The next few days were full of anxiety. I could not tell how my appeal had been regarded, but I knew that it would be only by good fortune that I should escape at least a trial for espionage for that is jvhat my presence in England would mean. Finally, I received a tentative assurance of immunity if I should tell what I knew of the workings of German secret agencies.
In spite of any hesitancy I might formerly have felt at such a course, I decided to make a confession. Von Papen's betrayal of me for that he had intentionally betrayed me I was, and am, convinced was too wanton to arouse in me any feeling except a desire for my freedom, which for fifteen months I had been robbed of merely through the silence which my own sense of honour imposed upon me. But I must be careful. I had no desire to injure anyone whom von Papen had not implicated. And I did not wish to betray any secret which I could safely withhold.
I speculated upon what other documents von Papen might have carried. So far as I knew the only one involving me was the cheque; but of that I could not be sure, nor did it seem likely. It was more probable that there were other papers which would be used to test the sincerity of my story. My aim was to tell only such things as were already known, or were quite harmless. But how to do that? I needed some inkling as to what I might tell and on what I must be silent.
That knowledge was difficult to obtain, but I finally secured it through a rather adroit questioning of one of the men who interrogated me at the time. He had shown me much courtesy and no little sympathy; and after some pains I managed to worm out of him a very indefinite but useful idea of what matters the von Papen documents covered.
What I learned was sufficient to enable me to exclude from my story any facts implicating men who might be harmed by my disclosures. I told of the Welland Canal plot so far as my part in it was concerned, and I told of von Papen's share in that and other activities. And I took care to incorporate in my confession the promise of immunity that had been made me tentatively.
"I have made these statements," I wrote, "on the distinct understanding that the statements I have made, or should make in the future, will not be used against me; that I am not to be prosecuted for participation in any enterprise directed against the United Kingdom or her Allies which I engaged in at the direction of Captain von Papen or other i epresentatives of the German Government; and that the promise that I am not to be extradited or sent to any country where I am liable to punishment for political offences, is made on behalf of His Majesty's Government."
It was on February 2 that I completed my confession and swore to the truth of it. Affairs .went better with me after that. I was sent to Lewes prison, and there I was content for the remainder of my stay in England. And although I was still a prisoner I felt more free than I had felt for many years. I was out of it all free of the necessity to be always watchful, always secret. And, above all, I had cut myself adrift from the intriguing which once I had enjoyed, but which in the last two years I had grown to hate more than I hated anything else on earth.
And there my own adventures end so far as this book is concerned. I shall not do more than touch upon my return to the United States on a far different errand from that I had once planned. My testimony in the Grand Jury proceedings against Captain Tauscher, von Igel, and others of my onetime fellow-conspirators, is a matter of too recent record to deserve more than passing mention. Tauscher, you t will remember, was acquitted because it was impossible to prove that he was aware of the objects for which he had supplied explosives. Von Igel, Captain von Papen's secretary, was protected by diplomatic immunity. And Fritzen and Covani, my former lieutenants, had not yet been captured.*
But though my intriguing was ended, Germany's was not. It may be interesting to consider these intrigues, in the light of what I had learned during those two years and what I have discovered since.
* Fritzen, who was captured in Hartwood, Gal., on March 9, 1917, was arraigned in New York City on March 16, and after pleading not guilty, later reversed his plea. He was sentenced to a term of eighteen months in a Federal prison.
CHAPTER X
GERMANY'S HATE CAMPAIGN IN AMERICA
The German intrigue against the United States Von Papen, Boy-Ed, and von Rintelen, and the work they did How the German-Americans were used, and how they were betrayed.
IN the long record of German intrigue in the United States one fact stands out predominantly. If you consider the tremendous ramifications of the system which Germany' has built, the extent of its organisation and the efficiency with which so gigantic a secret work was carried on, you will realise that this system was not the work of a short period, but of many years. As a matter of fact, Germany had laid the foundation of that structure of espionage and conspiracy many years before even before the time when the United States first became a Colonial Power and thus involved herself in the tangle of world politics.
I am making no rash assertions when I state that ten years ago the course which German agents should adopt towards the United States in the event of a great European war had been determined with a reasonable amount of exactness by the General Staff, and that it was this plan which was adapted to the conditions of the moment, and set into operation at the outbreak of the present conflict. No element of hostility lay behind this planning. Germany had no grievance against America; and whatever potential causes of conflict existed between the two nations lay in the far future.
That plan, so complete in detail, so menacing in its intent, was but part of a world-plan to assure to Germany when the time was ripe the submission of all her enemies and the peaceful assistance and acquiescence in her aims of those parts of the world which at that time should be at peace. Germany looked far ahead on that day when she first knew that war must come. She realised, if no other nation did, that however strong in themselves the combatants were, the neutrals who should command the world's supplies would really determine the victory.
Knowing this, Germany which does not play the game of diplomacy with gloves on laid her plans accordingly.
The United States offered a peculiarly fruitful field for her endeavours. By tradition and geography divorced from European rivalries, it was, nevertheless, from both an industrial and agricultural standpoint, obviously to become the most important of neutral nations. The United States alone could feed and equip a continent; and it needed no prophet to perceive that whichever country could appropriate to itself her resources would unquestionably win the war, if a speedy military victory were not forthcoming.
It was Germany's aim, therefore, to prepare the way by which she could secure those supplies, or, failing in that, to keep them from the enemy, England if England it should be. In a military way such a plan had little chance of success. England's command of the seas was too complete for Germany to consider that she could establish a successful blockade against her. It was then, I fancy, that Germany bethought herself of a greatly potential ally in the millions of citizens of German birth or parentage with whom the United States was filled.
One may extract a trifle of cynical amusement from what followed. Those millions of German-Americans had never been regarded with affection in Berlin. The vast majority of them were descendants of men who had left their homes for political reasons; and of those who had been born in Germany many had emigrated to escape military service, and others had gone to seek a better opportunity than their native land provided. They had been called renegades who had given up their true allegiance for citizenship in a foreign country, and Bernstorff himself, according to the evidence of U.S. Senator Phelan, had said that he regarded them as traitors and cowards.
But Germany voicing her own spleen in private, and Germany with an axe to grind, were two different entities. And no one who observed the honeyed beginnings of the Deutschtum movement in America would have believed that these men k who in public life were so assiduously and graciously flattered were in private characterised as utter traitors to the Fatherland and worse.
Certainly no one believed it when, in 1900, Prince Henry of Prussia paid his famous visit to America. No word of criticism of these "traitors'' was spoken by him; and when at banquets glasses were raised and Milwaukee smiled across the table at Berlin, the sentimental onlooker might have felt a gush of joy at this spectacle of amity and reconciliation. And the sentimental onlooker would never have suspected that Prince Henry had travelled three thousand miles for any other purpose than to attend the launching of the Kaiser's yacht Meteor, which was then building in an American yard.
But to the cynical observer, searching the records of the years immediately following Prince Henry's visit, a few strange facts would have become apparent. He would have discovered that German societies, which had been neither very numerous nor popular before, had in a comparatively short time acquired a membership and a prominence that were little short of marvellous. He would have noted the increasing number of German teachers and professors who appeared in the faculties of American schools and colleges. He would have remarked the growth in popularity of the German newspapers, many of them edited by Germans who had never become naturalised. And yet, observing these things, he might have agreed with the vast majority of Americans in regarding them as entirely harmless and of significance merely as a proof of how hard love of one's native land dies.
He would have been mistaken had he so regarded them. The German Government does not spend money for sentimental purposes; and in the last ten years that Government has expended literally millions of dollars for propaganda in the United States. It has consistently encouraged a sentiment for the Fatherland that should be so strong that it would hold first place in the heart of every German-American. It has circulated pamphlets advocating the exclusive use of the German language, not merely in the homes, but in shops and street cars and all other public places. It has lent financial support to German organisations in America, and in a thousand ways has aimed so to win the hearts of the German-Americans that when the time should come the United States, by sheer force of numbers, would be delivered, bound hand and foot, into the hands of the German Government.
It was this object of undermining the true allegiance of the German citizens of the United States which transformed an innocent and natural tendency into a menace that was the more insidious because the very people involved were, for the most part, entirely ignorant of its true nature. Germany seized upon an attachment that was purely one of sentiment and race and sought to make it an instrument of political power; and she went about her work with so efficient a secrecy that she very nearly accomplished her purpose.