For many years after the events which I am about to describe, the papers of Sherlock Holmes relating to them were lodged in the most secure bank vault in the City of London. I held one key to the black metal deed-boxes, a member of His Majesty’s Privy Council held the other. Neither of us could open them alone. Among the contents were letters, telegrams and folded parchments tied with pink ribbon, like the confidential brief of King’s Counsel in a leading criminal trial.
Some of these folded briefs bore a few words written by Holmes himself in black ink on their outer surface. One of them was dated 1917 and had the name “Arthur Zimmermann” written upon it with the instruction “Twenty years.” That is the period for which Holmes and I were sworn to secrecy concerning the Great War of 1914-18. Our promise had been given to the First Sea Lord of the Admiralty, at Buckingham Palace, as all Europe careered into the abyss in August 1914. With the passing of time and the consent of His Majesty’s Government the contents of those papers need no longer remain secret.
I had never expected that his records of our war against the German Empire would have survived the domestic bonfires of my friend’s final days. Surely he would have burnt this! Surely, surely he would have destroyed that! But I was quite wrong. There they lie, untouched among other letters and memoranda which he made no effort to conceal.
Perhaps he was satisfied that a certain telegraph message which gives its title to the present story would mean nothing to those who chanced to find it. I have it before me now. It is printed on a Western Union telegram form and it bears the mast-head of that company across the top of its page. It is dated 19 January 1917 and has been wired from Washington to Mexico City, via Galveston, Texas. You may now read it, if you choose. Though it is a little in advance of my narrative, it will illustrate how daunting can be the appearance of a diplomatic cipher from the intelligence service of a great world power. Imagine, if you will, that the lives of millions of people and the fate of the world depend upon your unaided ability to turn the following equation into plain and readable prose within the next two or three hours.
TO GERMAN LEGATION
MEXICO CITY
Charge German Embassy
Washington 19 January 1917
Via Galveston
130 13042 13401 8501 115 3528 416 17214 6491 11310 18147 18222 21560 10247 11518 23677 13605 3494 14936 98092 5905 11311 10392 10271 0302 21290 5161 39695 23571 17504 11269 18278 18101 0317 0228 17694 4473 23264 22200 19452 21589 67893 5569 13918 8958 12137 1333 4725 4458 5905 17166 13851 4458 17149 14471 6706 13850 12224 6929 14991 7382 15857 67893 14218 36477 5870 17533 67893 5870 5454 16102 5217 22801 17138 21001 17388 7446 23638 18222 6719 14331 15021 23845 3156 23552 22096 21604 4797 9497 22464 20855 4377 23610 18140 22260 5905 13347 20420 39689 13732 20667 6929 5275 18507 52262 1340 22049 13339 11265 22295 10439 14814 4178 6992 8784 7632 7357 6926 52262 11267 21100 21272 9346 9559 22464 15874 18502 18500 17857 2188 5376 7381 98092 16127 13486 9350 9220 76038 14219 6144 2831 17920 11347 17142 11264 7667 7762 15099 9110 10482 97556 3569 3670
Bernstorff.
Such is the complete text of this extraordinary document. I will tell you as a clue that no single number corresponds to the same letter of the alphabet on every occasion, though entire words may sometimes be identical. The number “7” may be “a” on one occasion and “q” on another, and “h” on the third. What lies behind this sequence of numbers is an infinitely variable series of ciphers.
Sherlock Holmes was one of the few men on earth who could break the secret of such a transmission within a few hours. His colleagues in Admiralty Intelligence were an unpredictable company of naval officers, classical scholars from the best universities, puzzle-book addicts, eccentrics of many kinds. There were mathematicians, and pioneers of symbolic logic, among them pupils of the late Rev C. L. Dodgson, better known to fame as “Lewis Carroll.” Holmes several times remarked that had we been able to enlist the creator of Alice, we should have given German intelligence “cards, spades and a beating,” from the first day of the war to the last.
Holmes himself was supreme-and he knew it. After the Zimmermann adventure was over and the war had ended, I recall him reclining in his fireside chair during one of his more insufferable meditations, shaking out the match with which he had just lit his briar pipe and saying,
“All things considered, Watson, and though I found much of the work tiresome, I believe it was just as well that I was at hand when this little matter came to the attention of our government.”
He did not intend to be humorous in the least. All the same I laughed. It was too much like the Duke of Wellington recalling the “close-run thing” of the Battle of Waterloo and adding, “Damn it, I do not know that it would have done if I had not been there.”
It would not have done-in either case. Let me now reveal how the career of Sherlock Holmes in the Great War of 1914-18 culminated in that bizarre but momentous battle of the famous telegram.
Holmes and I were recruited to this work on the very eve of war. The man responsible was the First Sea Lord at the Admiralty, Sir John Fisher, with whom my friend had worked in breaking Germany ’s peacetime codes. “Jacky Fisher,” as he was popularly known, did nothing so obvious as visiting us in Baker Street. Who was to say whether a passer-by might not be a trained spy, or a German sympathiser in the pay of Tirpitz and his Kriegsmarine?
We knew from our friend Chief Inspector Lestrade, now of the Special Branch at Scotland Yard, that several neutrals in the Baker Street area were under suspicion. They included a Swiss watch-repairer, a Swedish bank courier, even a Spanish restaurateur. Any of these might be the man whose role in the war was to report to Germany on the movements and activities of such men as Sherlock Holmes. Being neutrals, they might inform military intelligence in Berlin, through German embassies in their own countries, without the danger of being hanged or shot in London as traitors.
To foil surveillance of this kind, Sir John Fisher arranged a most unlikely rendezvous with Sherlock Holmes. It was the last Court Ball to be held at Buckingham Palace, before all such good things ended for the duration of the war. The place was well chosen, precisely because it was the type of function which Holmes abominated. So little taste had my friend for what he dismissed as “flummery” that there was an inevitable difficulty as to which ladies we should escort to the occasion. In the end, I was obliged to call upon the services of two astonished spinster cousins from Devonshire.
The Court Ball itself-dancing on the path to Armageddon as Holmes called it grimly-was no less brilliant for being the last of its kind. It was to have been held a month earlier, before the ultimatums of war were issued. Instead, it had been postponed during a period of court mourning for the assassination in Sarajevo of the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie by a Bosnian student on 28 June. Who would have thought that two deaths in a remote and dusty Balkan town would plunge the entire world into such conflict?
Even as a century of peace was dying, the scene at the palace on that gala night was one I shall never forget. The young Prince of Wales, a shy boy who was to succeed his father as Edward VIII in 1936, was his mother’s partner and piloted Queen Mary through the Royal Quadrille. King George stood apart, in grave conversation with the Ambassador of our Russian ally, Count Benckendorff. The Germans and the Austrians had feigned a diplomatic absence and were packing their bags for the journey home, as the minutes of our ultimatum ticked away.
At the edge of the grand ballroom, Holmes and I found ourselves chatting in a small group round Lord William Cecil, the King’s Equerry, who was also an officer of Military Intelligence at the War Office. Holmes had no appetite for small talk of any kind. He soon lapsed into a gloomy and discourteous silence. Even when a reply was necessary, he responded by a monosyllable.
I was only too anxious to be rescued from this embarrassment. I looked across the floor towards the tall and elegant figure of Sir John Fisher, in formal royal blue uniform and gold piping of Admiral of the Fleet. He caught my eye but gave no sign of recognition. He too was now unsmiling, despite the “laughter lines” round his mouth. Even the brightness in his pale eyes had died away.
Holmes and Jacky Fisher had been firm friends for many years. Fisher was a man after Holmes’s heart with his simple policy for naval warfare. “Hit first, hit hard, and keep on hitting.” Sherlock Holmes would never hear a word spoken against the admiral, describing Fisher as having “not an inch of pose about him.” My friend gave him the motto, “Sworn to no party-of no sect am I. I can’t be silent and I will not lie.”
Just then, Lord William Cecil ceased to talk ballroom trivialities. As if he had received a signal, he took us each by an elbow, murmuring something about “supper.” He led us towards the grand buffet, where a crowd was beginning to gather. However, we were not to reach those supper tables with their sparkling white cloths, their silver and porcelain dishes of salmon and caviar, where royal footmen were waiting to serve us. To one side of this display was a white panelled door with gilt mouldings. Beyond it lay an ante-room. In a moment we had passed through and the door had been locked behind us. The exchanges which followed were to remain under our wartime oath of secrecy.
Sir John Fisher was there to speak for King George. Lord William Cecil held a brief for the General Staff. There was one other man who was a complete stranger to me. Yet if I had never met him again I should not have forgotten his appearance. He was wearing the uniform of a Royal Navy captain. I recall him as being dapper, alert, with a perfectly-domed bald head, a large hooked nose and a strong cleft chin. Most memorably, he had eyes that were possessed of a dark and penetrating hypnotic power.
As we entered the damask-panelled chamber, Fisher went up to this newcomer and then turned to us.
“Gentlemen, may I present to you Captain Reginald Hall, who is at present commander of the battle-cruiser Queen Mary? You will see and hear a good deal of him before long. He will very shortly be taking up his appointment among us as Admiral Sir Reginald Hall, Director of Admiralty Intelligence.”
After that, I needed no further hints to deduce what part Holmes and I were invited to play. When the formal introductions were over. Reginald Hall casually picked up a copy of that evening’s Globe newspaper, which had been left on a small occasional table. Its tall black headlines proclaimed the immediate German military threat to Belgium and hopeless Belgian gallantry in meeting an overwhelming attack. As a way of introducing himself, the captain tossed the paper back again and looked at us with his penetrating gaze.
“Well, here’s a business, Mr Holmes and Dr Watson.”
“I daresay, Sir Reginald,” said Holmes, rather too coldly as it seemed to me, “but it is not a business of my making nor is it to my taste. I confess that I have killed one or two men in my time-and without regret-but slaughter of this kind is not a dish I can relish.”
Fisher intervened at once, before my friend could make matters worse.
“Nor I, Mr Holmes. However, now that the choice is set before us we must either win this war or lose it. My sole duty to His Majesty is to ensure that we win.”
I could guess what was coming, for I had heard it from so many people in the past few weeks. Fisher reminded us that England had fought no great European war for almost a century, since the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815. In consequence, we had been caught thoroughly unprepared for this one, as he had repeatedly warned us that we would be. Now there was work for us all, and we must do it with a will. There could be no “civilians.” Every man and woman at home had duties to perform, as surely as the first of our front-line regiments who had embarked secretly for France. The particular duties of Sherlock Holmes and I had yet to be agreed, but that they must be a matter of national importance was constantly implied.
“There can only be one place for you, Mr Holmes,” Fisher said at length, his eyes holding my friend’s gaze, “Your gifts belong at the heart of our nation’s security. Without such intelligence as you can bring us, we fight blind-and deaf too, for that matter.”
“To begin with,” said Holmes, more gently than I had feared, “if I were to travel like an office boy each day from Baker Street to Whitehall, I should soon have every spy in London on my back. I take it that when we speak of Whitehall we are talking of the famous Room 40 in the Old Admiralty Building. Room 40 is a secret so well kept that every newspaper boy in the West End streets can tell you a dozen stories about it.”
“If there are spies on your tail, the more easily shall they be caught,” said Fisher evenly. “We shall get the better of those fellows, believe me. I have given the matter considerable thought.”
Holmes seemed only to be half listening. He was looking round the ante-room, as though it were beyond his conception that any sane man should choose to live among such paint and gilt, such damask and satin as this. He responded to Fisher by raising his eyebrows a fraction, indicating a little surprise that a mere admiral of the fleet should presume to think in competition with the sage of Baker Street. Then he sighed.
“Very well. Tell me what you propose.”
Jacky Fisher relaxed and began to explain himself.
“Some years ago, you will recall that you first came to my assistance by recovering the Bruce-Partington submarine plans which had been stolen from Woolwich Arsenal. Indeed, our friend Dr Watson wrote an account of your adventure on that occasion.”
“Not by my wish,” said Holmes quickly but Fisher ignored him.
“At the time,” he continued, “I recall that you had made a hobby-or a study-of the choral music of the Middle Ages. Indeed, you were writing an analysis of the Polyphonic Motets of Orlando Lassus, were you not? I was much struck by that.”
“Your memory does you credit,” said Holmes dryly. Sir John brushed this aside.
“I will make a suggestion. Our adversaries in Berlin would give a good deal to know of your activities in the course of this war. I intend to appease their curiosity by feeding them something to chew on. Now, then. Your reluctance to go to war is humane and sensible. I will not ask you to compromise your views. Indeed, I suggest that you should compose a letter to the editor of the Times or the Morning Post or both, expressing your disapproval of this coming entanglement with Germany and your hopes for an early resolution of the conflict…”
“Not merely a disapproval of this war but of all such unnecessary wars,” Holmes retorted.
Captain Hall blinked but Fisher took this in his stride.
“The fact that the letter is genuine in its sentiments is entirely as I would wish. Having let your feelings be known, you should then openly pledge to dedicate yourself to the study of Orlando Lassus. Of course, the Germans may doubt the sincerity of your objections to the war but they cannot be sure. A suitable library should be chosen for your work. It must not be open to the public. If there is free access, your movements could be spied upon even while you were at your desk. That would never do. You will be seen coming and going to the institution but that also is as we would wish it.”
“And behind this charade of Achilles sulking in his tent?” Holmes inquired.
“I propose,” said Sir John Fisher, the eyes twinkling at last, “or rather His Majesty proposes, that you should become Director of Admiralty Signals Intelligence at Room 40. We divide our surveillance into Human Intelligence and Signals Intelligence. We offer you Signals. You see that your fame goes before you!”
Holmes began to mellow a little under Fisher’s charm. As we talked of the proposed arrangement that evening in the anteroom, the dancers whirled in a twisting of silk and a glitter of diamonds, a few feet away beyond the locked door.
The very existence of Room 40 was supposed to be known only to the trusted few. Despite Holmes’s scornful aside, that was still the case. At the rear of the Old Admiralty Building, this room and its offices looked out across the expanse of Horse Guards Parade and St James’s Park towards the heavy Renaissance pile of the Foreign Office. It was the centre from which the best brains of Naval Intelligence struggled with the coded signals and secret telegraph messages that filled the night sky between Berlin and Ankara, Vienna and New York, Valparaiso and Tokyo.
In addition, Fisher confided to us that the German deep-sea cables carried both naval and diplomatic ciphers, as well as conventional telegrams. They ran from Bremen on the bed of the North Sea, westwards down the English Channel, then across the Bay of Biscay to Vigo in northern Spain. From here they extended across the Atlantic to New York, and alternatively to Buenos Aires, touching first at Tenerife in the Canary Islands.
These sea-bed cables were not destined to survive the outbreak of war by more than a few hours. The Cable & Wireless company’s cable-laying ship Telconia was lying at Dover, already commandeered by the Admiralty and with a Royal Navy crew aboard. A few hours before the British ultimatum to Berlin expired, she would put to sea in darkness, carrying sealed orders. Her course had been set for the neutral Dutch coast to strike at the weakest point, where the cables must run in shallow waters. There the vessel would ride at anchor in the darkness and the mist, where the territorial waters of Holland meet those of Germany, awaiting the midnight signal from the Admiralty to all shipping that war had been declared.
As soon as the signal was received, Telconia was to trawl with her grappling gear for the five transatlantic cables in their iron sheathing. They would be hauled to the surface at the invisible sea-frontier. Royal Navy cable engineers were to sever them through their iron casings and let the broken ends fall back into the depths. Neutral Holland might continue to signal to the world. Our enemies in Germany would be obliged to communicate openly by wireless from the powerful transmitter at Nauen near Berlin or through neutral countries, most probably Sweden. Every one of the coded messages sent by such means could be intercepted by a new chain of Admiralty signal stations established round our coasts.
Having explained this, Fisher came to the supreme consideration of security and secrecy. “Your presence at the Admiralty, Mr Holmes, is to be kept from public knowledge. Our opponents almost certainly know that you have broken their code in the past. We must try to persuade them that you have not been given the chance to do it again.”
Captain Hall interposed, rather diffidently, as became a newcomer to the debate.
“Our first measure has been an attempt to convince our adversaries of the existence of a vast and efficient network of British spies on the Continent. Indeed two Royal Navy officers, Lieutenant Brandon and Lieutenant Trench, have served prison sentences in Germany. It seems Tirpitz prefers to believe that his cipher-tables may have been given away by indiscretion, or even betrayed, but not deciphered. We have a small number of spies in Europe, to be sure, but nothing like the total that the Wilhelmstrasse believes. A few of our most skilled and important agents play the part of traitors to us. We know that German intelligence believes such disloyalty to be the most valuable source of their information.”
Holmes turned away and stood silent for a moment. Sir John Fisher interrupted his thoughts with growing impatience.
“You say that you disapprove of this war, Mr Holmes. You do not disapprove of it more heartily than I do-or more deeply than the King himself. So long as it continues, the best of our young men face death in the trenches or on the high seas. The sooner it is over, the better. With your abilities we may win bloodless victories. If there is war, there must be battles, of course. But many more battles that would have cost tens of thousands of young lives may never need to be fought. I low much better to triumph in this way than through the hecatombs of the slaughtered young.”
Holmes turned to him, calmly and with his decision made.
“Very well. I am His Majesty’s subject and shall obey. May the end be as quick and as bloodless as you propose.”
In the white anteroom with its gold-laced furniture it was impossible to miss a collective breath of relief.
Our negotiations with Fisher and Hall were not before time. In the course of that evening, a score of officers in their medalled mess jackets and formal dress took an unceremonious leave of the Court Ball. Despatch riders had brought orders to the Palace that two of our most famous regiments must return to camp. There was to be no delay, not even to enable reservists to reach them. Their battalions were to mobilise at present strength. At Liverpool Street station, they were to entrain for King’s Lynn to meet a possible German raiding party on the East Coast. The enemy might be expected as early as the next day’s summer dawn.
Such news brought with it a sense of complete unreality, as if we were taking part in a new play at the Haymarket or the Lyceum. All too soon, the same news was to be the talk of the hour.
Even as we discussed Fisher’s plans for Sherlock Holmes, I was doubtful that the enemy would be deceived for long. It was all very well for Sir John Fisher to boast how easily he could make fools of the Germans. The truth was that enemy spies might be anywhere in London, in guises of every kind. A citizen of a neutral country, let alone our own, might have private German sympathies. Holmes and I must assume, each time we left Baker Street, that either of us was being followed by a man or woman whose presence we had failed to detect.
We came to recognise one or two of those who quite plainly kept watch on us, though it would have been difficult to prove what law they were breaking. In any case, Holmes insisted that we must “let them be.” Far better to have such hangers-on where we could see them, than behind prison bars. We might not recognise the enemies who took their places, until it was too late.
There was a stout young man with a high flush and breathless movements. He would frequently appear in cap and gaiters where Cornwall Terrace joins Baker Street, like a stable-groom setting out for the park, just as Holmes stepped into his hansom cab. But this young look-out went no further. He crossed the road and turned away in the opposite direction, towards Marylebone. We could accuse him of nothing-and yet we were sure. His turning away was the signal for another watchdog. As the cab moved forward, this second man would very often appear round the corner from Park Street. He rode a bicycle, convenient for keeping a cab in view, and appeared much the older of the pair. His dark hair and pointed beard had the suggestion of being rimed by white frost. All the same, the nimbleness of his movements on the bicycle pedals hinted strongly to me that he was a younger man disguised. But we could hardly have him shot for that.
With one exception, these watchers were never interfered with. Our only mishap, early on, was the arrest of a gingerhaired giant with an entirely Germanic face. This was done by my intervention, largely to placate our nervous landlady, Mrs Hudson. Holmes was not in the house at the time. The man proved to be a plain-clothes sergeant of the Criminal Investigation Division, stationed at Paddington Green police station specifically for our protection. Needless to say, this well-intentioned error on my part delighted my friend.
His letter denouncing the futility of war, from Holmes to the Morning Post, had duly appeared. It was written with sufficient feeling to carry conviction to the unprejudiced reader. I feared we should receive a deluge of hostile post from wartime patriots but such was not the case. We were at an early stage of the conflict and tempers were not as hot as they subsequently became.
Every morning Holmes went by cab to the St James’s Library, off Pall Mall, to resume his work on the counterpoint of Orlando Lassus. The St James’s was a private library, founded by the great John Stuart Mill in the 1840s and restricted to members only. Membership was granted after personal recommendation and election, so that it was easy to check the names of those who made use of it. Holmes the musicologist appeared to work there until late in the afternoon, when he was driven back to Baker Street.
We were informed by Naval Intelligence that those who spied upon the library during the day probably did so from the rooms of an otherwise respectable European Club on the far side of the square. Its windows overlooked the library building. Yet even if these hidden onlookers in St James’s continued to keep watch, they no evidence of Holmes among the readers leaving or returning between his arrival in the morning and his departure for home at the end of the afternoon. They must content themselves with a young carpenter, who had been at work erecting shelves in the reading room, swinging his long bag and whistling as he went on his way to another job. Perhaps a bluff middle-aged fellow in a country suit arrived from Sussex or Surrey for an hour’s browsing among the shelves. An elderly scholar with pince-nez and an old-fashioned stove-pipe hat might appear from the Oxford train or the ecclesiastical figure of an avuncular rural dean would set out for his return to a West Country parish.
Those who have followed the adventures of Sherlock Holmes may at once guess the identity of the whistling carpenter, the bluff countryman, the shrivelled old scholar or the rural dean. Happily it was a fact unknown to German intelligence that in 1879, as an anonymous understudy and at short notice, Holmes had played Horatio to Sir Henry Irving’s Hamlet at the Lyceum. It was his one and only appearance on the London stage. Almost at once he was engaged to sail on an eight-month tour of the United States with the Sasanoff Shakespearean Company. It was not merely that he adopted the costume of the role he played. He assumed the expression, the manner, and the very soul of that part.
Yet I believe my friend considered that he reached the height of impersonation when the cab stopped in the Piccadilly square, the familiar figure strode up the library steps, the driver whipped up the horse and clattered round the corner into Pall Mall. As so often, the spies saw what they expected to see. Yet it was a trustworthy amateur, perhaps resting from the stage, who went up the steps to the library door, while the consulting detective covered by a shabby coat and hat drove the hansom smartly round the corner. Fifteen minutes later, he brought the horse and cab to rest in the securely guarded precincts of Old Admiralty Yard.
If anything more was needed to lay German suspicions to rest, Holmes published in the following spring two impeccable reviews of the polyphony of Orlando Lassus. His learned references to texts and manuscripts were in themselves several pages long. Orders for the journal were placed with Lindemann in neutral Geneva. The destination of two copies proved to be the Bureau of Military Intelligence in Berlin. It was from this moment that a noticeable falling off began in the numbers of those who tracked the hero of Baker Street on his daily journeys to Piccadilly and, presumably, among those who watched forlornly from the windows of the European Club.
If my friend expressed his reservations in the first months of the war, when the hopeful belief was that it would be over by Christmas, you may imagine his feelings as the Western Front settled into mud and slaughter. On a pleasant June evening, after almost two years of the conflict, we were sitting either side of our window, discussing the losses of British battle-cruisers in the engagement off Jutland, a fortnight earlier, and the loss of Lord Kitchener, Minister of War, in the sinking of the cruiser HMS Devonshire the previous week. Holmes seemed to be at his lowest ebb.
“I fear that we and Germany may end as two corpses, manacled together,” he said gloomily. After a pause, he stared down into the quiet street and added, “Even were we to defeat the powers of central Europe utterly, the result could only be to destabilise that area completely for fifty years to come.”
“That is something beyond the power of Room 40 to remedy,” I said philosophically.
He stood up and went to the cigarette-box on the mantelpiece. It was a few days before midsummer and the setting sun glowed like molten gold on the far wall of our sitting-room.
He lit his cigarette, shook out the match, and said,
“I cannot make Hall understand that the only way to control German intelligence is to let them read our ciphers.”
As he returned to the window, I wondered if I had heard him correctly. Possibly I had missed a tone of irony in his words. He stood in the golden light, tall and gaunt, emaciated by months of constant work. I was struck by the sudden impatience of his grimace, a growing sense of his consuming energy, an onset of that passionate reasoning power, which I had learnt to recognise with some disquiet.
“You want the Germans to penetrate our codes and ciphers?”
“Of course!” he said emphatically, “We cannot control their thoughts simply by reading their cables. The time has come to let Germany win a battle of the ciphers. It will not do for Hall’s handful of spies to feed them stories of our intentions. That trick is done with. Tirpitz is not a Teutonic clown but the equal of Hall or Fisher. He has been stung too often and will now believe only what he reads for himself.”
“Then what is the answer? Surely not to give away our secrets?”
He shook his head impatiently.
“We must give him the means of reading our codes and ciphers. We must make him feel that he is winning, rather than losing. There has been too much triumph on our side and the braying that goes with it. He must read our wireless messages and signals with the assistance of our own code-books. He must read our confessions of being baffled by his new ciphers.”
“He will not believe any of that!”
To my surprise, he smiled.
“Suppose that we should present him with our Secret Emergency War Code, containing a complete set of our cipher tables for the next six months.”
“He will not believe anything that we give to him!”
“I think he will, if we allow him to steal the emergency code book. You and I could arrange that on our own. I hardly think we need trouble Admiral Hall. Let this be our own enterprise. I believe we could be successful in passing such information to Berlin.”
In that moment my heart seemed to stop.
“I believe we could be shot by our own side!” I said desperately, “Or assassinated by the Germans!”
“My dear Watson, they will be only too happy to believe in the value of a code-book, provided that it is served up to them in the right way. In every neutral country their spies are now ready to pay for whatever information our so-called double-agents betray to them. This is far better. All we need in this case is an apparently indiscreet leakage of our naval and military intelligence, including codes and cipher-tables. I grant you, we shall also need an impersonating agent of our own who must appear simple enough and gullible enough to carry conviction.”
“And what sort of man is that?” I asked scornfully.
“You are,” he said.
Holmes declined to discuss the matter further just then and I was left to my own thoughts. I confess that I had never imagined myself as a secret agent. Now that the suggestion was made, I was surprised to find that I was not entirely averse to the challenge. So far, I had played my part conscientiously in the Watchkeeper’s Office of Room 40. I had collected copies of intercepted telegrams as they fell from the pneumatic tubes and filed them as “Admiralty,” “Military,” “Diplomatic” or “Political.”
That work was so humdrum that I would scarcely have been human if I had not felt that I was cut out for more exciting things. Without telling Holmes, I had offered my skills to the War Office the previous year as a military surgeon, on the basis of my experience in Afghanistan. To my chagrin I was turned down as being at least twenty years too old! At least, if I became a make-believe agent, I should find myself on active service. I recalled the famous saying of Dr Samuel Johnson that a man always thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier. In Holmes’s wistful adventure, I might answer the call to arms.
Sir John Fisher summoned me several days later. He assured me that our enemies were ravenous for whatever information might come their way, provided their appetites were suitably stimulated. I knew that he had just been talking to Sherlock Holmes
“How will you know if they believe what is given them?” I asked.
He chuckled.
“If they believe it, they will come back for more. That is to say, they will continue to pay for it. Oh, yes, doctor. Our most successful and most valued agents in neutral Europe are those who have posed as traitors with secrets to sell. The money that comes to them from the German Abwehr, as their military intelligence is called, goes into our special fund at Room 40. We shall share it out among deserving causes when we celebrate victory at the end of the war.”
“Then you are offering them a traitor?” I had not liked the sound of this.
“I think not, on this occasion. We may have played that card too often.”
“Then whom?”
“We need a…” His eyes wandered a little as he avoided the words “fool” or “buffoon.” Then he smiled. “An innocent is what we want. One who appears naive enough to have information stolen from him.”
Within two more days, Holmes had put to Fisher a plan for selling to German Intelligence a bound volume of a counterfeit Secret Emergency War Code. Its contents had been devised by my friend, as a permanent means of introducing false information to the Wilhelmstrasse, including variations in codes and ciphers, for as long as the war might last. The way would be cleared by one of our best double-agents in Holland, working under the cover of being an importer of Sumatra tobacco, but in German pay since before the war began.
This agent was fastidious. He did not claim access to British intelligence. He was merely an international businessman and an admirer of Germany who had an old school-friend in the Foreign Office, William Greville. From this garrulous source, he was now able to alert his German clients to the forthcoming revision of our Secret Emergency War Code. Copies would be restricted to a handful of officers authorised to receive it. On previous occasions, the agents of the Wilhelmstrasse had no hope of laying hands upon it.
The tobacco importer did nothing so foolish as to offer the code himself. That would have alerted German suspicions at once. He merely passed on a piece of information that his easy-going friend at the Foreign Office had let slip. As the threat of war spread, the distribution list of the code would include for the first time the British Consul in neutral Rotterdam. Greville, a Foreign Office courier who had acted in the past as a King’s Messenger, was to deliver it at the beginning of August. The story had only come out between trusted friends because this affable diplomat had let slip that he was greatly looking forward to a weekend of peacetime luxury in the neutral Dutch city. So much for William Greville, the long-serving Foreign Office courier, an old Army man, genial but not formidably sharp-witted.
So I was to travel as “William Greville.” Before I assumed that role, our own people had watched me at home for several weeks and found no visible interest in me on the part of German agents. With the addition of horn-rimmed glasses, the temporary absence of my whiskers, a darkening of the hair, and an inch or two added to my height by the aid of built-up heels, I became the emissary and an assistant secretary to a junior Foreign Office minister. Or so my diplomatic passport described me.
Before I left the Pool of London on a Dutch ship, the nature of my mission was allowed to leak out by means of several loud and indiscreet conversations in hotels and bars frequented by neutrals with German sympathies. I was not convinced that this would be sufficient bait but my guardians thought otherwise and, after all, they knew best. The proof of the pudding would be in the eating. It was in this frame of mind that I sailed for Holland on the first Friday evening in August.
In Rotterdam, rooms had been booked for me at a hotel near the docks, where the hall-porter was known to our naval intelligence as being in German pay. By the time I came ashore, I could be assured that my presence in the city was not unnoticed. The time of my arrival was of the essence. It was the Saturday afternoon of an August bank holiday weekend, observed in England but nowhere else. The British Consulate behaved as though it were in England. In other words, it had shut on Saturday morning and would remain closed until Tuesday.
I acted the part of a frustrated emissary, spending my time reading newspapers in the hotel foyer, drinking whisky and twiddling my thumbs. After an hour or two, the hall-porter fell into conversation with me, as hall-porters are apt to do in such places when business is quiet. I complained of a tedious wait, caused by offices that did not open on the first Monday in August. After that, there could be little doubt who I was or where my business lay. In any case, the porter had only to glance at my passport which now lay behind the hotel desk. Whether or not he knew that the British consul was due to receive a copy of the Secret Emergency War Code, I could not say. I was quite sure by now that his masters had been warned.
Nothing more was said until the following evening-Sunday-when the obliging porter suggested that it was a pity I could not have a little “fun” while delayed in Rotterdam. I complained again, this time that I was a perfect stranger in the city and had no idea of where fun was to be found. He tendered the name and address of a house, also near the port, where a warm welcome and a good deal of amusement could be depended upon by the lonely stranger. I began to brighten up at this information. I went up to my room and changed. While there, I opened the locked briefcase with its code-book and papers, in order to take out some cash. In my apparent eagerness to experience the delights on offer, I omitted to lock the case when I put it back, clumsily hidden under a pile of clothes in the wardrobe drawer.
I now followed the plan prepared for me. It was simple in the extreme. I made sure that I was not followed immediately I left the hotel. Then I ordered a cab from the rank and loudly gave the address of the “house” recommended to me. Once round the corner and out of sight, I ordered the driver to drop me as I had decided to have my dinner first. He shrugged and drove off. Making sure again that no one had followed me, I diverged from the hall porter’s route. On my way to the hotel the previous day, I had noticed a pleasant enough quayside brasserie and now took a table outside it. This looked directly back across a stretch of water, giving me a view of my own window.
The window of that room was the third along from the right on the second floor and I had naturally left it in darkness. I waited for more than an hour, drinking my schnapps slowly on the quayside. Another twenty minutes passed and then, to my relief and excitement, the light went on in my hotel window.
This was no visit by a maid, turning down the bed. The light remained on for over an hour, quite long enough for someone to photograph every page in the Secret Emergency War Code, as well as to search my effects and confirm my assumed identity as William Greville. Before they began the search, the intruders had allowed me time to get to the house where amusement might be found and to immerse myself in it. No doubt the hall porter was on guard at the desk, watching for any unexpected return, but they had every reason to believe that there was ample time in hand, more than enough to copy the bound cipher volume.
I waited for a little while after the light had gone off. Then I made my way to a restaurant near the famous statue of Erasmus and spent another hour or so eating my dinner. As for my return to the hotel, I have seen and heard enough drunkards during my career to put on a pantomime of being a little the worse for wear. I welcomed help from the kindly hall-porter in climbing the stairs and getting into bed. He was very insistent in seeing that I got there.
I tipped him generously and, as soon as he had gone, went to look for the attaché-case. It was once again under the pile of clothes but not quite as I had left it. Moreover, someone in closing it had caused it to lock automatically. Such was the end of my three days of active service in the pay of British Military Intelligence. I cannot pretend that I found it exciting, it was more than anything tedious and a matter of waiting around for something to happen. However, Holmes seemed well pleased with the result and Sir John Fisher appeared positively affable towards me.
For more than six months after this, Admiral Hall and his colleagues were able to transmit messages from our own chain of wireless stations in a code which the Germans could decipher, thanks to the present I had made them, but which meant nothing to our own side. All the same, this advantage was only to be exploited with great care.
Counterfeit cipher messages must correspond in most details to subsequent events. It was the few significant variations which would plant false information in the intelligence bureau of the Wilhelmstrasse. On one occasion, at least, Admiral Beatty altered by two days the date on which he was to take the Home Fleet to sea on gunnery exercises, in order that this should verify the counterfeit version of the war code ciphers. It was a small price to pay for giving apparent authenticity to a masterpiece of deception.
On the basis of false information fed to Berlin through the counterfeit cipher tables my friend engineered what became known sardonically in Room 40 as “The Sherlock Holmes Invasion of Belgium.” This was at a time when detachments of our troops were being withdrawn from the Western Front to reinforce the expeditionary force to Salonika. As Holmes remarked, it seemed desirable that the Germans should be induced to withdraw units of their own troops in return.
In messages based on the new ciphers, the intelligence bureau of the Wilhelmstrasse was allowed to read an ingenious fiction of closely-guarded movements by our small naval craft on the eastern coast of England. Flat-bottomed boats of the kind used for landing troops on a sandy coast were being marshalled there. A further message contained an instruction to stop at short notice all cross-channel shipping between England and neutral Holland. The order would remain in force for a fortnight, so that merchant shipping should not compromise the movement of an invasion fleet on course for the coast of Belgium.
These enciphered orders, based upon the counterfeit code and its appendix, then revealed details of an imminent invasion of that coast, in the rear of the German army in France. It was gratifying that the enemy’s High Command diverted some 20,000 men to the defence of the Belgian sands and dunes along the North Sea. Little by little, the Admiralty’s orders to an imaginary invasion fleet were received in Berlin. The vessels would sail in three groups, from Harwich, from Dover, and from the mouth of the Thames. The command for the temporary prohibition of sea traffic to Holland was authorised, though not yet issued.
As a final persuasion of the truth of this story, a special edition of the Daily Mail was printed. This was done in consultation with Admiral Hall and the paper’s editor. It consisted of only twenty-four copies for sale in Holland, where it was routinely bought by German agents. The paper contained a front-page paragraph reporting “Great Military Preparations on the East Coast” and “Flat Bottomed Boats.” Within hours, this was followed by a further edition of the Mail with the whole story blacked out, as if the censor had intervened.
In order that the plan did not seem too easily revealed, it was allowed to appear that the author of the feature had got the wrong end of the stick, as Holmes put it, and that he believed the East Coast was being prepared against an attack by the Germans. Officers of the German High Command knew that they did not intend to invade Eastern England. Therefore they were bound to assume that the journalist had got the rumour wrong and that it must be the British who were going to attack Belgium. In the confusion, they had felt compelled to switch an entire division or so to the defence of the empty sands round Ostend.
Both sides were now changing ciphers with greater frequency, every day on the stroke of midnight. It was a race which Holmes was prepared to run. Before the end of the year, he penetrated the most complex of all, the German diplomatic code. This was, in truth, a gift from the Kaiser’s vice-consul in Persia. The unfortunate diplomat had fled in his pyjamas, abandoning his luggage, after witnessing a failed German attack on the Abadan oil pipeline. This paved the way for our final victory in “the war of ghosts and shadows.”
By the autumn of 1916, the neutral nations included Holland, Latin America and, most significantly, the United States. Many in the Admiralty and the War Office spoke wistfully of a new order of things. To put it plainly, they meant the entry of the United States into the war on the Allied side.
Homes “drudged” by day, as he called it, and read by night. Increasingly his thoughts seemed to be elsewhere. One evening, he was occupied by a history of the Russo-Japanese war of 1904, when Britain had backed Japan against Russian expansion in the Pacific. In the outcome, a primitive Asiatic nation had defeated a great European power.
I noticed later what Holmes had written in the margin.
“ Japan will remain our ally in the present war until she has acquired Germany ’s possessions in China and the Pacific. If ever the war should go against us, it will be in her interest to turn her eyes upon the possessions of Britain and the United States in the Far East.”
It was a cynical but not impossible conclusion.
A day or two later he was absorbed by John Reed’s account of the 1910 Mexican revolution, Insurgent Mexico. What had we to do with that? Mexico ’s recent history seemed to me no more than a chronicle of one tyrannical revolutionary succeeding another, by courtesy of Pancho Villa and his bandits. Next evening, while he was engaged at his work-table, I saw that he had jotted a note in the margin of this book as well. “ United States military strength 40,000. Three-quarters of these with General Pershing in Mexico or on the frontier.”
Anyone who read the newspapers knew how President Wilson had sent the U. S. Marines ashore at Vera Cruz. The USS Prairie had also intercepted the German cargo ship Ypringa. On board were 200 machine-guns and several tons of ammunition for Pancho Villa and Carranza’s troops, with thirty or forty German officers to train them. What had all that to do with Armageddon on the Western Front? I tried facetiousness.
“Let us hope, Holmes, that we shall be spared the sight of Pancho Villa and his bandits galloping down Baker Street with dripping swords!”
He said nothing but got up and went to the bureau. Unlocking a drawer, he took out a sheet of paper. I recognised it as the decryption of a diplomatic telegram. From the date, Holmes must have deciphered it within the last twenty-four hours. My eyes caught three sentences.
Despite the presence of General Pershing and the United States army upon their mutual frontier, the power to decide the Mexican question has passed from President Wilson to President Carranza, from General Pershing to Pancho Villa.
It was a contentious view but hardly a secret. I read what followed.
Whatever measures President Wilson may threaten in reply to our orders for unrestricted submarine warfare, his inclinations and those of the Congress are for peace. His scope for military action scarcely exists.
This was far more alarming. What were “our” orders? Who were “we?” There could only be one answer and it lay in the Wilhelmstrasse.
It is clearer and clearer that the American government has drawn back from breaking off relations with Germany because its military forces are not sufficient to face a war with Mexico.
A war between the United States and Mexico was surely a lunatic vision of the German High Command. But there was another line, edged with a chilling truth.
Without Tampico ’s oil-wells, the British fleet cannot leave Scapa Flow.
“A fevered brain in the Kriegsmarine!” I said contemptuously
“No, Watson. The brain is at this moment several thousand miles from Berlin.”
“Where does the cipher come from?”
“Our old friend number 13042,” he said quietly, “The German diplomatic code. It was employed yesterday by Count Bernstorff as Ambassador in Washington to communicate with Arthur Zimmermann at the Foreign Office in Berlin. It is Bernstorff’s weekly appreciation of what he calls The War Situation.’ The code and the cipher-tables are still those which came into our possession thanks to the German vice-consul at Abadan.” He put his pipe down and shrugged. “The message is only the latest of its kind.”
“But why should the Americans want to fight Mexico?”
Holmes’s eyebrows contracted, as if I had wilfully misunderstood him.
“They do not. It is Germany who wants America to fight Mexico. The Western Front is at a stalemate but Zimmermann, Bethmann-Holweg and the Kaiser believe that Germany can starve England into negotiation by unrestricted submarine warfare. Yet Germany knows she must not provoke America to fight her. If America is involved in Mexico, as three-quarters of her regular army already is, she can fight no war in Europe before Germany ’s U-boat campaign succeeds. Without a war in Mexico, American troops might land in France in a few months.”
“The whole thing is absurd.”
Holmes shrugged.
“I can only tell you that the ciphers from Bernstorff, which we have intercepted in the past few weeks, tell us that Mexico and Japan are already in negotiation with Berlin over the fruits of victory. Indeed, the Japanese battle-cruiser Asuma with troops on board is known to have anchored in the Gulf of California. I do not think that can be a lie told by an ambassador to his foreign minister.”
“But the German army cannot reach Mexico!”
He shook his head.
“In one sense, it is already there. Bernstorff boasts that the patriotic Union of German Citizens has twenty-nine branches in Mexico, supported by seventy-five branches of the veterans’ Iron Cross Society. He claims 50,000 willing recruits in the Americas and our own Foreign Office confirms it. The present 104 branches in Mexico include some 200 German officers who have entered the country recently as skilled workers but are ready to fight and are already training others. For that matter, there are also half a million Germans of military age in the United States.”
“They can hardly fight the rest of its population!”
“If only one in a thousand is prepared to sabotage ships, trains, and refineries, there will be 500 active agents. A score of time-bombs has gone off in the past few months on ships sailing from the eastern seaboard to Britain and France. Together with Mexico, it is enough to hold America back while we and the Germans fight it out.”
That night I lay awake and remembered a mad story I had heard a few years earlier. It was during gossip at my club, the Naval and Military. An officer of the Coldstreams, whom I knew only slightly, entertained us after dinner in the smoking-room with an account of how Japan, in an alliance with Mexico, might land troops on the very coast where the battle-cruiser Asuma was now said to have anchored. In a single spearhead to regain Mexico ’s “lost provinces,” the two countries would fall upon the peaceful and unsuspecting south-west of the United States. They would strike through Texas into Louisiana, invade the Mississippi valley and cut the nation in two before its inhabitants could rally. If Holmes was right this force, when reinforced by trained German troops, would easily outnumber Pershing’s 40,000 peacetime army. I was still awake when the winter morning dawned.
What became known as the Zimmermann crisis followed almost at once. A neutral Danish observer, the captain of a coaster returning home from the port of Kiel, passed information to our naval attaché in Copenhagen. The talk among officers of the German High Seas Fleet was of U-boat production already reaching the level necessary to sustain unrestricted warfare by mid-January 1917, six weeks away. An unknown number of the new submarines had sailed from Wilhelmshaven with stores, fuel and torpedoes for three months.
“Which can only mean operations off the American coastline from Florida to Maine,” said Holmes quietly, “No commander-in-chief would send his vessels to the Bay of Biscay or the Western Approaches for such a length of time and with no available port. It may take them three or four weeks to cross the Atlantic. They will be in the American coastal shipping lanes by early January, counting on a base in Mexico.”
There had been German threats to United States shipping before this. When the British liner Lusitania was sunk with the loss of many American lives, it had been all that President Wilson could do to hold the country back. America ’s own ships, like the Gulflight and the Sussex, had fallen victim to U-boats but still a fragile neutrality persisted. So far, each crisis had passed after a protest by Washington.
Woodrow Wilson continued to urge the combatants in the war to find a peace without victory, a peace without conquest, for the benefit of mankind. In this, Holmes was his supporter, though for more practical reasons. He argued that in a general war a million young Americans might die, for the sake of paltry gains on the Western Front, compared with a few dozen or a few hundred in the submarine war. It was a high price to pay for national pride.
As the latest U-boats sailed from Wilhelmshaven, the German diplomatic ciphers revealed that Arthur Zimmermann at the Foreign Office in Berlin, had been assured by the Kriegsmarine that Britain could be starved into negotiation in six or twelve months by the new fleet. Those in Whitehall who believed that American arms could yet change the course of war began to lose heart. It was surely too late.
During that Christmas season of 1916 and into the New Year, Sherlock Holmes was a stranger in Baker Street. If he slept in his own bed, he was gone before breakfast and absent until after midnight. Often he slept on a camp bed at the Old Admiralty Building, in a shabby panelled office allotted to him by Signals Intelligence. When grander accommodation was offered, he declined it. He worked alone in his “cubby hole” and there was little sign of him elsewhere in the building. The departure of the U-boats on their voyage kept our wireless interception busy day and night with ciphers to be decoded.
The New Year brought us the freezing January of 1917. I had taken three days leave to go alone to the Exmoor cousins at Wiveliscombe. I returned to Baker Street very early one morning, before the office workers were at their desks. An overnight sleeper had brought me on the train from Taunton to Paddington. There was no sign of Holmes in our rooms. It appeared as if he had not been in the house since my departure. I summoned Mrs Hudson.
“Why, Dr Watson, sir, I thought he must have gone down to Devon with you, after all. There’s been no sign of him here since you left.”
I called a cab off the rank and set off at once for Whitehall. If Holmes had been away for three days and two intervening nights, it must be at Room 40. When I arrived, only those who had been on watch since the day before were still there and the new watch had not yet taken over. I went to the Watchkeeper’s Office. Here the printed intercepts arrived through pneumatic tubes. A row of clocks told the time across the world from London to New York to Tokyo and back to Berlin. Closed circuit telephone lines ran to the Director of Naval Intelligence, the War Office, Special Branch at Scotland Yard, and the Prime Minister in Downing Street. The waste-paper baskets were usually full of pages, crumpled and discarded during the long night, all of which would be emptied into the Horse Guards incinerator by Royal Marine sergeants.
As a rule, several of the night watch would sit at their desks until 10am. In the morning light, their faces were pale from exhaustion and drawn from lack of sleep, eyes staring unnaturally bright from the dark shadows of their sockets. Even then, if necessary, they would wrestle for several hours more with some new naval or diplomatic cipher which had been changed at midnight in Berlin or Vienna.
This morning, Holmes was in the Watchkeeper’s Office alone. He sat in a wooden chair, the desk before him clear, head back, arms folded and eyes closed. Yet he was not asleep. His eyelids lifted as I came in.
“Where are the others?” I asked.
“They have gone,” he said wearily, “There was no purpose in staying. They had no work to do.”
“And the ciphers?”
“They have vanished.” He stood up. “The diplomatic ciphers between Berlin and Washington, that it is say everything that matters in the present state of affairs, have disappeared from the ether. So far as we are concerned, they are neither being sent nor received. There have been no intercepts for the past two days.”
I stared out of the window, across the mist of St James’s Park where two Jersey cows were grazing on the frosted grass that stretched between us and Buckingham Palace. I tried to make sense of what he had just said.
“Surely the signals are being sent. Now, of all times, when Wilson and Zimmermann are trying to avoid war. Zimmermann must be in contact with Bernstorff and their Washington embassy.”
Holmes sighed.
“Not through his own signals. Negotiations between the two countries are at a delicate stage. The last messages that we received merely confirmed that Chancellor Bethmann-Holweg had agreed to consider President Wilson’s fourteen-point proposal for a general peace on all fronts. I have a private assurance of that, from Edward Bell at the American Embassy. Bell tells me in confidence that President Wilson authorised the use of America ’s own diplomatic telegraph for transmission of German peace proposals in code.”
“And what of the U-boat fleet heading for the American coastline?”
“So far as we are concerned that has vanished off the map. So far as the Americans know, it never existed. For a time, it was communicating through Sayville, Long Island, disguised in the codes of commercial or steamship company telegrams. That has ceased.”
“How will Berlin ’s signals carry to Washington?”
“During the present negotiations, Zimmermann has requested that his own telegrams to Robert Lansing at the State Department shall be transmitted from Berlin with those of the American Embassy, in the American diplomatic code. The route is through neutral cables from Berlin to Stockholm, then to Buenos Aires and so to Washington. Wilson ’s Ambassador in Berlin, James Gerard, has agreed.”
“To transmit German diplomatic intelligence? Preposterous!”
“Perhaps. However Gerard and Secretary Lansing have accepted this, apparently on Wilson ’s instructions. Still worse, they have accepted Zimmermann’s insistence that his telegrams to Bernstorff must be transmitted by the Americans in the usual German diplomatic code-undeciphered-so that they remain confidential to Bernstorff. These telegrams are forwarded, unexamined, from the State Department to the German Embassy. Lansing and Wilson have no idea of the contents. Negotiations between the two countries are too delicate to permit the risk of interception in London or elsewhere.”
“It is unthinkable!”
“So is war,” said Holmes gloomily, “To Wilson, war is an abomination. If he can end it, why not allow Zimmermann this small concession? Zimmermann must send diplomatic telegrams to his ambassador in Washington anyway. Wilson does not want the British or the French eavesdropping at this point.”
“Why can we not eavesdrop through our own efforts?”
“Because we should have to break the American diplomatic code, before we can get at Zimmermann’s telegrams. Imagine a friendly power discovering that we had deliberately broken its code and were reading its confidential messages. In any case, Balfour at the Foreign Office has categorically forbidden it-at eight o’clock last night. We can only sit here and see if the ciphers in the German Diplomatic Code-13042-resume.”
“Well here’s a pretty pickle!” I said helplessly.
“Not quite. Stockholm is a link in the route. I have been trying my hand at the recent Swedish ciphers in our archives-so far without much reward. They have never merited attention before. I have established, however, that the new Swedish envoy in Mexico City has German sympathies. In one case, he has so far forgotten himself as to send in plain text an appreciation of the situation in Mexico. Unforgivably careless.”
Holmes drew a transcript from his pocket and read out what he had copied.
“Dated 1 September 1916. President Carranza, who is now openly a friend to Germany, is willing to provide support if necessary, and if possible, for German submarines in Mexican waters.”
The chill that ran through my blood was no figure of speech.
“For the U-boats from Wilhelmshaven!”
“It had clearly been arranged before they sailed.” Holmes continued to read the Swedish envoy’s report.
“The Imperial German government proposes to employ the most efficient means to annihilate Britain as its principal enemy. Since it intends to carry its operations across the Atlantic with the object of destroying its enemy’s merchant fleet, it will need shore bases to fuel and supply the submarines. In return, Germany will treat Mexico like the free and independent nation which it is.”
Holmes paused.
“There is a good deal more but that is the gist of it.”
I looked round the dim, gloomily-boarded watchroom.
“And the Americans know nothing of this?”
“No one else knows as yet. Arthur Balfour at the Foreign Office fears that if we reveal the contents of the Swedish telegram now, senior figures in America will treat it as a British hoax, designed to draw them into the war. In any case, it is no more than the opinion of one diplomat. No more than a foreign correspondent in Mexico City might write in his newspaper.”
There were so many fragments in this mystery. We needed one more which must be, to put it crudely, the centrepiece of the puzzle. For the time being it seemed as far away as ever. Neither Holmes nor I were great believers in sudden strokes of luck providing an answer to an insoluble problem. Nor was it so here. What came our way was not the answer to our problem but an Englishman who could unveil the clues, Mr Varney of Mexico City.
Holmes had never met his protégée face-to-face. Mr Varney was a printer who had been in trouble a year or two before. Unknown to him, several of his workers had made blocks, which they then used for printing off counterfeit small-denomination Mexican currency. When Mr Varney discovered this crime, he hurried to report it. To his dismay, he was arrested as though he were the culprit, brought before a revolutionary tribunal and sentenced to be shot.
His sister, Miss Varney of Muswell Hill, hurried to Baker Street and recited a tearful story to Sherlock Holmes, while her brother in his cell awaited a summons from the firing-squad. Holmes at once secured the intervention of the Foreign Office in London and the Mexican Ambassador was summoned. In Mexico City, the British Minister confronted President Carranza himself. Between them, Mr Balfour and his Minister persuaded the Mexican authorities that Mr Varney was unlikely to be the originator of a plot to forge notes that were worth only a few English pennies. Within two days he was released.
Mr Varney had vowed to do anything for Holmes in return. Several months ago, he had redeemed this pledge by infiltrating the office of Posts and Telegraphs in Mexico City. Under revolutionary law, coded telegrams were forbidden for fear that they might be used to start yet another revolution. However, the government minister responsible frequently permitted commercial codes to escape scrutiny, in exchange for a small bribe. Mr Varney, in his turn, had been able to bribe a lesser functionary. This man would alert him to the texts of incoming Western Union telegrams from Count Bernstorff in Washington to Minister Eckhardt at the German Mission in Mexico City.
“It is simple enough,” said Holmes, next morning at the breakfast table. “The United States Embassy in Berlin may forward German telegrams to the State Department in Washington -and so to the German Embassy. However, the State Department will not forward them to the German Minister in Mexico City. In any case, there is nothing beyond Galveston except the services of Western Union. Mr Varney is able to confirm that such telegrams are passing to Herr Eckhardt. They are in code, but any coded texts in the archives of Western Union in Mexico City will henceforward be available to us. Perhaps we shall no longer be working blindfold after all.”
Within days there came into our hands at Baker Street, late one afternoon, a wire from Mr Varney. It had been forwarded by courtesy of Captain Guy Gaunt, the British Naval Attaché in Washington, who was also Naval Intelligence officer at the embassy. This wire accompanied the secret message which is known to history as the “Zimmermann Telegram”-and which the reader will find quoted as a coded text at the opening of this chapter. What follows is the best sense that Sherlock Holmes and I could make of it that evening.
We sat at either side of the work-table while Holmes made two copies of the coded message and passed one to me. I hardly knew how to start upon it but the keen energy of my friend’s brain began to illuminate the darkness of the cipher like forked lightning.
“Let us dispose of the first two groups of numbers, Watson. At the start, 130 is simply the number of the telegram and tells us nothing. The next, 13042, is the current prefix for communications in the German diplomatic code and tells us a good deal. Then you will see 13401, which identifies its source as the German Foreign Office, not the embassy in Washington. The source, if not the message, is genuine. The next item, 8501, confirms that this began its journey as a ‘Most Secret’ telegram from Berlin to Count Bernstorff, who has now forwarded it to Mexico City. Between them, such clues narrow our area of search a little.”
“We have intercepted no messages between Berlin and Washington in the past fortnight,” I said cautiously, “May this not be a hoax of some kind by the German intelligence service?”
He frowned and ran his pencil across the rows of numbers.
“I think not,” he said presently, “By its number this is a recent telegram which Zimmermann has passed to Bernstorff under the cover of the United States diplomatic code. Had Bernstorff not forwarded it to Mexico City, we should never have seen it. I believe that disposes of any hoax. Now then, there are recurring words in this cipher and I fancy they will show us the way”
His pencil was busy for a moment. Then he looked up.
“The framework of the telegram is in a cipher system we have encountered before, therefore what follows must be related to it. The message, I concede, appears to be encrypted according to a new code, that is the challenge, but the system which sustains it should be the same.”
He pushed his paper across to me.
“See here. In the preliminary instructions, we have 17214, which has previously been used for ganz geheim-strictly secret. Well that is no surprise-it is an old friend to me. And then, here, 6491 11310 18147. That is also familiar from previous use. Selbst zu entziffern-decipher this yourself. From there on the code has been varied and everything is a little opaque.”
I worked my way through it, trying to pick out any groups of letters whose position or repetition might help us to “get a lever” under the rest. Holmes took another approach.
“We know that Eckhardt in Mexico City must be able to decode it. It has been sent as a matter of urgency and therefore probably in a code that can be read by anyone who knew the previous one. Eckhardt is not allowed to refer the matter to his underlings, he can ask for no assistance, therefore it must be a familiar system to him.”
He bowed his head over the paper, the harsh white gaslight throwing the shadow of his aquiline profile on the wall. Presently he chuckled. His pencil was ticking the most frequently used words. He selected one of them.
“Here, here, and here, Watson. The group of numbers most frequently used is 69853. From its position, as compared with earlier messages which we have decrypted, it appears to be a noun, almost certainly a proper name. In an urgent and secret diplomatic message to the German Minister in Mexico City, what is that word likely to be?”
“I would say most probably ‘ Mexico.”’
“And here it is used with the cipher 5870, which also occurs just before it and immediately after it. The same 5870 occurs again two words further on. May I be kicked from here to Charing Cross if that is not a comma! What else can it be with such frequency? Now, such a series of commas would suggest a list, would it not? A list of three items in this case, the second of which is in two words. The second of those two words is ‘ Mexico.’ So we have a compound noun, the second half of which is ‘ Mexico.’ To me that strongly suggests ‘ New Mexico.’ Let us see.”
It was a characteristic leap of intuition. Beforehand the answer might have appeared an outside possibility. As presented by Holmes, it now seemed the only answer that made sense.
“In all probability it is a list of American states,” I said quickly.
“Excellent, Watson. New Mexico, with an item before and an item after. The one in front of it appears as five letters. Try “ Texas.” The one that follows it has four syllables. What state associated with Texas and New Mexico has four syllables?”
“ Arizona?” I replied hopefully.
“And what unites Texas, New Mexico, Arizona? All three were at one time part of Mexico and were lost to the United States by conquest. What plan has Herr Zimmermann for those states now?”
“To return them to Mexico? Impossible!”
“Not at all impossible, provided that there is a sufficient bargain upon the table. Another name 52262 recurs closely. You will recall that all nations in the last diplomatic cipher to be broken by us were reduced to five digits and I fancy this is one of them. Allow me the luxury of supposing that it stands for “ Japan.” You will recall that the battle-cruiser Asuma lately paid a prolonged courtesy call to Mexico, as the papers tell us. That news was contained in one of Bernstorffs previous ‘appreciations’ of the war situation. The ship was in Turtle Bay so long that she ran aground and had to be attended by other units of the Japanese fleet.”
“What about the United States?” I inquired cautiously, “Surely a more likely country to be mentioned than Japan in the context of Mexico?”
“Not quite in the proximity which we find here. If my instinct is right, this telegram is about the part to be played by others in respect of the United States. In that case, ‘ United States ’ may have a lower frequency than the protagonists. You will find 39695, here, and here, and here, occurring almost incidentally. That I deduce is more likely to be the United States. I shall be surprised if I am not right.”
We worked long into that cold January night, deaf to the sounds of the street below, indifferent to the supper which Mrs Hudson brought on a tray and which remained untasted.
“Yes, yes!” said Holmes impatiently to her kindly reproach. Presently the sitting-room air was clouded with the smoke of his pipe and the food still remained almost untouched.
I was little help, I fear. Yet I could not have torn myself away as I watched him working at the blocks of numbers on the telegram form. He had the previous cipher of the German diplomatic telegrams to hand and now established to his own satisfaction the five-number groups which represented the nations, like pieces on a chess-board.
As the hours passed, Zimmermann’s text began to appear in groups or clumps of letters and signs, like islands in a sea of numbers. Just after midnight, Holmes hit another vein of inspiration. Nouns were divided into groups of four or five letters. Other words varied a little to identify each occurrence. He made out that 6926, 6929 and 6992, were varying forms of “and,” determined by which letter began the next word. This in turn gave him the first letters of “ Japan,” “understanding” and “suggestion.” With fewer than half the words deciphered, the purpose of the telegram was plain. He recognised 5903 as “krieg” or “war.” A repetition of 98092 from an earlier telegram gave him “U-boat.” This left him with an incomplete phrase, “ersten 13605 un-14963 U-boot krieg.”
“What is the date, Watson?”
I was quite unprepared for this and had to think for a moment.
“The twenty-third of January. That is to say, the small hours of the twenty-fourth.”
“Admirable! Then the crucial date in the telegram must be ‘ersten Februar’-the first of February! The first of the next month in the immediate future. One does not use telegrams for dates that are far off, there is no urgency and the decision may not yet have been taken. Therefore we have, The first of February un-14963 U-boat war.’ There is already a U-boat war being fought but what is to come is in some way different. What can that be but ‘The first of February un-restricted U-boat war.’ It is an instruction to Bernstorff in Washington and an order to Eckhardt in Mexico City, to the effect that Germany will sink on sight, in a week’s time, neutral shipping entering European waters.”
“ Wilson cannot hold back from war, if that is the case!”
“I fear he may. The decision lies with Tirpitz and his master. If the Germans use the threat sparingly, Wilson will hesitate to commit his country to all-out war. Who would not? The loss of a few ships is nothing compared to a million men slaughtered on the battlefield and the nation’s prosperity in ruins. In any case, the likely outcome is that neutral vessels will keep well away from our shores, our own merchant fleet will be destroyed by Germany ’s torpedoes, and our goose will be cooked. That is the plan in Berlin. They want to preserve peace with America, if they can. If not, they hope to trap her in a war on her own continent.”
By three o’clock in the morning his pessimism seemed confirmed. We now had a translation of the text of the earlier passage: “Zimmermann to Bernstorff. Strictly Secret. Decipher this yourself. We intend to begin unrestricted U-boat warfare from 1 February. We will attempt to keep the United States BLANK. If this should not be BLANK, we offer Mexico…”
“The first BLANK is ‘neutral’” I said, “the second is ‘possible.’”
The rest of that night was spent in teasing out from the sets of numbers just what it was that Mexico might be offered in exchange for a German alliance. We made out “united in war, united in peace.” Then we returned to “ Texas, New Mexico, Arizona ” and the single word “zuruck”-“back.” Preposterous though it might seem, President Carranza was being offered the return of Mexico ’s lost territories in return for loyalty to the Kaiser.
This reading was confirmed when Holmes deciphered the two occurrences of 22464 as “President,” referring to President Carranza of Mexico, who was to be both a German ally and mediator in the alliance. He must induce 52262- Japan -to join the pact. England, which now appeared for the first time, would be “compelled” to make peace in a few months by a massive U-boat assault now being prepared. This would be sustained by supplies and fuel from Mexican ports. So long as the United States had only its small peacetime army, it could be invaded along the Mississippi valley by a Mexican army with the support of German “legionaries” and Japanese troops, conveniently cutting off those territories which were now to be returned to President Carranza. It was a complete confirmation of the tall story I had heard in the Army and Navy Club several years before!
I burst out laughing at the apparent absurdity of the suggestion. Holmes remained solemn.
“You cannot take it seriously,” I said, “the notion of the Japanese occupying the Mississippi Valley!”
“What I take seriously, Watson, is that America is strong at sea but weaker on land, as England has been. Such have been both our historic priorities. I take seriously the prospect of a small American peacetime army fighting valiantly, suffering reverses at first, but eventually being victorious. Pending that eventuality, which may be months or years away, I also take seriously the probable triumph of the U-boat campaign, while the Tampico oil wells supply German submarine bases in Mexico. I take seriously the choking of our supply lines by U-boat fleets, stalemate on the Western Front, the Royal Navy starved of fuel oil, immobilised, and a peace treaty leaving Germany with all her European conquests.”
“What a peace!” I said, as if to myself.
“ Belgium would be her puppet state, giving her a seaboard opposite our own shores. France would lose all that she lost in the war of 1871 and more besides. Morocco would be a German colony, opposite Gibraltar. Remember the German gunboat Panther’s seizure of Agadir in the crisis of 1911.”
It was in a sober mood that we abandoned the half-finished puzzle and went to our rooms as the first sounds of the milk-carts and the bread-vans disturbed the early winter morning of the street. In a few hours more we should have enough of the German text before us to compose a report for Sir Reginald Hall.
The contents of the Zimmermann Telegram were released to the world in instalments. At first it seemed that we need not have bothered to decode the message, for Count Bernstorff called at the State Department on the afternoon of 31 January and gave notice to Secretary Lansing that Germany would commence unrestricted sinking on the following day. Bernstorff was handed his passport and ordered to leave for home. Yet Wilson was still the man of peace. “I refuse to believe that it is the intention of the German authorities to do what they have warned us they will feel at liberty to do. Only actual overt acts on their part can make me believe it even now.”
There were to be overt acts in plenty but Holmes had not been wasting his time. In the privacy of his room at the Foreign Office, Arthur Balfour, presented a copy of the infamous telegram to the American Ambassador, Dr Page. Woodrow Wilson, who had striven so long for peace and had hoped that even the U-boat campaign might not mean general war, was aghast at Zimmermann’s audacity. In the cause of peace, the President had put at the disposal of Zimmermann the diplomatic cipher channel of the United States, so that America ’s peace proposals and Germany ’s responses might be confidentially exchanged. The Foreign Office in Berlin had even been allowed to use the channel for coded telegrams to its own embassy in Washington. How this facility had been abused as a means of preparing for war was now plain to see.
Too late, Arthur Zimmermann telegraphed urgently and in plain text to Eckhardt in Mexico City, “Please burn all compromising instructions.”
Woodrow Wilson became as implacable for war as he had been adamant for peace. Yet for weeks afterwards, the Zimmermann Telegram was still described in the United States Senate as being “probably a forgery of the British Secret Service.” Sherlock Holmes was not much given to outbursts of passion. On this occasion, having read of the allegation, he went so far as to crumple the Morning Post and hurl it from the breakfast-table into the grate.
He need not have worried. The American Secret Service had already established that the telegram was indeed sent by Western Union from Bernstorff in Washington to Eckhardt in Mexico City. Worse still, it revealed that Zimmermann had so far violated the decencies of diplomacy as to propose an attack on the very nation which offered peace and the means of friendly negotiation.
Woodrow Wilson’s resolve broke the nerve of those who had been conspiring against him. Zimmermann admitted to the world the bad faith of which he had been guilty in sending the famous-or infamous-message to Count Bernstorff. Three American ships were sunk without warning on 18 March and President Wilson declared war on 6 April. President Carranza quickly denied any intention of offering Germany submarine bases or a military alliance to attack Texas and New Mexico. Japan, it seemed, had no such intention and Zimmermann was denounced for maligning the Imperial Court by imputing these designs to it.
So badly had events turned out for Zimmermann that he was soon to be dismissed from office. Germany ’s U-boats found that their base and fuel supply at Tampico had proved a will o’ the wisp. The Royal Navy’s oil reserves were secure. In alliance with the United States naval squadrons, it soon had the U-boat wolf-packs by the throat. The outcome of the war was no longer in doubt, only the date of victory.
Sherlock Holmes remained in government harness until the end of hostilities. Yet he was increasingly able to return to his private practice as a consulting detective. The first case of this kind is one that I remember with particular pleasure.
We received a visit from Sir Henry Jones, Laird of Tighnabruaich, whose son was Captain Obidiah Jones, a young Scots officer reported missing, feared dead, in a battle against the Turks. Sir Henry heard no more until he received a postcard from Turkey, written in a hand he did not recognise. It was entirely blank except for the address: “Sir Henry Jones, 184 Kings Road, Tighnabruaich, Scotland.”
As if to celebrate the gentler ways of peace, Holmes had instructed Mrs Hudson that a glass of mid-morning Madeira and slices of seed cake must be provided for our first civilian client. It woke memories of the pre-war world, a far cry from the intellectual austerity of Room 40.
Sir Henry had brought his curious post-card to us in some distress, not knowing what had become of his son. Since there was no message on it, he feared the worst. The curiosity of the address was that his village ofTighnabruaich is a remote collection of a few houses. It is so small that those houses need no numbers and there is certainly no “ Kings Road ” to be found there.
Holmes studied the postcard for a long moment and then looked up.
“I believe you may have every confidence, Sir Henry, that your son is alive and well. He may soon return to his regiment, for he and his company have escaped the enemy pursuit, though they were cut off from their comrades. He is leading his company back, under cover, to their headquarters. Their provisions are spartan but he and his men are so far safe. Indeed, he has been able to smuggle out this message to you.”
There was no mistaking the old man’s delight but he looked at us in the most startled manner, as if afraid to believe what he had been told.
“How on earth, Mr Holmes, can you tell such a thing from that card-which seems to me to bear no message whatever, merely an incorrect address?”
Holmes drew himself upright.
“There you are in error, Sir Henry. You will appreciate that the equipment of the criminal investigator must contain a working knowledge of the world’s great texts, not least those of Classical Languages and Holy Writ. They are frequently employed in forming military codes. It was General Sir Harry Smith-was it not?-who having seized the province of Sind during the Indian wars, communicated this by a message in one word. ‘Peccavi.’ To those with no knowledge of the Latin tongue it must be meaningless. Yet every English schoolboy would know that it is translated as ‘I have sinned.’ You see? The Horse Guards understood at once that Sind was in our power.”
“I daresay,” said Sir Henry impatiently, “but what has that to with my son?”
Holmes picked up the postcard again.
“This address. There is no Kings Road in your village and no house numbered 184. I suggest to you that ‘Kings 184’ can only be a reference to the Old Testament-the First Book of Kings. If that is correct, the number 184 can only stand for Chapter 18, verse 4.”
“How extraordinary!”
Holmes bowed his head a little in acknowledgement and then continued.
“You will, I am sure, recall how that verse runs. ‘Obidiah took a hundred prophets and hid them in a cave, and fed them with bread and water.’ A hundred is a regimental company, a little under strength as his might well be. Obidiah can only be your Obidiah. And now let us drink a health to this brave young man-and wish him well.”
In this matter, I must record, Sherlock Holmes was later proved correct. We heard from his proud father that Captain Obidiah Jones had been awarded the Military Cross for gallantry and was now a youthful Major Obidiah Jones.
On that morning, however, after Sir Henry had thanked us several times and left us to seek further particulars of the story at the War Office, Holmes stretched out in his chair and stared at the gentle dancing of flames in the grate.
“I believe, Watson, that Sir Henry is the first client whom we have seen in these chambers for a very long time.”
“I believe he is.”
“Then I think we may say that the war is over at last. From now on, this office is open as usual for business. I take a good deal more pleasure in seeing my clients face to face, in this homely manner, than in being the servant of the government. Be so good as to pass me this morning’s copy of the Morning Post.”
He took another sip of his morning Madeira, a crumb of seed cake, and opening the pages of the newspaper began to read the reports of yesterday’s proceedings in the Central Criminal Court. In this manner, peace returned to Baker Street.