I will never again command an army in America if we must carry along paid spies. I will banish myself to some foreign country first.
—William Tecumseh Sherman, 1863Issue Coming Soon
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There is nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little.
—Francis Bacon, 1625Secrets define us, they mark us, they set us apart from all the others. The secrets which we preserve provide a key to who we are, deep down.
—Nuruddin Farah, 1998Guard more faithfully the secret which is confided to you than the money which is entrusted to your care.
—Isocrates, c. 370 BCOnce suspicion is aroused, everything feeds it.
—Amelia Edith Barr, 1885
Miscellany
Concerned about pigeons carrying military communications, German troops in occupied Belgium during World War I would shoot at overhead flocks. Such fears had not abated by World War II, when the British government ordered a systematic slaughter of pigeons throughout the UK, and inmates at British and Australian interment camps were banned from approaching birds on compound grounds.
Miscellany
New York Giants pitcher Christy Mathewson wrote in 1912 that he had heard the Philadelphia Athletics “had a spy” who stole signs and “tipped the batters by raising and lowering an awning a trifle.” In Philadelphia for the World Series the year before, Mathewson had looked for the culprit. “In the enemy’s camp, I kept watching the windows of the houses just outside the park for suspicious movements,” he wrote. “But I never discovered anything wrong.”
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