Brigadier-General Sir James Edward Edmonds was an officer of the Royal Engineers in the late-Victorian era British Army who worked in the Intelligence Division, took part in the creation of the forerunner of MI5 and promoted several spy scares, which failed to impress Richard Haldane, the Secretary of State for War (1905–1912). Viscount Esher said that Edmonds was...a silly witness from the War Office [who saw] rats everywhere - behind every arras.
Paris in 1871 after the suppression of the Commune, showing an intact Arc de Triomphe
The War Office (photographed in 2017
Photograph of Le Queux
Military Operations, France and Belgium, 1914 (1922)
Richard Haldane, 1st Viscount Haldane
Richard Burdon Haldane, 1st Viscount Haldane, was a British lawyer and philosopher and an influential Liberal and later Labour politician. He was Secretary of State for War between 1905 and 1912 during which time the "Haldane Reforms" of the British Army were implemented. As an intellectual he was fascinated with German thought. That led to his role in seeking detente with Germany in 1912 in the Haldane Mission. The mission was a failure and tensions with Berlin forced London to work more closely with Paris.
Richard Haldane, 1st Viscount Haldane
17 Charlotte Square, Edinburgh, birthplace of Richard Haldane
Haldane caricatured by Spy in Vanity Fair, 1896
Haldane at West Point sometime before the Great War.