Part 40

Then the _Arcadian_ was dismantled and turned into a transport, and Captain Custance took her back to England filled with Canadian troops. But wanting a more war-like job he appealed to the Admiralty and eventually was assigned to the perilous duty of mine-sweeping, to keep the sea about the Orkneys free from the floating or sunk mines, to the sowing and planting of which the Germans were devoting their devilish activities. When it is borne in mind that Captain Custance was then 46 years old, with wife and several children, one may appreciate the patriotic zeal that kept him in this dangerous employ for two years. During that time he stuck at it with never a glimpse at his family until he was called to London to have the King confer on him the D. S. O.

Those broad-beamed boats known as trawlers in which the fishermen ply their calling were the instruments employed in mine-sweeping, and admirable they were for the business, but comfortless enough for other purposes. Said the Captain in a letter: “It’s no joke monkeying about in a tiny craft hunting ‘tin fishes.’ In daylight it’s bad enough, but at night it’s extremely dangerous, as one can’t see the sea, and one is liable to half swamp oneself in turning. And as far as any comfort below goes, there isn’t any. Everything is damp and cold, and the steward loses the greater part of your food in bringing it to you, and what you finally receive is a cold, unpalatable mess. Yet, by God! it’s something to be out here having a chance to bag a bally German swine.”

Besides the danger from mines there was the excitement of submarine shelling of the fleet every now and then. In one attack of that kind Custance’s trawler struck a mine and sank. After that the Captain was given a steam yacht, no longer at her best, the _Mingary_, in which he did patrol work, visited and overhauled neutral ships, and kept a weather eye out for submarines and mines.

The performance that gained him the D. S. O. was the day after the Jutland naval fight, when the German fleet had fled, leaving only the submarines to prowl and finish off the wounded if possible. The dreadnought _Warspite_ was one of the wounded and poorly protected by destroyers as she toiled along with deranged steering gear. The Captain saw three submarines maneuvering against the _Warspite_, and despite the fact that the chances were all against him in an attempt to beat off three submarines with his little yacht and its tiny guns Custance rushed the _Mingary_ pell mell to the rescue, acting with such suddenness that he took one submarine by surprise and was able to ram it, got so close that he could use his guns on the next one and sink it and so thoroughly scared the third one that it submerged instantly without an offer of fight.

Later the Captain was in command of the _Maid of Honor_ in convoying colliers across the English Channel by night. There were no lights, there was no signaling by whistle, there was traffic both ways, troop ships, darkness everywhere. Skilled navigators were necessary—men of the merchant ship sort. Out of all his convoys going or coming, only three ships were torpedoed, only two being lost.

In the final part of the war he crossed and recrossed the Atlantic in convoy. It was then that the _Justicia_ was torpedoed. “She remained afloat for twenty-four hours, and Custance would have saved her if a German had not dived under the ring of patrol boats that surrounded her and fired a finishing torpedo.”

In getting off the dying _Justicia_ Custance nearly lost his life, yet, says Mr. Cropley, “I received a very apologetic letter saying he was sorry he hadn’t been able to save the cigarettes he was bringing over to me.”

CHRISTMAS IN THE TRENCHES

(_An Incident_)

_By_

Dan Burnet

I

Still the guns! There’s a ragged music on the air, A priest had climbed the ruined temple’s stair, Ah, still the guns! It’s Christmas morning. Had ye all forgot? Peace for a little while, ye battle-scarred— Or do ye fear to cool those minds grown hot? Up the great lovely tower, wracked and marred, An old priest toils— Men of the scattered soils, Men of the British mists, Men of France! Put by the lance. Men of Irish fists, Men of heather, Kneel together— Men of Prussia, Great dark men of Russia, Kneel, kneel! Hark how the slow bells peal. A thousand leagues the faltered music runs, Ah, still the wasting thunder of the guns, Still the guns!

II

Out of the trenches lifts a half-shamed song, “Holy Night” Here, where the sappers burrowed all night long To bring the trench up for the morrow’s fight, A British lad, with face unwonted white, Looks at the sky and sings a carol through, “God rest you merry, gentlemen!” It was the only Christmas thing he knew. And there were tears wrung out of hard-lipped men, Tears in the strangest places, Tears on troopers’ faces!

III

They had forgotten what a life was for, They had been long at suffering and war, They had forgot old visions, one by one, But now they heard the tolling bell of Rheims, Tolling bell of Rheims; They saw the bent priest, white-haired in the sun, Climb to the hazard of the weakened spire, They saw, and in them stirred their hearts’ desire For Streets and Cities, Shops and Homes and Farms, They only wanted space to love and live; They felt warm arms about them—women’s arms, And such caresses as a child might give Coming all rosy in the early day To kiss his world awake.... The British lad Broke off his carol with a sob. The play Of churchly musics, solemn, strange, and sad, Fluttered in silver tatters down the wind, Flung from the tower where the guns had sinned Across the black and wounded fields.... The bell Sang on—a feeble protest to the skies, Until the world stood like a halted hell, And men with their dead brothers at their feet Drew dirty sleeves across their tired eyes, Finding the cracked chimes overwhelming sweet.

IV

Aye, still the guns! And heed the Christmas bell, Ye who have done Death’s work so well, Ye worn embattled ones, Kneel, kneel! Put by the blood-stained steel, Men from the far soils and the scattered seas, Go down upon your knees, While there lives one with peace upon his eyes, While hope’s faint song is fluttered to the skies, In that brief space between the Christmas suns, Still the guns!

SPYING AT ITS WORST

The German Secret Service System the Scrap Basket of Official Honor

Though the knowledge of an enemy’s plans, purposes and preparatory measures is of the highest importance in military campaigning, and though the utmost of courage and daring are often necessary to obtain the required information, the office of the spy has, from time immemorial, been contemned of men. There was but one fate for the captured spy under military rule. Even when the bravery and devotion of the adventuring spy have been admitted to admiration there has remained the instinctive aversion to the office. The reason for the almost universal mental attitude is that spying usually, if not invariably, involves treachery, the betrayal of trust and confidence gained by professions of friendship and sympathetic opinion. The word “spies” stirs the spleen of wholesome minded persons. It implies craft, duplicity, perversity. Few men have been willing to confess themselves spies. However greedily the sensational or adventure-loving reader may follow the narrative of the experiences, the desperate chances, the hazards, the daring risks, the narrow escapes of the successful spy, there is nevertheless a regretful wish that the valor, the intelligence, had found a nobler medium of expression.

But because there is such a thing as fearless, generous self-sacrifice in the performance of undertakings or obligations that come under the general classification of spying, it is perhaps unfortunate that no attempt has been made to discriminate what may be termed honorable (in a military sense) espionage from ignoble spying. Surely there is a vast distinction between the soldier who volunteers to penetrate an enemy’s lines to ascertain particular facts and the person who under the protection of social or official privilege wins trust only to betray it. In the second class there probably is no more despicable violation of moral responsibility recorded in the history of nations than the German intrigue against the United States when this country was still at peace with Germany. The indictment is clearly drawn in a few words in the Flag Day address of President Wilson, June 14, 1917. He said speaking of the German Government:

“They filled our unsuspecting communities with vicious spies and conspirators and sought to corrupt the opinion of our people in their own behalf. When they found they could not do that, their agents diligently spread sedition amongst us and sought to draw our own citizens from their allegiance—and some of these agents were men connected with the official embassy of the German Government itself here in our own capital.”

ITS DIPLOMATIC AIDS

Their Ambassador, Count Johann von Bernstorff; their military attaché, Capt. Franz von Papen; their naval attaché, Capt. Karl Boy-Ed; their financial agent, Dr. Heinrich Albert, were the diplomatic and social spies who engineered and supplied with necessary information the vicious under-agents of the spy system of which sedition and violence were the shameful instruments.

With patient diligence, John Price Jones, a newspaper man, attached to the New York _Sun_, collected—from documentary evidence, from Secret Service officials and by means of his own investigation over a period of eighteen months—a vast amount of valuable and exact information, the vital part of which Small, Maynard and Company subsequently published in book form, under the title _The German Secret Service in America_. The information in that book, substantiated by governmental and other evidence, is authoritative, and we are indebted to it for much of the matter in this article.

Of the organization of the spy system he says:

“Count von Bernstorff, once his nation had declared war upon France and England, went to war with the United States. As ambassador, diplomatic courtesy gave him a scope of observation limited only by the dignity of his position. A seat in a special gallery in the Senate and House of Representatives was always ready for his occupancy; he could virtually command the attention of the White House; and senators, congressmen and office-holders from German-American districts respected him. Messengers kept him in constant touch with the line-up of Congress on important issues, and two hours later that line-up was known in the Foreign Office in Berlin. As head and front of the German spy system in America, he held cautiously aloof from all but the most instrumental acquaintances: men and women of prominent political and social influence who he knew were inclined, for good and sufficient reasons, to help him. One woman, whose bills he paid at a Fifth Avenue gown house, was the wife of a prominent broker and another woman of confessedly German affiliations who served him lived within a stone’s throw of the Metropolitan Museum and its nearby phalanx of gilded dwellings (her husband’s office was in a building at 11 Broadway, of which more anon); a third, woman intimate lived in a comfortable apartment near Fifth Avenue—an apartment selected for her, though she was unaware of it, by secret agents of the United States.

BAIT FOR INGÉNUES

“During the early days of the war the promise of social sponsorship which any embassy in Washington could extend proved bait for a number of ingénues of various ages, with ambition and mischief in their minds, and the gracious Ambassador played them smoothly and dexterously. Mostly they were not German women, for the German women of America were not so likely to be useful socially, nor as a type so astute as to qualify them for von Bernstorff’s delicate work. To those women whom he chose to see he was courteous, and superficially frank almost to the point of naïveté. The pressure of negotiation between Washington and Berlin became more and more exacting as the war progressed, yet he found time to command a campaign whose success would have resulted in disaster to the United States. That he was not blamed for the failure of that campaign when he returned to Germany in April, 1917, is evidenced by his prompt appointment to the court of Turkey, a difficult and important post, and in the case of Michaelis, a stepping-stone to the highest post in the Foreign Office.

“Upon the shoulders of Dr. Heinrich Albert, privy counselor and fiscal agent of the German Empire, fell the practical execution of German propaganda throughout America. He was the American agent of a government which has done more than any other to coöperate with business towards the extension of influence abroad, on the principle that ‘the flag follows the constitution.’ As such he had had his finger on the pulse of American trade, had catalogued exhaustively the economic resources of the country, and held in his debt, as his nation’s treasurer in America, scores of bankers, manufacturers and traders to whom Germany had extended subsidy. As such also he was the paymaster of the Imperial secret diplomatic and consular agents.

“You could find him almost any day until the break with Germany in a small office in the Hamburg-American Building (a beehive of secret agents) at No. 45 Broadway, New York. He was tall and slender, and wore the somber frock coat of the European business man with real grace. His eyes were blue and clear, his face clean-shaven and faintly saber-scarred, and his hair blond. He impressed one as an unusual young man in a highly responsible position. His greeting to visitors, of whom he had few, was punctilious, his bow low, and his manner altogether polite. He encouraged conversation rather than offered it. He had none of the ‘hard snap’ of the energetic, outspoken, brusque American man of business. Dr. Albert was a smooth-running, well-turned cog in the great machine of Prussian militarism.

CORRUPTION FUND OF MILLIONS

“Upon him rested the task of spending between $2,000,000 and $3,000,000 a week for German propaganda. He spent thirty millions at least in secret agency work, also known by the uglier names of bribery, sedition and conspiracy. He admitted that he wasted a half million.

“His methods were quiet and successful, and his participation in the offenses against America’s peace might have passed unproven had he not been engaged in a too-absorbing conversation one day in August, 1915, upon a Sixth Avenue elevated train. He started up to leave the train at Fiftieth Street, and carelessly left his portfolio behind him—to the tender care of a United States Secret Service man. It contained documents revealing his complicity in enterprises the magnitude of which beggars the imagination. The publication of certain of those documents awoke the slumbering populace to a feeling of chagrin and anger almost equal to his own at the loss of his dossier. And yet he stayed on in America, and returned with the ambassadorial party to Germany only after the severance of diplomatic relations in 1917, credited with expert generalship on the economic sector of the American front.

“Germany’s military attaché to the United States was Captain Franz von Papen. His mission was the study of the United States army. In August, 1914, it may be assumed that he had absorbed most of the useful information of the United States army, which at that moment was no superhuman problem. In July of that year he was in Mexico, observing, among other matters, the effect of dynamite explosions on railways. He was quite familiar with Mexico. According to Admiral von Hintze he had organized a military unit in the lukewarm German colony in Mexico City, and he used one or more of the warring factions in the southern republic to test the efficacy of various means of warfare.

“Von Papen operated from New York after the outbreak of war. “German reservists who had been peaceful farmers, shopkeepers or waiters, all over the United States, were mobilized for service, and paraded through Battery Park in New York shouting ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles!’ to the strains of the Austrian hymn, while they waited for Papen’s orders from a building near by, and picked quarrels with a counter procession of Frenchmen screaming the immortal ‘Marseillaise.’ Up in his office sat the attaché, summoning, assigning, despatching his men on missions that were designed to terrorize America as the spiked helmets were terrorizing Belgium at that moment.

“... Although von Papen marshaled his consuls, his reservists, his thugs, his women, and his skilled agents, for a programme of violence the like of which America had never experienced, the military phase of the war was not destined for decision here, and there is again something ironical in the fact that the arrogance of Captain von Papen’s outrages hastened the coming of war to America and the decline of Captain von Papen’s style of warfare in America.

BOY-ED, A TURKISH HALF-BREED

“The Kaiser’s naval attaché at Washington was Karl Boy-Ed, the child of a German mother and a Turkish father, who had elected a naval career and shown a degree of aptitude for his work which qualified him presently for the post of chief lieutenant to von Tirpitz. He was one of the six young officers who were admitted to the chief councils of the German navy, as training for high executive posts.... His duties took him all over the world as naval observer, and he may be credited more than casually with weaving the plan-fabric of marine supremacy with which Germany proposed in due time to envelop the world.

“He impressed diplomatic Washington in 1911 as a polished cosmopolite. Polished he was, measured by the standards of diplomatic Washington, for rare was the young American of Boy-Ed’s age who had his cultivation, his wide experience, and his brilliant charm. He was sought after by admiring mothers long before he was sought after by the Secret Service; he moved among the clubs of Washington and New York making intimates of men whose friendship and confidence would serve the Fatherland, cloaking his real designs by frivolity and frequent attendances at social functions. His peace-time duties had been to study the American navy; to familiarize himself with its ship power and personnel, with its plans for expansion, its theories of strategy, its means of supply, and finally, with the coast defenses of the country. He had learned his lesson, and furnished Berlin with clear reports. On those reports, together with those of his colleagues in other countries, hinged Germany’s readiness to enter war, for it would have been folly to attempt a war of domination with America an unknown, uncatalogued naval power. (It will be well to recall that the submarine is an American invention, and that Germany’s greatest submarine development took place in the years 1911-14.)

“And then, suddenly, he dropped the cloak. The Turk in him stood at attention while the German in him gave him sharp orders—commands to be carried out with Oriental adroitness and Prussian finish. Then those who had said lightly that ‘Boy-Ed knows more about our navy than Annapolis itself’ began to realize that they had spoken an alarming truth. His war duties were manifold. Like von Papen, he had his corps of reservists, his secret agents, his silent forces everywhere ready for active coöperation in carrying out the naval enterprises Germany should see fit to undertake in Western waters.

“America learned gradually of the machinations of the four executives, Bernstorff, Albert, Papen and Boy-Ed. America had not long to wait for evidences of their activity, but it was a long time before the processes of investigation revealed their source. It was inevitable that they could not work undiscovered for long, and they seem to have realized that they must do the utmost damage at top speed. Their own trails were covered for a time by the obscure identities of their subordinates. The law jumps to no conclusions. Their own persons were protected by diplomatic courtesy. It required more than two years of tedious search for orthodox legal evidence to arraign these men publicly in their guilt, and when that evidence had finally been obtained, and Germany’s protest of innocence had been deflated, it was not these men who suffered, but their country, and the price she paid was war with America.

GERMANY’S SECRET ARMY

“A hundred or more of their subordinates have been convicted of various criminal offenses and sent to prison. Still more were promptly interned in prison camps at the outbreak of war in 1917. The secret army included all types, from bankers to longshoremen. Many of them were conspicuous figures in American public life, and of these no small part were allowed to remain at large under certain restrictions—and under surveillance. Germany’s army in the United States was powerful in numbers; the fact that so many agents were working destruction probably hastened their discovery; the loyalty of many so-called German-Americans was always questionable. The public mind, confused as it had never been before by the news of war, was groping about for sound fundamentals, and was being tantalized with false principles by the politicians. Meanwhile Count von Bernstorff was watching Congress and the President, Dr. Albert was busy in great schemes, Captain von Papen was commanding an active army of spies, and Captain Boy-Ed was engaged in a bitter fight with the British navy.”

But long after the departure of the principals for their native land the enterprises they had inaugurated persisted.