Part 44

“To-day the Belgian flag flows again from the tower of Thielt and the thrifty people of Flanders are busy rebuilding their homes. Many of the men are missing; some died on the battlefield, others in prison, but all died fighting for the small strip of land they called their own, and those who remain cherish the memory of their heroes. They will tell their stories to their children and grandchildren, thus adding another page to the glorious history of Flanders, and among those stories will be that of Alois Van Keirsbilk, who tried to end the war by ending its instigator, and who failed and died, silent.”

EYE OF THE MORNING

The Popular Dutch Dancer Who Played the Rôle of German Spy to Her Cost

A story redolent of intrigue, adventure and a kind of romance is that of “Mata-Hari”—which is Japanese for “Eye-of-the Morning,” and is the name by which a Dutch dancer was known in the rendezvous of the light world of the European capitals before the war. Her real name is Marguerite Gertrude Zelle McLeod, and in 1917 her public and dashing career of art and adventure came to an abrupt stop by her arrest, trial, condemnation, and imprisonment, under sentence of death, in the prison of St. Lazare, Paris. She was condemned as a German spy, the specific offense being the betrayal to the Germans of the secret of the new, carefully guarded war weapon, the Tank. Reams have been written about this woman since her arrest, but nothing probably that would have anything like the interest for the public that will attach to the “memoirs,” the writing of which, reporters say, was her prison occupation.

Among the stories published at the time was one in the New York _World_ in October, 1917, that presented what was known of her connection with the leak of the tank secret. The success of the tank depended largely on the element of surprise when it was put into the fighting front. Therefore the planning, construction and shipment of tanks to the Somme were conducted with the utmost possible secrecy. Necessarily, however, a certain number of persons in France and England were in a position to know; but, as it took a good many months to get the machines in readiness and habituate a crew to their rolling, pitching, sickening motion, the circle of those who knew more or less about it increased, and in some way not yet explained, Mata-Hari learned something of the secret. It is rumored that a member of the Chamber of Deputies inadvertently gave her her first information. The _World_ said the rumor was strengthened by the fact that Mata-Hari had plenty of coal for her apartment during the fuel famine that winter. That in itself is proof enough to everybody of her intimacy with some high official, as few people, short of Deputies, had influence enough to obtain a hundredweight of coal during the bitter months of January, February, and March.

“In any event, Mata-Hari learned vaguely of tanks early in 1916, when the Krupp guns of the Crown Prince were daily booming nearer and nearer to Verdun in that terrific struggle which was to mark the turning-point of the war. Mata-Hari also learned that the tanks were being constructed in England, and would be shipped to France via certain ports—and she got the names of the ports, too.”

Suddenly, Mata-Hari, then in Paris, decided to return to Holland, her native land, explaining to curious inquirers that she married a Dutch army officer with a Scotch name (McLeod) who had divorced her and that she was going to arrange a settlement.

SHE ACQUIRES A DRAGON

“The dancer proceeded to Rotterdam. Investigation there has since proved that she had no ‘communal rights property’ to settle with any one, and further that Captain MacLeod of the Dutch Army was known among his fellow officers as pronouncedly pro-German.

“Soon Mata-Hari returned to Paris. She was seen at the Café de Paris and at Maxim’s, and at Armenonville in the Bois with an English officer who wore on the lapel of his collar, as insignia denoting his branch of service, a little twisted brass dragon. Months later, when more of these badges were seen on British officers passing through Paris, it became known that the dragon was of the official insignia denoting service with the tanks.

“Mata-Hari sported a new bauble soon after taking up with the Englishman—a jeweled replica of his gold insignia—her dragon had real emeralds for eyes, and a carrot-shaped ruby for a tongue darting from its opened fangs.

“In May, 1916, a little more than a month before the Somme offensive opened and tanks were first used, Mata-Hari appeared before the police magistrate of her district and requested a safe conduct to visit a certain port in France. The reason she gave was that her fiancé, an English officer, was seriously wounded and in hospital there. He had sent for her to come to see him. Perhaps they would be married at his death-bed if he could not recover, she volunteered, dabbing at her eyes with a lace handkerchief. The safe conduct was made out, and Mata-Hari arrived at a certain French port almost simultaneously with the first consignment of tanks shipped over from England.”

She spent the greater part of her time for a week strolling about the town making frequent excursions by night, and then just a month before Foch and Haig began their drive along the Somme she appeared again in Paris.

“The first thing she did was to apply for a visé on her passport permitting her to go to Spain. San Sebastian was the place she mentioned, as she explained she wished to attend the horse-races there. Her papers were stamped and sealed and she left almost immediately for the fashionable winter resort in the south.

“Madrid, Spain, and Nauen, Germany, are in constant wireless communication. There are other radio stations, privately owned, in Spain which can flash messages to Germany, according to Allied intelligence officers who have investigated. And of course there are innumerable German agents, spies, and propaganda disseminators infesting the land of the Dons.

“Secret service reports disclose the fact that Mata-Hari was seen much in company at San Sebastian race-track with a man long looked upon with suspicion by the French government. He was a frequent caller upon her at the hotel where she stopped, and it was reported that he made many of the big bets she placed on horses that did not materialize as winners.

AGAIN THE DEPUTY

“Soon Mata-Hari came back to Paris and the apartment near the Bois de Boulogne. And once more the limousine owned by the individual whom rumor has branded a Deputy began rolling up to her door twice a week and sometimes oftener.

“Then came the simultaneous Franco-British offensive at the Somme. Tanks went into action for the first time, and according to General Haig’s official _communiqué_ his ‘Land ships achieved satisfactory results.’”

But, notwithstanding the “satisfactory results,” several of the tanks were surprisingly put out of action and the investigation of the how and the wherefore revealed the fact that they had been disabled by a peculiar, small-caliber penetrating shell unlike anything known before. They were fired by guns of a special manufacture.

Instantly it became evident that the enemy had become aware of what was in store for him and had constructed an “anti-tank” gun. And when the booty in the captured German positions was examined, the British found they had several good specimens of Krupps’ newest weapon. Several German officers of higher rank taken prisoners confirmed suspicions by explaining they had received description of the tanks several weeks before, and had been instructed how to combat them.

Suspicion aroused, items of information, curious circumstances in accountable movements, bits of gossip were put together and military law took charge of Mata-Hari.

For some reason the finish of her memoirs is not yet; but the fictionist, attempting to forecast a sensation, has written this:

“So Mata-Hari writes feverishly, and all Paris waits eagerly!—except the one who waits apprehensively—to see if she will name the _ami_ who gave her the first inkling of the tanks.

“Pinned to the corsage of the Empire-cut black silk dress which Mata-Hari wears in her narrow cell in St. Lazare prison is a curious gold brooch. It is shaped like a twisted dragon, and its eyes are emeralds!”

BETTER WRECKER THAN SPY

Scion of a Noble Prussian Family Who Failed to Deliver the Goods

Though he may not have been a conspicuous success as a spy, Gustav Constantin Alvo von Alvensleben had a very decided record as a wrecker. Through his directive genius many concerns, industrial and financial, went to utter smash, involving the loss of an unknown but huge number of millions of dollars and causing a suicide or two. In the brief span of years between 1904 and 1911 Alvo rose from the precarious state of a hobo to the lofty plane of millionairedom. That is a performance that requires some doing, and indicates a mental aptitude for the peculiar office of “playing your fellow man” considerably above the ordinary.

And Gustav, or, as he was more commonly named, Alvo, played with no mean counters. Among his clients was Kaiser Wilhelm himself, who, through Alvo, invested two and a half million dollars in British Columbia timber. Other clients were the ex-Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg, Gen. von Mackensen, the conqueror of Rumania; Emma von Mumm, the champagne queen; Bertha Krupp, the gun woman, and others of equal prominence in Germany. The companies he organized or coupled up with his enterprises—nearly all of which collapsed when the shadow of war blighted Alvo’s golden prospects—included the Alvensleben Canadian Finance and General Investment Company, the Standard Fish and Fertilizer Co., the Vancouver Timber and Trading Co., the Piercite Powder Co., the German-Canadian Trust Co., etc. Also with these went several of the Pacific Coast’s largest financial and industrial concerns, including the Bank of Vancouver, the Issaquah and Superior Coal Mining Company of Seattle, and the Dominion Trust Company, whose failure following the alleged suicide of its managing director, W. R. Arnold, was one of the greatest scandals in the history of the Dominion of Canada.

Two private banks of Seattle closed their doors as a result of their connection with the I. and S. Coal Company, one of the projects of the gambler-financier. The final liquidation of his original real estate and financial company in Vancouver disclosed liabilities of over one and a half millions, with assets of about $3,000, insufficient to satisfy the liquidator’s fees.

NOT A NONDESCRIPT

It is assumed that Alvo would have been able to extricate himself from his difficulties and avert the bankruptcy into which he was forced but for the outbreak of war. The fatality lay in the fact that all his investments were in countries with which the Kaiser was or was about to be at war.

But to begin at the beginning, as we find it in an issue of the _Canadian Courier_ of October, 1917, when Alvo’s career came to a conclusion, temporarily at least, by his internment as a spy.

He was not a mere nondescript adventurer. He was the youngest son of Count Werner Alvo von Alvensleben, erstwhile German Ambassador to Russia, when Nicholas was Czar. The young man had a taste for the livelier side of life, gaily dissipated his allowance and seemed to regard college life not so much as an educational purpose as a convenience to the sowing of wild oats. This was not at all to the liking of Papa von Alvensleben and in an hour of unsuppressed wrath and resentment he cast the young man off and bade him shift for himself. This was an unexpected climax to his pleasure quest, and rather shocked Alvo. He remembered that the Kaiser was an intimate friend of his father’s, of the family indeed, and it jarred his pride to be an outcast from a circle of such distinction. He felt under obligation to reëstablish himself in the good graces of his father and the august personage whom he had so often familiarly _hoched_. So he set out to subdue some fraction of the world to his service and credit. He did not immediately find a field of action.

It was in the rôle of a hobo that he drifted into Western America and began casting about for the horn of plenty from which he hoped to shake substantial advantage. Two inches above six feet in stature, two years under forty years of age, he was typically Prussian, stubborn, unreasonable, of violent temper. But he was a good talker and not without imagination. Behold him arrived in Seattle. The _Canadian Courier_ says:

HOBO TO MILLIONAIRE

“He was practically dead broke. An employment office extracted from him the usual $2 fee—all he had—and sent him to a job in a lumber-mill some distance from the city. Alvo tramped many miles to the mill only to be refused employment upon his ticket. He could scarcely speak any English, but he knew how to use his fists. Walking all the way back to Seattle, he proceeded to beat up the employment agent in thorough and picturesque fashion. Afterward he secured temporary rough work at various mills along Puget Sound.

“His first job in British Columbia was the whitewashing of a salmon-cannery at the little village of Ladner, near the mouth of the Fraser River. His wardrobe included overalls and a dozen dress-shirts—the latter relics of his grander days—but he had no socks. From wielding the whitewash-brush to hauling the nets was the next step, and it was not long before the Prussian Junker’s son was engaged in partnership with a rough-neck fisherman making nightly trips out into the Gulf of Georgia, and doing his share in one of the hardest and most dangerous callings in the world, that of a deep-sea salmon-fisher.

“In two months, with the money obtained from his salmon fishing, he was enabled to purchase an ancient mare and a light wagon. Over night he blossomed out as a produce-dealer, buying poultry and dairy products from the farmers in the vicinity of Ladner. These he brought to the city of Vancouver and sold them from house to house in opposition to the Chinamen. Business increased, and the staid old Vancouver Club, a hoary and the most exclusive institution, in which only the most elect held membership, became his best customer.

“But Alvo did not stay long in the business; but went up by leaps and bounds. Real-estate clerk, then curb-broker, then large independent dealer were some of his upward steps, until two years after he had sold his last load of produce to the Vancouver Club he was himself a member.”

There was one little incident of the club life which pleasantly reminds us that Alvo was not an upstart and therefore not a snob. He was entertaining a German baron soon after having become a member, and he noticed that the waiter eyed him very curiously. Presently divining the reason, Alvo suddenly looked up at the waiter and said: “Yes, by jingo, I’m the man who used to deliver chickens at the back door. Now go on serving dinner, and stop staring.”

PLAYS THE GAME WELL

“When the real-estate boom struck Vancouver in 1905,” continues the _Courier_, “Alvensleben was quick to see the opportunities in land. The old wild gambling spirit of his youthful days was still strong upon him. He was the man for the moment, reckless, willing to take chances, and a born mixer. He cabled relatives in Berlin, who had heard of his early successes, and induced them to invest large sums of money. His first investment yielded enormous and quick profit, and thus established his prestige in Germany, for he promptly repaid the investors with a 1,000 per cent. on their money. In the next three years he made several visits to Germany, brought men of royal blood to the Pacific coast, and was given several audiences with the Kaiser, whose accredited representative he became. In all probability, at a very conservative estimate, Alvensleben caused $20,000,000 of German capital to be invested in British Columbia and Washington State.

“In 1908, after a very romantic courtship, he married Edith Mary Westcott, a popular Vancouver girl, daughter of one of the leading society matrons. Following the marriage the financier purchased the largest private estate in Vancouver’s most select residential district, Point Grey, where he erected a magnificent home. His name, high foreign connections, and expenditure on entertainment that set a hitherto unknown high mark in the very British city of Vancouver, quickly brought him valuable social connections.

“His business ventures broadened with astounding rapidity, but most of his purchases for himself and clients were made on ‘agreements,’ with the expectations of making big margins in the prevalent boom. A good salesman himself, he was also the easiest mark for wildcat schemes who ever came out of Europe, owing to his gambling mania. Soon his companies became loaded up with timberlands, bought at inflated prices, wild lands, doubtful mining leases, Alberta oil shares, and other unproductive assets. Some of his wealthy clients thrust upon him their useless sons, whom he was forced to maintain in his office at high salaries.

SHY ON DIVIDENDS

“In 1912 the first trouble arose over dividends not being forthcoming from his investments. He was still strong in Berlin and went there and raised fresh capital with which he succeeded in placating some of his investors. Then he was attacked in a Vancouver German paper which charged him with unscrupulous methods in handling foreign capital. Copies of this were mailed to Berlin to members of the Reichstag by the Vancouver editors, and the matter was brought up for discussion by that body. Alvo was game. He sued the local paper and secured judgment in a criminal action against the editors. But the fat was in the fire as far as his German clients were concerned, though he managed to keep his affairs afloat.

“In the early part of 1914 the financier’s creditors, both in Europe and Canada, were pressing him. He was tied up in such a mass of deals, counter-deals, and trades of property with Arnold and the Dominion Trust Company that an army of auditors has never as yet succeeded in untangling them. He owed over $10,000 to one of Vancouver’s chartered banks on some Victoria Island timber deals, which he had anticipated selling to the British Columbia government for a park reserve. The Vancouver manager and a dozen of the staff were dismissed through their connection with this loan.”

He doubtless had advance notice of the outbreak of war, for he suddenly left Canada.

Later interviewed by a New York paper he said he could “best serve his country and his clients by returning to the Pacific Coast,” and from the outbreak of the war until his arrest on the suspicion that he was implicated in a plot to steal the plans of the Puget Sound Navy Yard of Bremerton, he remained in Seattle and other American Pacific Coast cities.

THE WIND-UP

“Rumors were afloat several times that he had visited Vancouver in disguise. After one of these reports appearing in the local papers, Alvensleben wrote to a friend in Vancouver, saying: ‘You can tell the good people of Vancouver I have something better to do than visit their city in the disguise of a Hindu or any other of their numerous allies.’

“Alvensleben’s brother, Bodo, who was in charge of the Victoria branch of the Alvensleben Canadian Finance and General Investment Company, left hurriedly a few days before the outbreak of war to join his unit. The wildest rumors were circulated as to the spying operations of the brothers. It was said that Bodo had been taken off a ship by a British man-of-war, and when searched had in his possession the plans of the Canadian navy-yard at Esquimalt, and for this he was shot. Alvo denied the report, but whatever happened to this escaping brother, British censorship has never let out. Joachim von Alvensleben, an elder brother, well known from his various visits to Vancouver, was killed early in the war.”

The third and most brilliant of the brothers, the gambler-financier Alvo, was arrested at Portland and taken to Seattle, where he was interned “till the end of the war.” Concerning his subsequent proceedings there is no important information; at all events his meteoric career made a chapter of life which Vancouverites will never tire of discussing.

DELICATE SCRUPLES

One of Von Papen’s Dynamiters More Conscientious than His Chief

“Porter, boss?” The remark was an entirely facetious one, but the brakeman did not like to have his humor disregarded. Therefore when he got home he told his wife about the rum party he had met in the cut above the Vanceboro railroad bridge—a six-footer, carrying a suitcase. The brakeman would have been rather more than disgruntled, if Werner Horn had closed with his offer—that is, he would have been, had he known that the suitcase contained dynamite, and that its owner was an _Oberleutnant_ in the German army. The man with the suitcase had passed for a Swede in the hotel at Vanceboro, and his appearance warranted it. But his recent experience as manager of a coffee plantation in Moka, Guatemala, had not effaced the imprint of ten years in the service. He marched out upon the bridge, the brakeman having disappeared, as if he were taking a town. He was going into the enemy’s territory and fire his single shot. He was going to blow up the bridge, over whose rails flowed a tide of death to the Germans—cargoes of guns and shells bound for St. John and Halifax.

He would have preferred to join his regiment and fight, but von Papen had been unable to get him passage when he reported, at the time of the outbreak of the war, and told him that this affair was equally his duty. The Kaiser’s agent had likewise informed him, to soothe him, for Horn had refused to endanger innocent human lives—that there were no more passenger trains after eleven. It was now nearly midnight. Suddenly a whistle shrieked behind him, and in a moment the glaring lights of an express train’s locomotive shone upon him. Horn clutched with one hand at a steel rod of the bridge, and swung out over the river, holding the suitcase safe behind him with the other. The train thundered by, and left him to recover his footing on the ice-coated bridge. Once more, this time from the Canadian side, an express thundered past, and again he went through the same painful process.

He might have blown up the bridge comfortably, from the American side, but this he had refused to do. America was a neutral country. Germany was not at war with America, therefore to blow up the American side of the bridge was an outrage, a crime. He struggled on, the biting wind in his face. Past the middle now—a spy, liable to the penalty of death.

There was a fifty-minute fuse with his dynamite, but when he saw that the passenger-trains continued to run (von Papen’s schedules must have been out-of-date), Horn decided that what he was to do must be done at once, before another train started across. Feeling with his benumbed fingers in his pocket for a knife, he cut off the fuse and with it the long half-hour that was his chance of escape from capture. A very slim chance, if you like, through the Maine woods knee-deep in snow, but still a chance.

THE EXPLOSION