Secret, inconspicuous battles began long before the first shot of the "August guns" of the First World War. To the considerable annoyance of the German intelligence chief Walter Nikolai, the head of the special department of the headquarters of the Warsaw Military District, Colonel Yevgeny Evgrafovich Batashov, left the German army in the East without "eyes and ears," revealing the most complex combinations of a smart and cunning enemy, identifying and eliminating hundreds of agents who penetrated not only the military department and defense enterprises, but also the emperor's inner circle.