief Instructor in the afternoons. Edmonds was promoted to captain in 1890 and returned to the RMA Woolwich as an instructor in fortification. During his six years as an instructor Edmonds spent his long vacations abroad learning Russian and other languages.^[1][5]

Staff College

In 1895 Edmonds took the entrance exam for the Staff College, Camberley and passed first again; during the year he married Hilda Margaret Ion (died 1921), daughter of the Rev. Matthew Wood; they had one daughter. Twenty-four candidates were chosen by application and eight men with near misses in the examinations could enter by nomination, one of whom was Douglas Haig. Edmonds felt intellectually superior to his peers and wrote later that only George Macdonogh was an exception, a man who could also understand some of the more recondite subjects, like the decoding of cyphers. In his Memoirs, Edmonds wrote that he was often paired with Haig because he was good with detail and Haig a generalist.^{[7][lower-alpha 1]} Edmonds passed out in 1899 at the top of his class, one of the most successful and popular students of the era, noted for his conversation which had become even more interesting and appreciated by, amongst others, Douglas Haig, Aylmer Haldane and Edmund Allenby. Edmonds wrote that Allenby was a blockhead, which Cyril Falls later called "an error typical of Edmonds's worst side".^[1][9]

Edmonds overheard Colonel George Henderson predict that Haig would become commander in chief.^{[1][9][lower-alpha 2]} While at the college, Edmonds co-wrote with his brother in law, W. Birkbeck Wood, "The History of the Civil War in the United States 1861–1865" (1905). The book was well received by reviewers who wrote that the book would be appealing to soldiers and to students of history alike. The book was full of statistical information, although the reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement thought that in this, the authors had gone a little too far. The book gave prominence to novel aspects of the war including the use of cavalry, battles of attrition and the turning of volunteers into disciplined soldiers. The book was in print for thirty years and by 1936 was in its fourth edition and was in use at West Point.^[8]

The Intelligence Division

The War Office (photographed in 2017

Edmonds was offered a post in the Intelligence Division of the General Staff, commanded by Major-General John Ardagh in October 1899, ten days after the beginning of the Second Boer War (11 October 1899 – 31 May 1902). Edmonds became head of the Special Duties Section of the War Office (Section H) which was established soon after the outbreak of the war. Section H censored cable communications, spied on suspected agents, press correspondents and monitored martters of international law. Edmonds has a staff of one officer and a retired police detective with a budget of £200. The section later took on counter-intelligence and secret service work which entailed the dispatch of a small number of officers to South Africa to study topography, communications and Boer troop movements. The temporary Secret Section 13 (A), with a staff of three, kept watch on messages to South Africa and exports of ammunition. The section managed to intercept Dutch correspondence to South Africa but was prevented from accepting the offer by the captain of a rugby team to vandalise the London offices of a pro-Boer agent.^[11]

In 1901 Ardagh and Edmonds went to South Africa, at the request of the Foreign Office, to advise Lord Kitchener on questions of international law. From 1902–1904 Edmonds worked for Lord Milner on the establishment of peace.^{[1][lower-alpha 3]} After six years abroad, Edmonds, now a major, returned to England in 1906 and took over MO3, which in 1907 was renamed MO5 and until 1910 concentrated on counter-espionage, intelligence gathering and cryptography. Apart from Edmonds the staff consisted of another major, who spent his time cultivating a parliamentary constituency, where he was elected as a Conservative MP three years later. Edmonds found that the MO3 files contained matters pertaining to the Boer War, a few items about France and Russia but nothing about Germany, which was to become Edmonds's concern with the diplomatic settlements with France (Entente Cordiale [1904]) and the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907.^[13] Edmonds devised a code called double Playfair for communications with the Japanese and for British forces engaged in field operations. Edmonds drew up a list of experts in code-breaking and trained junior officers in cypher methods to create a reserve for times of war.^[12] Edmonds attempted to establish intelligence gathering by the British as an equivalent of the efforts being made by the French and Germans, who had been spying and counter-spying on each other since before the Franco-Prussian War. Edmonds took the view that in a modern war, old methods would be inadequate and in 1908 gave a lecture on tactical intelligence which compared the tasks of a field officer in a small war to that of their continental equivalents.^[14] In a European war, the British Army would need

...far greater vigilance, far closer watching of the enemy, far greater secrecy than war [against] the foes we have been accustomed to meet.^[14]

field officers would find it far harder to get topographical data in Germany during hostilities and would have to rely on information gained during peace. In the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) the Japanese had the benefit of agents placed in Russia before the war, which contributed to the Japanese victory. Edmonds advocated intelligence operations in Germany before a war but his efforts were hampered by the usual lack of money and War Office inexperience, whose early efforts were embarrassing failures. Edmonds had most success in changing the Security Service, despite his reasons coming from a fantasy. The growing Anglo-German antagonism had led to a fashion for alarmist literature about German spies and invasion scares, several written by William Le Queux, one of Edmonds's friends. There were some German agents in Britain watching ports and dockyards but no centrally organised system of espionage; Germany was far more interested in France and Russia. Gustav Steinhauer of German naval intelligence (Nachrichten-Abteilung N) ran "poorly paid and clumsy agents".^[15]

Invasion scares

Photograph of Le Queux

Le Queux wrote The Invasion of 1910 in 1906, serialised in the Daily Mail and then published in 17 languages, selling more than a million copies. In 1907 The Morning Post splashed a story purporting that 90,000 German reservists and spies, with arms caches, were at large in Britain. Invasion scares whipped up public anxiety when the Germans accelerated their dreadnought building plans.^{[16][lower-alpha 4]} The British government set up a sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID) in 1907 to look into the possibility of a German invasion, which met 16 times from November 1907 to July 1908 and debunked the invasion scares. The Director of Military Operations, Major-General Sir Spencer Ewart did have to admit that the counter-intelligence system was inadequate and began a review. In October 1908 a new Official Secrets Act was drafted to allow arrests and searches without warrant, the registration of aliens (foreigners), the use of paid agents in Britain to unmask foreign spies and copying the German system instituted in 1866, in which a police or private detective under an intelligence officer ran spies abroad. Without peacetime preparations, Britain would enter a war "fatally handicapped".^[16]

Edmonds was suspicious of German intentions because of a widespread assumption that the German victory in the Franco-Prussian War had been helped by its military intelligence effort and the ineptitude of French counter-intelligence. MO5 judged that German army reservists resident in France and the consular service had sent useful information to Germany. MO5 Got hold of a copy of the 1894 edition of "Felddienstordnung" the German Army Field Manual which required the use of spies by every command. In the 1890s, Edmonds had got to know several German intelligence officers, who had told him that a new department had been established in 1901 for naval intelligence gathering about Britain, the Nachrichten Abteilung N but this was assumed to be part of military intelligence, Sektion IIIb.^[18]

Several German friends told Edmonds that they had been approached by the German Imperial Admiralty (Kaiserliche Admiralität) to report on the movements of warships, observe dockyards, arsenals, aircraft and munitions factories. In 1909 Le Queux published "Spies of the Kaiser" in which London and the east coast were full of German spies disguised as barbers, waiters and tourists.^{[18][lower-alpha 5]} The denunciation of alleged spies increased and the cases were passed on to Edmonds who began to classify German visitors according to their proximity to important buildings and other structures, those who entertained parties of visiting Germans or tradesmen and photographers who lived near dockyards and ports. Richard Haldane, the Secretary of State for War (1905–1912), refused to credit the existence of a German spy network and few other members of the government took it seriously. Even Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, the Chief of the Great German General Staff (1906–1914) claimed that an invasion might be feasible but that supplying a landing force or re-embarking it would be impossible.^[18]

During 1909 Edmonds was promoted to colonel and that year told Captain Vernon Kell, his deputy during his time in the Far East, that the commander of a German landing in East Anglia would be better informed than a British general.^[1][19] Haldane was persuaded to set up another CID sub-committee to inquire about foreign espionage, at which Edmonds gave evidence. Viscount Esher said that Edmonds was

...a silly witness from the War Office [who saw] rats everywhere - behind every arras.^[19]

but Haldane was more persuaded. The existing intelligence system could not quantify German spying or stop it.^[19] The sub-committee recommended that a secret service bureau be established and in August 1909 the new agency was set up within MO5. Edmonds appointed Kell to run the agency. The government also created controls to monitor and limit the freedom of movement of aliens and increased powers under the Official Secrets Act to give more powers to the police against spies. After studying continental powers, the Metropolitan Police gained more powers of arrest and search. A conviction could be obtained on the evidence of suspicious behaviour and the burden of proof was placed on the accused.^{[20][lower-alpha 6]} By the time that Edmonds left MO5 in 1910 he had established a Secret Service section from a ramshackle, under-funded and poorly-organised group of temporary, part-time and amateur agents which resembled a modern intelligence gathering and counter-intelligence organisation. Despite being taken in by sensational tales of mass spying, Edmonds had laid the foundations of MI5 and MI6.^[22]

"History of the Great War"

"History of the Great War" is an abbreviation of The History of the Great War Based on Official Documents by Direction of the Committee of Imperial Defence (sometimes called the British Official History). A formal decision to write an official history was taken in a Cabinet meeting on 26 August 1915, when Maurice Hankey (1 April 1877 – 26 January 1963) the Secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence and of the War Council, advocated a series of histories to provide

...a popular and authoritative guide for the general reader; for the purposes of professional reference and education [and to provide] an antidote to the usual unofficial histories which besides being generally inaccurate, habitually attribute all naval and military failures to the ineptitude of the Government.^[27]

Field Marshal Herbert Kitchener (24 June 1850 – 5 June 1916) the Secretary of State for War wanted work begun on a single-volume popular history, to be published soon after the war. Kitchener hoped to maintain public interest in the main series and put the case of the government at the same time as accounts by participants and popular authors.^[28] The Treasury gave way and agreed to finance an official history series and popular single-volume works, written by civilian authors to ensure public appeal. Sir John Fortescue (28 December 1859 – 22 October 1933) was chosen as the author of the army volume.^[29] Work on the military histories in 1919 was hampered by paucity of resources and bad management, until Edmonds who had joined the Historical Section (Military Branch) in February 1919, was appointed Director on 1 April. Edmonds found documents in un-catalogued bundles on the floor, from which historians had abstracted items and not replaced them.^[30]

The Fortescue volume was to have covered the war but he wrote so slowly that it was decided to end his volume at May 1915 and only cover France.^[31] Edmonds also came to doubt the quality of the work, judging Fortescue to be ignorant of the workings of a contemporary army, apparently being 200 years behind the times; Fortescue had excluded dates and times and used obsolete language; he agreed to revise his draft but then took no notice. His second draft was said to be confused, containing nothing about the general situation and hardly referring to the Germans. Senior officers were ridiculed, the government blamed for not stopping the war and the French effort was "slurred over in less than one typewritten page". Edmonds blamed Fortescue for lack of interest, lethargy and ignoring the records made available, bungling the chance to write an exciting story of the BEF by delivering a patchwork of unit diaries. At the end of the year, Edmonds decided to rewrite the work; Fortescue was sacked and Edmonds even wanted him to be made to pay back his salary.^{[32][lower-alpha 7]} Edmonds decided that an account must be enhanced by statements, private records of officers and by German material, to counter "garbled" accounts by the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle and John Buchan. Soundings with publishers and authors convinced Edmonds that a work based on dispatches would fail to engage the public. An educational work needed a foundation on which to base teaching and a work must be readable enough for the public to buy, be a credible educational work for the military student and rebut inaccurate commercial accounts by civilian authors.^[32]

Edmonds submitted an annual report and meetings considered costs and the progress of publication, the number of volumes, their scope and size. On rare occasions the committee made a ruling on content after complaints by a department; in 1928, the War Office strenuously objected to some of the content of the first Gallipoli volume by C. F. Aspinall-Oglander.^[34] Money determined the speed of publication, the size and number of volumes and the choice of author. Edmonds preferring to employ officers on half-pay or retired on £500 per year, about half the price of a civilian author; officers were usually willing to work longer hours and do unpaid work. The Treasury managed to obtain the removal of Lieutenant-General Launcelot Kiggell, Chief of the General Staff of the British Armies in France from late 1915 to early 1918 from writing 1918 Part I and Edmonds agreed, because his work was "lacking in colour and atmosphere".^[35] The price of the early volumes was set at 21 Shillings (21s) and another 21s for accompanying map cases but this was considered too costly for professional officers. In 1923, the price was cut to 12s 6d but this left no surplus for advertising and no incentive for booksellers to display them prominently; publishers also set a maximum number of pages per volume, a constraint that led the Committee for Control in 1924 to advise a price increase to 15s. In March 1933, Edmonds showed copies of French, German and Austrian histories to demonstrate their "elaborate and voluminous" nature.^[36] Several volumes were financed by interested departments but Edmonds retained supervision and maintained the same editorial control as for the other volumes.^[36]

Parsimony affected the organisation of the Historical Section and the speed at which it could publish. The premises were cramped, visits to battlefields and the number of historians and administrators were limited and in 1922, Edmonds threatened to resign if denied more help. Daniel and Edmonds had only three or four full-time officers, who had to write the volumes, prepare them for publication, maintain the library, study prisoner of war (POW) records and foreign official and non-official publications in their native language and provide help for the War Office, War Graves Commission, Staff College, educational establishments and government departments. The section had about 2,000 visitors a year to its cramped offices in Cavendish Square, until it moved to the Audit Office in 1922. By 1924, Edmonds had five administrators and eight writers, when the French and German equivalents had about 130 each. The British staff were also underpaid, A. F. Becke being refused a salary increase from £500 per annum. Edmonds got the money instead, from £560 to £800 per annum and then £1,000 per annum in 1924, when he was writing most of the histories, managing the section and working a seven-day-week for three months, then taking ten days off (Edmonds worked like this for much of the 29 years of the project). A 1927 proposal for Cyril Falls (2 March 1888 – 23 April 1971) to visit Mesopotamia for £200 was vetoed by the Treasury but £50 was allowed for Aspinall-Oglander to visit Gallipoli.^[37]