Tucker accompanied me to Baltimore, and together we paid a visit to Consul Luederitz. The Consul glanced at the letter I presented to him.
"Captain von Papen requests me to give you all the assistance you may ask for, Major von der Goltz," he said, intimating by the use of my name that he had previously been informed of the enterprise. "I shall be happy to do anything in my power. What is it you wish?"
Men, I told him, were my chief need at the moment. He said that there should be no difficulty about securing them. There was a German ship in the harbour at the time, and we could doubtless make use of part of the crew and an officer, if we desired. He offered me his visitingcard, on the back of which he wrote a note of recommendation to the captain of the ship. But while we were talking this man entered the office and we made our preliminary arrangements there.
The following day, a Sunday, Tucker and I visited the ship and after dinner selected our men, who were informed of their prospective duties. I also listened to the news that was being received on board by wireless; for the captain was still allowed to receive messages, although the harbour authorities had forbidden him to use his apparatus for sending purposes.
I needed nothing more in Baltimore, so far as my present plans were concerned, but at Consul Luederitz's suggestion I decided to furnish myself with a passport, made out in my nom de guerre of Bridgeman Taylor. Luederitz was of the opinion that it might be useful at some future time as a means of proving that I was an American citizen, and accordingly we had one of the clerks make out an application, which was duly forwarded to Washington; and on August 31 the State Department furnished the non-existent Mr. Bridgeman H. Taylor with a very comforting, although, as it turned out, a decidedly dangerous document. One other thing I needed at the moment a pistol, for my own was out of order. This Mr. Luederitz provided me with from the effects of an Austrian who had committed suicide in Baltimore not long before, and whose property, in the absence of an Austrian Consulate in the city, had been turned over to the German Consul.
The days immediately following my return to New York were filled with preparations for our coup. I engaged three additional men to act as my lieutenants, acquainted them with the main objects of our plan, and agreed to pay them daily while in New York, and to add a bonus when our enterprise should succeed. These men had all been well recommended to me, and I knew I could trust them thoroughly. One, Fritzen, who was later captured in Los Angeles, had been a purser on a Russian ship. A second, Busse, was a commercial agent who had lived for many years in England; the third bore the Italian name of Covani.
Meanwhile I saw von Papen frequently, and had on one occasion received from him a cheque for two hundred dollars, which I needed for the sailors who were coming from Baltimore. That cheque, which is reproduced in this book, was to prove a singularly disastrous piece of paper, for in order to avoid connecting my name with that of von Papen, it was made out to Bridgeman Taylor. I cashed it through a friend, Frederick Stallforth, whose brother, Alberto Stallforth, had been the German Consul at Parral when I was there. He, incidentally, syas later implicated in the Bintelen trial, and was detained for a time on Ellis Island, from which he was subsequently released.
Mr. Stallforth lifted his eyebrows when he saw the name on the cheque. I smiled.
"I am Bridgeman Taylor," I told him. He laughed, but said nothing, merely getting the cheque cashed for me at the German Club in Central Park South, of which he was a member.
In a few days everything was ready. My men had arrived from Baltimore, my plans were definitely made--I needed but one thing: the explosives. These, von Papen told me, I could obtain through Captain Hans Tauscher, the American agent of the Krupps, which meant, in effect, the German Government.
It was asserted many times, in 1916 especially, that the charges against Captain Tauscher were utterly unfounded. It is easy to understand the motives of this gentleman's defenders. There are many people still in the United States whose friendship with the amiable captain would wear a decidedly suspicious look were his complicity in the anti-American plots of the first two years of the war to be proved. I shall not quarrel with these people. But reproduced in this book are four documents, the originals of which are in the possession of the Department of Justice, which tell their own story and are a fair indication of the way I secured the explosives I needed.
These documents show:
First, that on September 5, 1914, Captain Tauscher, American representative of the Krupps, ordered from the du Pont de Nemoury Powder Company 300 pounds of 60 per cent dynamite to be delivered to bearer, "Mr. Bridg man Taylor," and to be charged to Captain Tauscher.
Second, that on September 11, the du Pont Company sent Captain Tauscher a bill for the same amount of dynamite delivered to Bridgman Taylor, New York City, on September 5; and on September 16 they sent him a second bill for forty-five feet of fuse delivered to Bridgman Taylor on September 13 the total of the two bills amounting to $31.13.
Third, that on December 29, 1914, Tauscher sent a bill to Captain von Papen for a total amount of $503.24. The third item, dated September 11, was for $31.18.
Is it difficult to tell of whom I got my explosives or who eventually paid for them? I got the dynamite, at any rate, by calling for it myself at one of the company's barges in a motor boat, and taking it away in suit cases. At 146th Street and the Hudson River we left the boat, and, carrying the explosives with us, went to the German Club, where I applied to von Papen for automatic pistols, batteries, detonators, and wire for exploding the dynamite* Von Papen promised them in two or three days and he kept his word.
Bit by bit, all this material was removed from the German Club in suit cases by taxi-cab. They were exciting rides we took in those days, and my heart was often in my mouth when our chauffeur turned corners in approved New York fashion. But luckily there were no accidents, and in a day or so all of our materials were stored away; part of them in my apartments not in the Holland House, alas! but in a cheap section of Harlem. For von der Goltz, the spendthrift, the braggart, was seen no longer in the gay places of New York. He had spent all his money, and now, no longer of interest to the newspapers or to the secret agents of the Allies had taken a two dollar and a half room in Harlem where he could repent his follies and be as inconspicuous as he pleased.
So it came about that towards the middle of September we five Fritzen, Busse, Tucker, Covani and myself took train for Buffalo, armed with dynamite, automatic guns, detonators and other necessary implements, and proceeded, absolutely unmolested, to go to Buffalo. There I engaged rooms at 198 Delaware Avenue and began to reconnoitre the ground. I made a trip or two over the Niagara River via aeroplane, with an aviator who unquestionably thought me mad and charged accordingly; and at the suggestion of von Papen I secured money for my expenses from a Buffalo lawyer, John Ryan.
It had been decided that von Papen should let us know when the Canadian troops were about to leave camp so that we might strike at the psychological moment. A telegram came from him, signed with the non-committal name of Steffens, telling me that Ryan had money and instructions. Ryan gave me the money, as I have stated, but insisted that he had no instructions whatever.
Then, after a stay of several days in Niagara, during which we did nothing but exchange futile telegrams with Ryan and "Mr. Steffens," we learned that the first contingent of Canadian troops had left the camp and my men and I returned to New York unsuccessful.
Our failure was greater than appears on the surface, for my men and I were a blind. Our equipment, our loud talking, our aggressive pro- Germanism even our secret preparations which had not been secret enough were intended primarily to distract attention from other and far more dangerous activities.
We had been watched by United States Secret Service men from the very beginning of our enterprise. During our entire stay in Buffalo and Niagara we had been under the surveillance of men who were merely waiting for us to make their suspicions a certainty by some positive attempt against the peace of the United States. We knew it and wanted it to be so.
And while they were waiting for sufficient cause to arrest us, other men, totally unsuspected, were making their way down through Canada, intent upon destroying all of the bridges and canal locks in the lake region!
You can see what the effect would have been had our plan succeeded Canada crippled and terrorised England robbed of the troops which Canada was even then preparing to send her, but which would have been forced to remain at home to defend the border. But, far more desirable in German eyes, the United States would have been convicted in the sight of the world of criminal negligence. For my band of men the obvious perpetrators of one crime had been acting suspiciously for weeks. And yet, in spite of that, we were at liberty. The United States had made no effort to apprehend us.