Review: The Secrets of the German War Office

The Secrets of the German War Office by Armgaard Karl Graves

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



I really enjoyed reading this, but find the most exciting parts hard to believe. Most of the book is the autobiographical details of a gentleman spy plying his craft in exotic, urbane locales. All that is well and good enough, but a pre-WW I secret Black Forest meeting with German military leads, Austrians, and British leaders including Churchill and Haldane (British Secretary of State for War) agreeing to support or allow Russia pushed out of Europe at the cost of the Slavs and Antwerp going to Germany! Well, then again Haldane was pushed out of the government for German sympathies and apparently the author's report is substantatiated by the documented Haldane Mission. It seems the more I read, the more interesting and complex pre-WW I Europe was.

However, the exiting relation at the end of super Zeppelin "X 15" machines hidden in secret bases and filled with exotic, nonflammable gases which can reach perilous heights and go over a 1000 kilometers with heavy bomb loads all strains credulity and at least on the Web I haven't found any source for these superweapons beyond the author.

Still, the feeling that Armgaard wasn't Zelig and imagined more than he experienced is overwhelming. Characters like lady spy Olga Bruder feel like they could have been inspired by the [a:Maugham Somerset Maugham|5725487|Maugham Somerset Maugham|http://www.goodreads.com/assets/nophoto/nophoto-U-50x66.jpg] story "Miss King", a story collected in [b:Collected Short Stories: Volume 3 of 4|90311|Collected Short Stories Volume 3 of 4 (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)|W. Somerset Maugham|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171189677s/90311.jpg|6532265] where Maugham disclaims in the preface, "The works of an agent in the Intelligence Department is on the whole monotonous. A lot of it is uncommonly useless. The material it offers for short stories is scrappy and pointless; the author has himself to make it coherent, dramatic, and probable. That is what I have tried to do in this particular series."

Maybe Armgaard's intelligence work was similarly blah and he just meant to make it coherent and dramatic if not probable.



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