Zeppelin raids, I told him. I chose that subject first, because it was the least harmful I could think of in case my "traitorous" offer ever reached the ears of Berlin. No one knew better than I how impossible it was to obtain information about Zeppelins. I reasoned that the officers in command of Abteilung III. B in the General Staff would know that I was bluffing when I offered to get information upon that subject for the English. They would know that I was not in a position to have or to obtain any such knowledge, for in Germany no topic is so closely guarded as that. Also, I reasoned that it k was a topic in which the English were vastly interested. They were.
Mr. X was hesitating, so I added two other equally absurd subjects: the movements of the Emden and the Leipzig, about which I knew and the service chiefs knew that I knew absolutely nothing.
Mr. X was plainly puzzled. My intentions seemed to be good. At any rate, I had come to him quite openly, and any ulterior motives I might have had were not apparent. Then, too, I had offered him the key of my safe deposit box, telling him what it contained. He considered a moment.
"We shall have to investigate your story," he said finally. "We shall send to Holland for the papers you say are contained in the vault there; and you will be questioned further. In the meantime I shall have to place you under arrest."
I had expected nothing better than this, and went to my gaol with a feeling that was relief rather than anything else. My papers would establish my identity, and then, if all went well, I should go back to Germany and make my way to America by another route.
But all did not go well. Somehow, in spite of my commission and leave of absence--perhaps because my offer seemed too good to be true --the British authorities decided that it would be better to lose the information I had offered them and keep me in England. Whatever their suspicions, the only charge they could bring against me and prove was that I was an alien enemy who had failed to register. They had no proof whatever of any connection between me and the German Government. So on November 13, 1914, they brought me into a London policecourt to answer the charge of failing to register. I was delighted to do so. It was far more comfortable than facing a court-martial on trial for my life as a spy, as the English newspapers had seemed to expect. Accordingly on November 26 I was duly sentenced to six months' hard labour in Pentonville Prison, with a recommendation for deportation at the expiration of my sentence. I served five months at Pentonville, and then my good behaviour let me out.
Home Secretary McKenna signed the order for my deportation. I was free. I was to slip from under the paw of the lion.
And then something happened to this day I don't know what. Instead of being deported I was thrust into Brixton Prison, where Kuepferer hanged himself, strangely enough, just after his troubles seemed over. Kuepferer had driven a bargain with the English. He was to give them information in return for his life and freedom; and then, when he had everything arranged, he committed suicide. In Brixton I was not sentenced on any charge, I was simply held in solitary confinement, with occasional diversions in the form of a "third degree." After my first insincere offer to give the English information I kept my mouth shut and made no overtures to them, although I confess that the temptation to tell all I knew was often very great. The English got nothing out of me, and in September, 1915, I was shifted to another prison. They took me out of Brixton and placed me in Reading gaol the locale of Oscar Wilde's ballad. Conditions were less disagreeable there. I was allowed to have newspapers and magazines, and to talk and exercise with my fellow-prisoners.
You may be sure that all this time the English made attempts to solve my personal identity as well as to learn the reason for my being in England. They could not shake my story. Time after time I told them: "I am Horst von der Goltz, an officer of the Mexican army on leave. I used the United States passport made out to Bridgeman Taylor from necessity to avoid the suspicion that would be attached to me because of my German descent.
"Gentlemen, that is all I can tell you."
Over and over again I repeated that meagre statement to the men who questioned me. I would not tell them the truth, and I knew that no lie would help me. And then came an event which changed my viewpoint and made me tell if not the whole story at least a considerable part of it.
I had, as I have said, managed to secure newspapers in my new quarters. It is difficult to say how eagerly I read them after so many months of complete ignorance, or jvvith what anxiety I studied such war news as came into my hands. It was America in which I was chiefly interested, for I knew that after my capture some other man must have been sent to do the work which I had planned to do. I know now that it was von Rintelen who was selected that infinitely resourceful intriguer who planted his spies throughout the United States, and for a time seemed well on the way to succeeding in the most gigantic conspiracy against a peaceful nation that had ever been undertaken. But at the time I could tell nothing of this, although I watched unceasingly for reports of strikes, explosions and German uprisings which would tell me that that work which I had been commanded to do, and from which I was only too glad to be spared, was being prosecuted.
So several months passed months in which I had time for meditation and in which I began to see more clearly some things which had been hinted at in Berlin and of which I shall tell more later. And then one day I read a dispatch that caused me to sit very silently for a moment in my cell, and to wonder and fear a little.
Von Papen had been recalled.
I read the story of how he and Captain Boy-Ed had overreached and finally betrayed themselves; of the passport frauds they had conducted; of the conspiracies and seditions they had sought to stir up. I learned that they had been sent home under a safe-conduct which did not cover any documents they might carry. It was this last fact which caused me uneasiness. Had von Papen, always so confident of his success, attempted to smuggle through some report of his two years of plotting? It seemed improbable, and yet, knowing his tendency to take chances, I k was troubled by the possibility. For such a report might contain a record of my connection with him and I was not protected by a safe-conduct!
My fears were well founded, as you know t Von Papen carried with him no particular reports, but a number of personal papers which were seized when his ship stopped at Falmouth.
In my prison I read of the seizure and was doubly alarmed; increasingly so when the newspapers began publishing reports which implicated literally hundreds of Irish- and German-Americans whose services von Papen had used in his plots. Then as the days passed, and my name was not mentioned in the disclosures, I became relieved.
"After all," I thought, "he knows that I am here in prison and that I have kept silent. He will have been careful. These others he has had some reason for his incautiousness with them. But he will not betray me, just as he has betrayed none of his German associates."
Then, on the night of January 80, 1916, the governor of Reading prison informed me that I was to go to London the next day.
"Where to?" I asked.
"To Scotland Yard," he said briefly.
"What for?"
"I do not know."
My heart sank, for I realised at once that something had occurred which was of vital import to me. I have faced firing squads in Mexico. I have stood against a wall waiting for the signal that should bid the soldiers fire. And I have taken other dangerous chances without, I believe, more fear than another man would have known. But never have I felt more reluctant than that night when I stood outside of Scotland Yard, waiting for what?