Copenhagen in 1914, courtesy Det Konglige Bibliotek

100 years ago, Reuter’s new man in Copenhagen, Geoffrey Pyke, aged just 20, filed his first and last dispatch from the Danish capital. This is how it was reported back in London:

‘Four German destroyers were also reported off Hammerfest, apparently bound for the White Sea. Reuter’s correspondent at Copenhagen stated that on the afternoon of August 5 three German submarines were sighted at the southern outlet of the sound. They appear to have taken up their position there as a sort of advance guard.’

By the end of the month Pyke had been forced to leave Denmark. Yet soon after he had devised a plan for how to spend the next few months of the war, a scheme so radical that he broke out into a grin whenever he thought about it.