Chapter I: Have a Rendezvous with Death (3)

“The big dinner at which the Kaiser and his staff were to gather around the table, and for which all the best silver in town had been requisitioned, was to begin at 2 o’clock. At that moment anxious eyes watched the sky toward the west. Would they come, the airmen with their bombs to do the deed that would finish the war? Would they be in time?

“At 2.15 there was a speck in the blue sky. It grew bigger and bigger, and bigger, and soon the watchers distinguished three flying machines. In haste Alois communicated with his friends. Barely had those who were warned taken shelter when the first explosion was heard. Then for a few minutes the town of Thielt shuddered as bomb after bomb exploded.

“It was a well-managed raid and the daring airmen escaped in safety, but it was all in vain. There had been a sudden change in the Kaiser’s schedule and the war lord had left Thielt at 2 o’clock sharp. During the bombardment his motor cars were speeding along the road to Bruges and his life was safe.

“But the commander of the Fourth German Army raged in his private office at the _kommandatur_. The secret of the visit had plainly got out. The Kaiser, the idol of 70,000,000 Germans, had barely escaped death. The guilty had to be found and punished.

“A contra-spy system was organized at once and large sums were promised for any bit of information. Slowly but surely Alois was drawn into the net woven by a most minute and complete investigation. On Feb. 2 he was summoned to the _kommandatur_ and taken prisoner. Already three of his coöperators were there.

“It was then that Alois Van Keirsbilk showed the courage which won for him the name of ‘the Silent Hero.’ He knew that one word spoken lightly might betray the whole of his organization, and his last word to his friends who were still free had been, ‘Do not let my absence or death scare you; but keep up the work that we have been doing.’ After his arrest nothing could induce him to speak even a word. All devices, old and new, were tried by the _kommandatur_—tortures as well as promises, the menaces of a cruel death, and the promise of life in luxury. It was all in vain. Perhaps Alois thought of the many lives he had in his hands. Anyway, he remained silent.

“He was condemned to death on Feb. 25, and then the Germans created and applied as devilish a scheme of mental torture for a human being as could be devised. Alois had two children, and a third was to be born soon.

“‘On the day that new life enters your home your life will end unless you speak,’ said the German inquisitor. Undoubtedly Alois thought of his wife, who would be calling for him that day more than ever. Perhaps he thought of the new baby also. Nevertheless he was still true to his name, ‘the Silent.’

“On the 5th of April a little girl was born in the Van Keirsbilk home. It might seem unbelievable, but evidently the Germans had waited for the event. On the same day they sent official word to ‘Madame Van Keirsbilk’ that if she desired to see her husband still alive, she could see him that day at 3 o’clock in the prison at Ghent. A merciful neighbor nurse saw to it that the message did not reach the mother, then nursing her day-old baby. Instead the eldest girl, 10 years old, was sent to the prison to see her father. Full of joy, in her happy ignorance, she exclaimed:

“‘Oh, father, you must come home with me. We have a little sister, and mother wants to show it to you. Come, father!’

“But father could not come. He pressed his little girl in his arms. He could not tell her she would never see him again, for he wanted to spare the mother, who had to live for the children. Not a word did he say. One kiss, and the big prison gate closed after the child, while her father prepared himself to die.

FACED DEATH A HERO

“His end came next morning at half-past five in the _cour_ of the prison. Four Belgians were to fall that day. When Van Keirsbilk arrived at the place of execution three were already lying dead against the wall. For some unknown reason he went to the muzzles of twelve German rifles alone.

“He refused to be blindfolded. ‘Let not a German hand touch me in this solemn moment when I die for my country. I have no fear of your bullets,’ the Belgians heard that he said, and erect he waited for the moment when his agony would come to an end. A few seconds later his body, with those of his comrades in death, was thrown into the ditch.

“In the afternoon of the same day a German soldier knocked at the door of the ‘Widow Van Keirsbilk’ and delivered a parcel to the devoted neighbor who was caring for the new baby and its mother. The woman opened it, and with horror found that it contained the suit of clothes of the unhappy master of the house. That was the German announcement of his death.

“Loving friends managed to keep the news from the widow for several days, although the continual absence of her husband plainly made her fear. But one morning she was looking through the window into the street, when the church bells began to ring for a funeral service. The people attending looked up at her and nodded with sympathy. None told her, but perhaps the unhappy woman read the pity that was in the eyes of the passers-by. Nobody knows, but suddenly a terrible look of suspicion came into her eyes. She rushed downstairs, where the neighbor nurse was preparing the meal for the children, and, seizing her by the arms, cried out:

“‘Who is dead? For whom are the bells ringing? Is it for Alois? Tell me, or I will run out into the street and find out. I must know where Alois is. I must know it if he is dead.’ Then and there the sad news had to be broken, and the widow of Alois began a time of lonely misery only broken by the struggle to keep her three children fed and clothed.”

_Courtesy of Red Cross Magazine._

A Long-Range Bombardment

Italian artillery bombarding Austrian trenches on a distant mountain-side, preparatory to a general attack.]

Egbert Hans concludes his story of Alois the Silent:

“To-day the Belgian flag flows again from the tower of Thielt and the thrifty people of Flanders are busy rebuilding their homes. Many of the men are missing; some died on the battlefield, others in prison, but all died fighting for the small strip of land they called their own, and those who remain cherish the memory of their heroes. They will tell their stories to their children and grandchildren, thus adding another page to the glorious history of Flanders, and among those stories will be that of Alois Van Keirsbilk, who tried to end the war by ending its instigator, and who failed and died, silent.”

EYE OF THE MORNING

The Popular Dutch Dancer Who Played the Rôle of German Spy to Her Cost

A story redolent of intrigue, adventure and a kind of romance is that of “Mata-Hari”—which is Japanese for “Eye-of-the Morning,” and is the name by which a Dutch dancer was known in the rendezvous of the light world of the European capitals before the war. Her real name is Marguerite Gertrude Zelle McLeod, and in 1917 her public and dashing career of art and adventure came to an abrupt stop by her arrest, trial, condemnation, and imprisonment, under sentence of death, in the prison of St. Lazare, Paris. She was condemned as a German spy, the specific offense being the betrayal to the Germans of the secret of the new, carefully guarded war weapon, the Tank. Reams have been written about this woman since her arrest, but nothing probably that would have anything like the interest for the public that will attach to the “memoirs,” the writing of which, reporters say, was her prison occupation.

Among the stories published at the time was one in the New York _World_ in October, 1917, that presented what was known of her connection with the leak of the tank secret. The success of the tank depended largely on the element of surprise when it was put into the fighting front. Therefore the planning, construction and shipment of tanks to the Somme were conducted with the utmost possible secrecy. Necessarily, however, a certain number of persons in France and England were in a position to know; but, as it took a good many months to get the machines in readiness and habituate a crew to their rolling, pitching, sickening motion, the circle of those who knew more or less about it increased, and in some way not yet explained, Mata-Hari learned something of the secret. It is rumored that a member of the Chamber of Deputies inadvertently gave her her first information. The _World_ said the rumor was strengthened by the fact that Mata-Hari had plenty of coal for her apartment during the fuel famine that winter. That in itself is proof enough to everybody of her intimacy with some high official, as few people, short of Deputies, had influence enough to obtain a hundredweight of coal during the bitter months of January, February, and March.

“In any event, Mata-Hari learned vaguely of tanks early in 1916, when the Krupp guns of the Crown Prince were daily booming nearer and nearer to Verdun in that terrific struggle which was to mark the turning-point of the war. Mata-Hari also learned that the tanks were being constructed in England, and would be shipped to France via certain ports—and she got the names of the ports, too.”

The airship was brought down April 1, 1916, by British anti-aircraft guns.]

Suddenly, Mata-Hari, then in Paris, decided to return to Holland, her native land, explaining to curious inquirers that she married a Dutch army officer with a Scotch name (McLeod) who had divorced her and that she was going to arrange a settlement.

SHE ACQUIRES A DRAGON

“The dancer proceeded to Rotterdam. Investigation there has since proved that she had no ‘communal rights property’ to settle with any one, and further that Captain MacLeod of the Dutch Army was known among his fellow officers as pronouncedly pro-German.

“Soon Mata-Hari returned to Paris. She was seen at the Café de Paris and at Maxim’s, and at Armenonville in the Bois with an English officer who wore on the lapel of his collar, as insignia denoting his branch of service, a little twisted brass dragon. Months later, when more of these badges were seen on British officers passing through Paris, it became known that the dragon was of the official insignia denoting service with the tanks.

“Mata-Hari sported a new bauble soon after taking up with the Englishman—a jeweled replica of his gold insignia—her dragon had real emeralds for eyes, and a carrot-shaped ruby for a tongue darting from its opened fangs.

“In May, 1916, a little more than a month before the Somme offensive opened and tanks were first used, Mata-Hari appeared before the police magistrate of her district and requested a safe conduct to visit a certain port in France. The reason she gave was that her fiancé, an English officer, was seriously wounded and in hospital there. He had sent for her to come to see him. Perhaps they would be married at his death-bed if he could not recover, she volunteered, dabbing at her eyes with a lace handkerchief. The safe conduct was made out, and Mata-Hari arrived at a certain French port almost simultaneously with the first consignment of tanks shipped over from England.”

She spent the greater part of her time for a week strolling about the town making frequent excursions by night, and then just a month before Foch and Haig began their drive along the Somme she appeared again in Paris.

“The first thing she did was to apply for a visé on her passport permitting her to go to Spain. San Sebastian was the place she mentioned, as she explained she wished to attend the horse-races there. Her papers were stamped and sealed and she left almost immediately for the fashionable winter resort in the south.

“Madrid, Spain, and Nauen, Germany, are in constant wireless communication. There are other radio stations, privately owned, in Spain which can flash messages to Germany, according to Allied intelligence officers who have investigated. And of course there are innumerable German agents, spies, and propaganda disseminators infesting the land of the Dons.

“Secret service reports disclose the fact that Mata-Hari was seen much in company at San Sebastian race-track with a man long looked upon with suspicion by the French government. He was a frequent caller upon her at the hotel where she stopped, and it was reported that he made many of the big bets she placed on horses that did not materialize as winners.

AGAIN THE DEPUTY

“Soon Mata-Hari came back to Paris and the apartment near the Bois de Boulogne. And once more the limousine owned by the individual whom rumor has branded a Deputy began rolling up to her door twice a week and sometimes oftener.

“Then came the simultaneous Franco-British offensive at the Somme. Tanks went into action for the first time, and according to General Haig’s official _communiqué_ his ‘Land ships achieved satisfactory results.’”

But, notwithstanding the “satisfactory results,” several of the tanks were surprisingly put out of action and the investigation of the how and the wherefore revealed the fact that they had been disabled by a peculiar, small-caliber penetrating shell unlike anything known before. They were fired by guns of a special manufacture.

Instantly it became evident that the enemy had become aware of what was in store for him and had constructed an “anti-tank” gun. And when the booty in the captured German positions was examined, the British found they had several good specimens of Krupps’ newest weapon. Several German officers of higher rank taken prisoners confirmed suspicions by explaining they had received description of the tanks several weeks before, and had been instructed how to combat them.

Suspicion aroused, items of information, curious circumstances in accountable movements, bits of gossip were put together and military law took charge of Mata-Hari.

For some reason the finish of her memoirs is not yet; but the fictionist, attempting to forecast a sensation, has written this:

“So Mata-Hari writes feverishly, and all Paris waits eagerly!—except the one who waits apprehensively—to see if she will name the _ami_ who gave her the first inkling of the tanks.

“Pinned to the corsage of the Empire-cut black silk dress which Mata-Hari wears in her narrow cell in St. Lazare prison is a curious gold brooch. It is shaped like a twisted dragon, and its eyes are emeralds!”

BETTER WRECKER THAN SPY

Scion of a Noble Prussian Family Who Failed to Deliver the Goods

Though he may not have been a conspicuous success as a spy, Gustav Constantin Alvo von Alvensleben had a very decided record as a wrecker. Through his directive genius many concerns, industrial and financial, went to utter smash, involving the loss of an unknown but huge number of millions of dollars and causing a suicide or two. In the brief span of years between 1904 and 1911 Alvo rose from the precarious state of a hobo to the lofty plane of millionairedom. That is a performance that requires some doing, and indicates a mental aptitude for the peculiar office of “playing your fellow man” considerably above the ordinary.

And Gustav, or, as he was more commonly named, Alvo, played with no mean counters. Among his clients was Kaiser Wilhelm himself, who, through Alvo, invested two and a half million dollars in British Columbia timber. Other clients were the ex-Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg, Gen. von Mackensen, the conqueror of Rumania; Emma von Mumm, the champagne queen; Bertha Krupp, the gun woman, and others of equal prominence in Germany. The companies he organized or coupled up with his enterprises—nearly all of which collapsed when the shadow of war blighted Alvo’s golden prospects—included the Alvensleben Canadian Finance and General Investment Company, the Standard Fish and Fertilizer Co., the Vancouver Timber and Trading Co., the Piercite Powder Co., the German-Canadian Trust Co., etc. Also with these went several of the Pacific Coast’s largest financial and industrial concerns, including the Bank of Vancouver, the Issaquah and Superior Coal Mining Company of Seattle, and the Dominion Trust Company, whose failure following the alleged suicide of its managing director, W. R. Arnold, was one of the greatest scandals in the history of the Dominion of Canada.

Two private banks of Seattle closed their doors as a result of their connection with the I. and S. Coal Company, one of the projects of the gambler-financier. The final liquidation of his original real estate and financial company in Vancouver disclosed liabilities of over one and a half millions, with assets of about $3,000, insufficient to satisfy the liquidator’s fees.

NOT A NONDESCRIPT

It is assumed that Alvo would have been able to extricate himself from his difficulties and avert the bankruptcy into which he was forced but for the outbreak of war. The fatality lay in the fact that all his investments were in countries with which the Kaiser was or was about to be at war.

But to begin at the beginning, as we find it in an issue of the _Canadian Courier_ of October, 1917, when Alvo’s career came to a conclusion, temporarily at least, by his internment as a spy.

© _National Service._

Protecting French Works of Art

A scaffolding built around the statue of “Flore” at Versailles to protect it from enemy air raids.]

He was not a mere nondescript adventurer. He was the youngest son of Count Werner Alvo von Alvensleben, erstwhile German Ambassador to Russia, when Nicholas was Czar. The young man had a taste for the livelier side of life, gaily dissipated his allowance and seemed to regard college life not so much as an educational purpose as a convenience to the sowing of wild oats. This was not at all to the liking of Papa von Alvensleben and in an hour of unsuppressed wrath and resentment he cast the young man off and bade him shift for himself. This was an unexpected climax to his pleasure quest, and rather shocked Alvo. He remembered that the Kaiser was an intimate friend of his father’s, of the family indeed, and it jarred his pride to be an outcast from a circle of such distinction. He felt under obligation to reëstablish himself in the good graces of his father and the august personage whom he had so often familiarly _hoched_. So he set out to subdue some fraction of the world to his service and credit. He did not immediately find a field of action.

It was in the rôle of a hobo that he drifted into Western America and began casting about for the horn of plenty from which he hoped to shake substantial advantage. Two inches above six feet in stature, two years under forty years of age, he was typically Prussian, stubborn, unreasonable, of violent temper. But he was a good talker and not without imagination. Behold him arrived in Seattle. The _Canadian Courier_ says:

HOBO TO MILLIONAIRE

“He was practically dead broke. An employment office extracted from him the usual $2 fee—all he had—and sent him to a job in a lumber-mill some distance from the city. Alvo tramped many miles to the mill only to be refused employment upon his ticket. He could scarcely speak any English, but he knew how to use his fists. Walking all the way back to Seattle, he proceeded to beat up the employment agent in thorough and picturesque fashion. Afterward he secured temporary rough work at various mills along Puget Sound.

“His first job in British Columbia was the whitewashing of a salmon-cannery at the little village of Ladner, near the mouth of the Fraser River. His wardrobe included overalls and a dozen dress-shirts—the latter relics of his grander days—but he had no socks. From wielding the whitewash-brush to hauling the nets was the next step, and it was not long before the Prussian Junker’s son was engaged in partnership with a rough-neck fisherman making nightly trips out into the Gulf of Georgia, and doing his share in one of the hardest and most dangerous callings in the world, that of a deep-sea salmon-fisher.

“In two months, with the money obtained from his salmon fishing, he was enabled to purchase an ancient mare and a light wagon. Over night he blossomed out as a produce-dealer, buying poultry and dairy products from the farmers in the vicinity of Ladner. These he brought to the city of Vancouver and sold them from house to house in opposition to the Chinamen. Business increased, and the staid old Vancouver Club, a hoary and the most exclusive institution, in which only the most elect held membership, became his best customer.

“But Alvo did not stay long in the business; but went up by leaps and bounds. Real-estate clerk, then curb-broker, then large independent dealer were some of his upward steps, until two years after he had sold his last load of produce to the Vancouver Club he was himself a member.”

There was one little incident of the club life which pleasantly reminds us that Alvo was not an upstart and therefore not a snob. He was entertaining a German baron soon after having become a member, and he noticed that the waiter eyed him very curiously. Presently divining the reason, Alvo suddenly looked up at the waiter and said: “Yes, by jingo, I’m the man who used to deliver chickens at the back door. Now go on serving dinner, and stop staring.”

PLAYS THE GAME WELL

“When the real-estate boom struck Vancouver in 1905,” continues the _Courier_, “Alvensleben was quick to see the opportunities in land. The old wild gambling spirit of his youthful days was still strong upon him. He was the man for the moment, reckless, willing to take chances, and a born mixer. He cabled relatives in Berlin, who had heard of his early successes, and induced them to invest large sums of money. His first investment yielded enormous and quick profit, and thus established his prestige in Germany, for he promptly repaid the investors with a 1,000 per cent. on their money. In the next three years he made several visits to Germany, brought men of royal blood to the Pacific coast, and was given several audiences with the Kaiser, whose accredited representative he became. In all probability, at a very conservative estimate, Alvensleben caused $20,000,000 of German capital to be invested in British Columbia and Washington State.

“In 1908, after a very romantic courtship, he married Edith Mary Westcott, a popular Vancouver girl, daughter of one of the leading society matrons. Following the marriage the financier purchased the largest private estate in Vancouver’s most select residential district, Point Grey, where he erected a magnificent home. His name, high foreign connections, and expenditure on entertainment that set a hitherto unknown high mark in the very British city of Vancouver, quickly brought him valuable social connections.

“His business ventures broadened with astounding rapidity, but most of his purchases for himself and clients were made on ‘agreements,’ with the expectations of making big margins in the prevalent boom. A good salesman himself, he was also the easiest mark for wildcat schemes who ever came out of Europe, owing to his gambling mania. Soon his companies became loaded up with timberlands, bought at inflated prices, wild lands, doubtful mining leases, Alberta oil shares, and other unproductive assets. Some of his wealthy clients thrust upon him their useless sons, whom he was forced to maintain in his office at high salaries.

SHY ON DIVIDENDS

“In 1912 the first trouble arose over dividends not being forthcoming from his investments. He was still strong in Berlin and went there and raised fresh capital with which he succeeded in placating some of his investors. Then he was attacked in a Vancouver German paper which charged him with unscrupulous methods in handling foreign capital. Copies of this were mailed to Berlin to members of the Reichstag by the Vancouver editors, and the matter was brought up for discussion by that body. Alvo was game. He sued the local paper and secured judgment in a criminal action against the editors. But the fat was in the fire as far as his German clients were concerned, though he managed to keep his affairs afloat.

“In the early part of 1914 the financier’s creditors, both in Europe and Canada, were pressing him. He was tied up in such a mass of deals, counter-deals, and trades of property with Arnold and the Dominion Trust Company that an army of auditors has never as yet succeeded in untangling them. He owed over $10,000 to one of Vancouver’s chartered banks on some Victoria Island timber deals, which he had anticipated selling to the British Columbia government for a park reserve. The Vancouver manager and a dozen of the staff were dismissed through their connection with this loan.”

He doubtless had advance notice of the outbreak of war, for he suddenly left Canada.

Later interviewed by a New York paper he said he could “best serve his country and his clients by returning to the Pacific Coast,” and from the outbreak of the war until his arrest on the suspicion that he was implicated in a plot to steal the plans of the Puget Sound Navy Yard of Bremerton, he remained in Seattle and other American Pacific Coast cities.

THE WIND-UP

“Rumors were afloat several times that he had visited Vancouver in disguise. After one of these reports appearing in the local papers, Alvensleben wrote to a friend in Vancouver, saying: ‘You can tell the good people of Vancouver I have something better to do than visit their city in the disguise of a Hindu or any other of their numerous allies.’

© _Underwood and Underwood._

Exhausted French Soldiers Resting in a Farmyard

A pile of straw was a welcome couch to men who had been for days in the trenches near the Yser. Men under artillery fire were often unable to get any sleep for several days. Sometimes their nerves were so shattered that they were unable to sleep after they were relieved. Deafness from the concussion of their own heavy artillery was also a frequent occurrence.]

“Alvensleben’s brother, Bodo, who was in charge of the Victoria branch of the Alvensleben Canadian Finance and General Investment Company, left hurriedly a few days before the outbreak of war to join his unit. The wildest rumors were circulated as to the spying operations of the brothers. It was said that Bodo had been taken off a ship by a British man-of-war, and when searched had in his possession the plans of the Canadian navy-yard at Esquimalt, and for this he was shot. Alvo denied the report, but whatever happened to this escaping brother, British censorship has never let out. Joachim von Alvensleben, an elder brother, well known from his various visits to Vancouver, was killed early in the war.”

The third and most brilliant of the brothers, the gambler-financier Alvo, was arrested at Portland and taken to Seattle, where he was interned “till the end of the war.” Concerning his subsequent proceedings there is no important information; at all events his meteoric career made a chapter of life which Vancouverites will never tire of discussing.

DELICATE SCRUPLES

One of Von Papen’s Dynamiters More Conscientious than His Chief

“Porter, boss?” The remark was an entirely facetious one, but the brakeman did not like to have his humor disregarded. Therefore when he got home he told his wife about the rum party he had met in the cut above the Vanceboro railroad bridge—a six-footer, carrying a suitcase. The brakeman would have been rather more than disgruntled, if Werner Horn had closed with his offer—that is, he would have been, had he known that the suitcase contained dynamite, and that its owner was an _Oberleutnant_ in the German army. The man with the suitcase had passed for a Swede in the hotel at Vanceboro, and his appearance warranted it. But his recent experience as manager of a coffee plantation in Moka, Guatemala, had not effaced the imprint of ten years in the service. He marched out upon the bridge, the brakeman having disappeared, as if he were taking a town. He was going into the enemy’s territory and fire his single shot. He was going to blow up the bridge, over whose rails flowed a tide of death to the Germans—cargoes of guns and shells bound for St. John and Halifax.

He would have preferred to join his regiment and fight, but von Papen had been unable to get him passage when he reported, at the time of the outbreak of the war, and told him that this affair was equally his duty. The Kaiser’s agent had likewise informed him, to soothe him, for Horn had refused to endanger innocent human lives—that there were no more passenger trains after eleven. It was now nearly midnight. Suddenly a whistle shrieked behind him, and in a moment the glaring lights of an express train’s locomotive shone upon him. Horn clutched with one hand at a steel rod of the bridge, and swung out over the river, holding the suitcase safe behind him with the other. The train thundered by, and left him to recover his footing on the ice-coated bridge. Once more, this time from the Canadian side, an express thundered past, and again he went through the same painful process.

He might have blown up the bridge comfortably, from the American side, but this he had refused to do. America was a neutral country. Germany was not at war with America, therefore to blow up the American side of the bridge was an outrage, a crime. He struggled on, the biting wind in his face. Past the middle now—a spy, liable to the penalty of death.

There was a fifty-minute fuse with his dynamite, but when he saw that the passenger-trains continued to run (von Papen’s schedules must have been out-of-date), Horn decided that what he was to do must be done at once, before another train started across. Feeling with his benumbed fingers in his pocket for a knife, he cut off the fuse and with it the long half-hour that was his chance of escape from capture. A very slim chance, if you like, through the Maine woods knee-deep in snow, but still a chance.

THE EXPLOSION

He fixed the dynamite against a girder of the bridge above the Canadian bank of the river, adjusted the explosive cap, and touched his cigar to the end of the three-minute fuse. Then he stumbled back across the gale-swept icy bridge, and back into the hotel at Vanceboro, just as the dynamite exploded with a report that broke half the windows in the town, and twisted rods and girders on the bridge. Everybody in Vanceboro was aroused, but Horn, after a futile attempt to rub his hands and feet with snow, turned in and went to sleep. He had seen all he wanted to of dynamite. In a town turned out of doors with excitement, sleeping was in itself an act to arouse suspicion.

People remembered the tall Swede who had been hanging around Vanceboro for a couple of days, and the suitcase which he had been seen to hide in a wood-pile near the tracks. After some delay, during which Horn slept peacefully, the sheriff and a couple of Canadian constables were got on the job, and they took him at about noon in Teague’s Hotel. He was wearing German colors on both sleeves, for he had been told that they would be regarded, were he caught, in the light of a uniform. He offered little resistance, but in telling his story, he interpolated an innocent lie that caused the Canadian officials a good deal of anxiety. He had not brought the dynamite in his suitcase, he said, but had carried the empty suitcase to the bridge, where an Irishman from Canada, in response to the pass-word “Tommy,” had given him the dynamite. This detail he afterwards cleared up, when asked to set his name to a paper concluding, “I certify on my honor as a German officer that the foregoing statements are true.” He would not sign a lie and set his name to it as the truth.

“Too scrupulous for a spy,” one of the newspapers called him, in the perplexities awakened by this early manifestation of the afterwards famous bomb-plot, “and too thickheaded for an honest man.” Werner Horn was extradited to Canada, and everybody joined in congratulating the man, whoever he might have been, who slept in the lower berth the night Horn took an upper for Vanceboro. It had developed during the trial that the big German, to disencumber himself, had chucked the suitcase under the lower berth, against the shoes and the hot-water pipes, then had climbed into the upper, to sleep peacefully through the night as was his wont. The evil effects of dynamite were comparatively novel at that time, even to bomb-plotters.

FRUSTRATED DIABOLISM

A Ruthless Tool of German Duplicity Fails Only Because He Trusted the Wrong Man with His Secret

One of the most nefarious of the schemes formulated in Germany and financed by the German government for operation in this country in the period of our neutrality, and of which von Papen was aware, was that which one Robert Fay undertook to carry out in 1915. This man had invented an infernal machine, the purpose of which was to blow up ships at sea to prevent the transportation of munitions and food supplies from this country to France and England. The story was well told in the _World’s Work_ after Fay and his accomplices had been jailed.

The device was a box containing forty pounds of trinitrotoluol, to be fastened to the rudder post of a vessel, and so geared to the rudder itself that its oscillations would slowly release the catch of a spring, which would then drive home the firing pin and cause an explosion that would instantly tear off the whole stern of the ship, sinking it in midocean in a few minutes. Experts in mechanics and experts in explosives and experts in shipbuilding all tested the machine, and all agreed that it was perfect for the work which Fay had planned that it should do.

Fay had three of these machines completed, he had others in course of construction, he had bought and tested the explosive to go into them, he had cruised New York harbor in a motor boat and proved by experience that he could attach them undetected where he wished, and he had the names and sailing dates of the vessels that he meant to sink without a trace. Only one little link that broke—and the quick and thorough work of American justice—robbed him of another Iron Cross besides the one he wore.

A PLOT HATCHED IN GERMANY

Fay and his device came straight from the heart of the German Army, with the approval and the money of his government behind him. He, like Werner Horn, came originally from Cologne; but they were very different men. Where Horn was almost childishly simple, Fay’s mind was subtle and quick to an extraordinary degree. Where Horn had been humane to the point of risking his life to save others, Fay had spent months in a cold-blooded solution of a complex problem in destruction that he knew certainly involved a horrible death for dozens, and more likely hundreds, of helpless human beings. Horn refused to swear to a lie even where the lie was a matter of no great moment. Fay told at his trial a story so ingenious that it would have done credit to a novelist and would have been wholly convincing if other evidence had not disproved the substance of it. The truth of the case runs like this:

Fay was in Germany when the war broke out and was sent to the Vosges Mountains in the early days of the conflict. Soon men were needed in the Champagne sector, and Fay was transferred to that front. Here he saw some of the bitterest fighting of the war, and here he led a detachment of Germans in a surprise attack on a trench full of Frenchmen in superior force. His success in this dangerous business won him an Iron Cross of the second class. During these days the superiority of the Allied artillery over the German caused the Germans great distress, and they became very bitter when they realized, from a study of the shells that exploded around them, how much of this superiority was due to the material that came from the United States for use by the French and British guns. Fay’s ingenious mind formed a scheme to stop this supply, and he put his plan before his superior officers. The result was that, in a few weeks, he left Germany, armed with passports and $3,500 in American money, bound for the United States on the steamer _Rotterdam_. He reached New York on April 23, 1915.

One of Fay’s qualifications for the task he had set for himself was his familiarity with the English language and with the United States. He had come to America in 1902, spending a few months on a farm in Manitoba and then going on to Chicago, where he had worked for several years for the J. I. Case Machinery Company, makers of agricultural implements. During these years, Fay was taking an extended correspondence school course in electrical and steam engineering, so that altogether he had a good technical background for the events of 1915. In 1906, he went back to Germany.

What he may have lacked in technical equipment, Fay made up by the first connection he made when he reached New York in 1915. The first man he looked up was Walter Scholz, his brother-in-law, who had been in this country for four years and who was a civil engineer and had studied mechanical engineering on the side. When Fay arrived, Scholz had been out of a job in his own profession and was working on a rich man’s estate in Connecticut. Fay, armed with plenty of money and his big idea, got Scholz to go into the scheme with him, and the two were soon living together in a boarding house at 28 Fourth Street, Weehawken, across the river from uptown New York,

A SHAM GARAGE

To conceal the true nature of their operations they hired a small building on Main Street and put a sign over the door announcing themselves in business as “The Riverside Garage.” They added verisimilitude to this scheme by buying a second-hand car in bad condition and dismantling it, scattering the parts around the room so that it would look as if they were engaged in making repairs. Every once in a while they would shift these parts about so as to alter the appearance of the place. However, they did not accept any business—whenever a man took the sign at its face value and came in asking to have work done, Fay or Scholz would take him to a nearby saloon and buy him a few drinks and pass him along by referring him to some other garage in the neighborhood.

The most of their time they spent about the real business in hand. They took care to have the windows of their room in the boarding house heavily curtained to keep out prying eyes, and here under a student lamp, they spent hours over mechanical drawings which were afterward produced in evidence at the trial of their case. The mechanism that Fay had conceived was carefully perfected on paper, and then they confronted the task of getting the machinery assembled. Some of the parts were standard—that is, they could be bought at any big hardware store. Others, however, were peculiar to this device and had to be made to order from the drawings. They had the tanks made by a sheet metal worker named Ignatz Schiering, at 344 West 42nd Street, New York. Scholz went to him with a drawing, telling him that it was for a gasoline tank for a motor boat. Scholz made several trips to the shop to supervise some of the details of the construction and once to order more tanks of a new size and shape.

At the same time Scholz went to Bernard McMillan, doing business under the name of McMillan & Werner, 81 Center Street, New York, to have him make a special kind of wheels and gears for the internal mechanism of the bomb, from sketches which Scholz supplied. At odd times between June 10th and October 20th McMillan was working on these things and delivered the last of them to Scholz just a few days before he was arrested.

In the meanwhile Fay was taking care of the other necessary elements of his scheme. Besides the mechanism of the bomb, he had to become familiar with the shipping in the port of New York, and he had to get the explosive with which to charge the bomb. For the former purpose he and Scholz bought a motor boat—a 28-footer—and in this they cruised about New York harbor at odd times, studying the docks at which ships were being loaded with supplies for the Allies and calculating the best means and time for placing the bombs on the rudder posts of these ships. Fay finally determined by experience that between two and three o’clock in the morning was the best time. The watchmen on board the ships were at that hour most likely to be asleep or the night dark enough so that he could work in safety. He made some actual experiments in fastening the empty tanks to the rudder posts, and found that it was perfectly feasible to do so. His scheme was to fasten them just above the water line on a ship while it was light, so that when it was loaded they were submerged and all possibility of detection was removed.

THE ROAD TO BETRAYAL

The getting of explosives was, however, the most difficult part of Fay’s undertaking. This was true not only because he was here most likely to arouse suspicion, but also because of his relative lack of knowledge of the thing he was dealing with. He did know enough, however, to begin his search for explosives in the least suspicious field, and it was only as he became ambitious to produce a more powerful effect that he came to grief.

The material he decided to use at first was chlorate of potash. This substance in itself is so harmless that it is an ingredient of tooth powders and is used commonly in other ways. When, however, it is mixed with any substance high in carbons, such as sugar, sulphur, charcoal, or kerosene, it becomes an explosive of considerable power. Fay set about to get some of the chlorate.

Fay’s fellow conspirators were Germans—some of them German-Americans—and each in his own way was doing the work of the Kaiser in this country. Herbert Kienzle was a dealer in clocks with a store on Park Place, in New York. He had learned the business in his father’s clock factory deep in the Black Forest in Germany and had come to this country years ago to go into the same business, getting his start by acting as agent for his father’s factory over here.

One of the first things in Fay’s carefully worked out plan was to locate a place to which he could quietly retire when his work of destruction should be done—a place where he felt he could be safe from suspicion. After a talk with Kienzle he decided that Lusk’s Sanatorium, at Butler, N. J., would serve the purpose. This sanatorium was run by Germans and Kienzle was well known there. Acting on a prearranged plan with Kienzle, Fay went to Butler and was met at the station by a man named Bronkhorst, who was in charge of the grounds at the sanatorium. They identified each other by prearranged signals and Fay made various arrangements, some of which are of importance later in the story.

Another friend of Kienzle’s was Max Breitung, a young German employed by his uncle, E. N. Breitung, who was in the shipping business in New York. Breitung supplied Fay with the information he needed regarding munitions-laden ships which Fay should elect to destroy.

© _Underwood and Underwood._

German Prisoners Recaptured After an Escape from Fort McPherson]

Fay asked Kienzle how he could get some chlorate of potash, and Kienzle asked his young friend Breitung if he could help him out. Breitung said he could, and went at once to another German who was operating in New York ostensibly as a broker in copper under the name of Carl L. Oppegaard, though his real name was Paul Siebs, and for the purpose of this story he might as well be known by that name. Siebs had also been in this country in earlier days, and during his residence in Chicago, from 1910 to 1913, he had become acquainted with young Breitung. He, too, had gone back to Germany before the war, but soon after it began he had come back to the United States under his false name, ostensibly as an agent of an electrical concern in Gothenburg, Sweden, for the purpose of buying copper. He frankly admitted later that this copper was intended for reëxport to Germany to be used in the manufacture of munitions of war. He did not have much success in his enterprise and he was finally forced to make a living from hand to mouth by small business transactions of almost any kind. He could not afford a separate office, so he rented desk room in the office of the Whitehall Trading Company, a small subsidiary of the Raymond-Hadley Corporation. His desk was in the same room with the manager of the company, Carl L. Wettig.

When Breitung asked Siebs to buy him some chlorate of potash Siebs was delighted at the opportunity to make some money and immediately undertook the commission. He had been instructed to get a small amount, perhaps 200 pounds. He needed money so badly, however, that he was very glad to find that the smallest kegs of the chlorate of potash were 112 pounds each, and he ordered three kegs. He paid for them with money supplied by Breitung and took a delivery slip for it. Ultimately this delivery slip was presented by Scholz, who appeared one day with a truck and driver and took the chemical away.

POTASH TOO WEAK

Fay and Scholz made some experiments with the chlorate of potash and Fay decided it was not strong enough to serve his purpose. He then determined to try dynamite. Again he wished to avoid suspicion and this time, after consultation with Kienzle, he recalled Bronkhorst down at the Lusk Sanatorium in New Jersey. Bronkhorst, in his work as superintendent of the grounds at the sanatorium, was occasionally engaged in laying water mains in the rocky soil there, and for this purpose kept dynamite on hand. Fay got a quantity of dynamite from him. Later, however, he decided that he wanted a still more powerful explosive.

Again he applied to Kienzle, and this time Kienzle got in touch with Siebs direct. By prearrangement, Kienzle and Siebs met Fay underneath the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge, and there Siebs was introduced to Fay. They walked around City Hall Park together discussing the subject; and Fay, not knowing the name of what he was after, tried to make Siebs understand what explosive he wanted by describing its properties. Siebs finally realized that what Fay had in mind was trinitrotoluol, one of the three highest explosives known. Siebs finally undertook to get some of it for him, but pointed out to him the obvious difficulties of buying it in as small quantities as he wanted. It was easy enough to buy chlorate of potash because that was in common commercial use for many purposes. It was also easy to buy dynamite because that also is used in all kinds of quantities and for many purposes. But trinitrotoluol is too powerful for any but military use, and it is consequently handled only in large lots and practically invariably is made to the order of some government. However, Siebs had an idea and proceeded to act on it, and without any delay.

He went back to the Whitehall Trading Company, where he had desk room, and saw his fellow occupant, Carl Wettig. Wettig had been engaged in a small way in a brokerage business in war supplies, and had even taken a few small turns in the handling of explosives. He agreed to do what he could to fill the order.

Carl Wettig was the weak link in Fay’s chain of fortune. He did indeed secure the high explosive that Fay wanted, and was in other ways obliging. But he got the explosive from a source that would have given Fay heart failure if he had known of it, and he was obliging for reasons that Fay lived to regret. Siebs made his inquiry of Wettig on the 19th of October. The small quantity of explosives that he asked for aroused Wettig’s suspicions, and as soon as he promised to get it he went to the French Chamber of Commerce near by and told them what he suspected and asked to be put in touch with responsible police authorities under whose direction he wished to act in supplying the trinitrotoluol.

From that moment Fay, Siebs, and Kienzle were “waked up in the morning and put to bed at night” by detectives from the police department of New York City and operatives of the Secret Service of the United States. By arrangement with them Wettig obtained a keg containing twenty-five pounds of trinitrotoluol, and in the absence of Fay and Scholz from their boarding house in Weehawken, he delivered it personally to their room and left it on their dresser. He told Siebs he had delivered it and Siebs promptly set about collecting his commission from Fay.

TAKEN INTO CUSTODY

Siebs had some difficulty in doing this, because Fay and Scholz, being unfamiliar with the use of the explosive, were unable to explode a sample of it and decided that it was no good. They had come home in the evening and found the keg on their dresser and had opened it. Inside they found the explosive in the form of loose white flakes. To keep it more safely, they poured it out into several small cloth bags. They then took a sample of it and tried by every means they could think of to explode it. They even laid some of it on an anvil and broke two or three hammers pounding on it, but could get no result. They then told Siebs that the stuff he had delivered was useless. Siebs repeated their complaint to Wettig, and Wettig volunteered to show them how it should be handled. Accordingly, he joined them the following day at their room in Weehawken and went with them out into the woods behind Fort Lee, taking along a small sample of the powder in a paper bag. In the woods the men picked up the top of a small tin can, built a fire in the stump of a tree, and melted some of the flake TNT in it. Before it cooled, Wettig embedded in it a mercury cap. When cooled after being melted, TNT forms a solid mass resembling resin in appearance, and is now more powerful because more compact.

However, before the experiment could be concluded, one of the swarm of detectives who had followed them into the woods stepped on a dry twig, and when the men started at its crackling, the detectives concluded they had better make their arrests before the men might get away; and so all were taken into custody. A quick search of their boarding house, the garage, a storage warehouse in which Fay had stored some trunks, and the boathouse where the motor boat was stored resulted in rounding up the entire paraphernalia that had been used in working out the whole plot. All the people connected with every phase of it were soon arrested.