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. 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. In a European war, the British Army would need 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 () ran "poorly paid and clumsy agents". Invasion scares 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. 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