Part 45

“The American Truth Society, Inc., the parent of the Friends of Peace, was founded in 1912 by Jeremiah O’Leary, a Tammany lawyer later indicted for violation of the Espionage Act, who disappeared when his case came up for trial in May, 1918; Alphonse Koelble, who conducted the German-American Alliance’s New York political clearing house; Gustav Dopslaff, a German-American banker, and others interested in the German cause. In 1915 the Society, whose executives were well and favorably known to the German embassy, began issuing and circulating noisy pamphlets, with such captions as ‘Fair Play for Germany,’ and ‘A German-American War.’ O’Leary and his friends also conducted a mail questionnaire of Congress in an effort to catalogue the convictions of each member on the blockade and embargo questions. Their most insidious campaign was an effort to frighten the smaller banks of the country from participating in Allied loans, by threats of a German ‘blacklist’ after the war, to organize a ‘gold protest’ to embarrass American banking operations, and in general to harass the Administration in its international relations.

[Illustration: Prize Winning War Savings Poster]

“So with their newspapers, rumor-mongers, lecturers, peace societies, alliances, bunds, vereins, lobbyists, war relief workers, motion picture operators and syndicates, the Germans wrought hard to avert war. For two years they nearly succeeded. America was under the narcotic influence of generally comfortable neutrality, and a comfortable nation likes to wag its head and say ‘there are two sides to every question.’ But whatever these German agents might have accomplished in the public mind—and certainly they were sowing their seed in fertile ground—was nullified by acts of violence, ruthlessness at sea, and impudence in diplomacy. The left hand found out what the right hand was about.”

PAUL KOENIG, THE ATLAS LINE’S MAN

One of the delectable agents of the Bernstorff-von Papen intrigues was a “bull-headed Westphalian” named Paul Koenig, who had been one of the Hamburg-American Line’s detectives in service with the subsidiary company, the Atlas Line. His duties brought him into close relations with sailors, tug-captains, wharf-rats, longshoremen and keepers of dives of the lowest sort. That experience, coupled with the fact that he was, as his apelike countenance suggests, crafty and brutal, made him an ideal man for von Papen’s more dastardly purposes, especially as Koenig had under him the company’s police force of ten or twelve men, obedient to his will. Here was a nice little organization ready to hand.

On von Papen’s request the Atlas Line put Koenig entirely at his disposal, and no time was lost in making use of his service. Under von Papen, Koenig became the chief of a majority of the German Secret Service groups in the eastern part of the country. Gradually his work extended to the execution of commissions for the higher-ups, Bernstorff, Dr. Albert, the curious Austrian Ambassador, Dr. Dumba, as well as the orders of von Papen. He was a sort of factotum to them on various occasions, guard, messenger, investigator, etc. But to preserve the air of unsuspicious employment the Line continued to pay his wages, his work for the conspirators being covered by special bills and von Papen’s special checks. Koenig kept a book in which were listed the names of hundreds of persons—German-Americans and Americans, clerks, army reservists, scientists, city and federal employees, etc.—indicating his wide range of sources of information and the effectiveness of his system of poisonous propaganda.

His staff had numbers and special initials as well as aliases for identification in correspondence and telephone or other communications. He provided against the tapping of his telephone wires by talking in code. His code seems to have been devised with some sense of humor in the possibility of sending listeners-in on wild-goose chases, which was often the result. Then to prevent being shadowed he had one or two of his own men trail him, ready to notify him by signal if he seemed to be the object of too persistent attention. It is said he had the trick, when being followed, of suddenly turning a corner and waiting until the detective came up, when, taking a good look to identify the follower, he would go on with a boisterous laugh. By this trick he came to know quite a number of the agents of the Department of Justice. Such a cunning and cautious fellow of course gave the police a deal of trouble to keep tabs on him. Mr. John Price Jones says in his book:

A SUPERSUBTLE KNAVE

“So elusive did he become that it was necessary to evolve a new system of shadowing him in order to keep him in sight without betraying that he was under surveillance. One detective, accordingly, would be stationed several blocks away and would start out ahead of Koenig. The ‘front shadow’ was signaled by his confederates in the rear whenever Koenig turned a corner, so that the man in front might dart down a cross-street and maneuver to keep ahead of him. If Koenig boarded a street car the man ahead would hail the car several blocks beyond, thus avoiding suspicion. In more than one instance detectives in the rear, guessing that he was about to take a car, would board it several blocks before it got abreast of Koenig.

“It was impossible to overhear direct conversation between Koenig and any man to whom he was giving instructions. Some of his workers he never permitted to meet him at all, but when he kept a rendezvous it was in the open, in the parks in broad daylight, or in a moving-picture theater, or in the Pennsylvania Station, or the Grand Central Terminal. There he could make sure that nobody was eavesdropping. If he met an agent in the open for the first time he gave him some such command as this:

“‘Be at Third Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street at 2:30 to-morrow afternoon beside a public telephone booth there. When the telephone rings answer it.’

“The man would obey. On the minute the telephone would ring and the man would lift the receiver. A strange voice told him to do certain things—either a definite assignment, or instructions to be at a similar place on the following day to receive a message. Or he might be told to meet another man, who would give him money and further orders. The voice at the other end of the wire spoke from a public telephone booth and was thus reasonably sure that the wire he was talking over was not tapped.”

But cunning, like vaulting ambition, sometimes “doth o’erleap itself,” and Koenig’s fall into the clutches of the law was due to that excess of caution that forbade him to trust any of his men or assistants. His rule was to employ no one man more than once in any service that gave him a “hold” on Koenig sufficient to warrant blackmail or threaten exposure. The detectives found this out, by observation. Then they noticed that one George Fuchs, a young relative with whom Koenig had been quite chummy at first, came to be seen less and less in his company. The detectives thereupon set about making the acquaintance of Fuchs and getting into his good grace. It did not take them long to learn that he was resentful of his unappreciative relative, and they gave sympathetic ear to his complaints. The desired result was the betrayal of Koenig to the authorities.

AS TO SPIES IN ENGLAND

A Dozen Were Shot, Hundreds Were Imprisoned, But “Cherished Spies” Were Allowed To Go Free Because Their Work Was So Bad.

There has never been a war since the one in which the daughter of Jupiter and Leda, the inconstant Helen, figured so conspicuously, that has not had its fact or fiction of “beautiful” women. Whether it be Homer or Timothy Tubbmutton who wields the recording pen, there is always the woman beautiful to flavor the narrative. And usually the “beautiful” is a clever spy who casts a seductive spell over diplomats, statesmen, generals or, if need be, corporals of the guard. Inevitably a war of a magnitude to take in every clime and nation offered alluring field for the play of the reportorial or literary imagination, and we have had—in novel, movie and magazine as well as in the columns of the press—stories unlimited about beautiful women spies.

It goes without saying that, with the rarest possible exception, beauty is not a feature of the type of person whose mentality delights in “treasons, stratagems and spoils.” But we seldom have an authoritative pronouncement on the subject, and for that reason it is particularly interesting to reproduce in part an interview Miss Gertrude Lynch had with an English secret service official in 1917 while the war was still very much on. Miss Lynch was one of the “Vigilantes,” an association of American writers whose object was to “help win the war” by the dissemination of educative information. The interview with the English official was to get some light on the German espionage system as applied to England. Though not named, the official is described as the spy expert of England. A great many spies, of one and another sort, were nabbed in England. The article says:

ONLY A DOZEN SHOT

“There have only been twelve spies shot since the beginning of the war, but hundreds are either in penal servitude for life or serving shorter sentences. The actual number was not known to the official who talked with me on this topic—with the distinct understanding that I should not mention his name or title. He is the acknowledged authority on the spy evil. Not far from where we sat, in a formidable cabinet which looked as if it held other interesting documents, the papers taken from von Papen were carefully locked.

[Illustration:

_Courtesy of Leslie’s Weekly._

French and German Soldiers as Comrades in Death

Clearing a battlefield after the advance of the French armies in September, 1915. The fallen of both armies were loaded together on wagons and hauled to convenient places for interment. Their identity was learned from numbered metal tags on cords around the neck, or sewn into the clothing.]

“‘No woman spies have been shot in England and only one among the feminine lot—a bad lot—who are serving sentence could possibly lay claim to being a “beautiful lady” spy. This woman had all the hall-marks of the fiction and cinema character, charming in manner, well gowned, having plenty of money, traveling about luxuriously, and was finally nabbed with the incriminating papers on her. But the popular conception of the feminine secret agent rarely exists outside of sensational stories because only women without moral sense can take up this profession, and when a woman is devoid of moral sense she is sure to be devoid of the other qualities that might make her work efficacious.

“‘There are, of course, numberless men and women who would be spies if they had not been interned, and, among the 30,000 Germans who are at this moment so confined, there are doubtless several who treasure the belief that they would have been of inestimable use to their country; but as they will never get a chance to prove themselves wrong that poor solace is permitted them.

“‘We have,’ continued my informant, ‘a great number of “cherished spies” with us. These are the spies who go about plying their profession and believing themselves the personification of that cleverness the Germans demand for this work. That is why we have dubbed them “Our Cherished Ones.” They are carefully watched. We let them go on doing bad work because it is much better to keep a bad spy doing bad work than it is to take him and perhaps have a spy who might do good work sent in his place.

“‘We would hate to lose our “cherished spies.” We don’t intend to!

“‘America has the job of the century. I wouldn’t know where to tell her to begin. Spies that were there and have left had plenty of time to lay their plans before the unrestricted submarine warfare began.

“‘With 8,000,000 Germans in America, what you have to find out is whether or not a German has been denationalized, a process that can only be gone through in Germany. It is not enough to know that he has been naturalized and that he claims to be a good citizen to your country. The fact that he has become a naturalized citizen does not free him from the call to fight for his own land. If he is denationalized as well as naturalized you are then safe, but not before. In England we had only a very small number who were found to be denationalized, a fairly negligible unit.

“‘I should say that the rush by foreigners immediately after the declaration of war in America was not because before they had been indifferent or hostile, but because they feared to be called upon to fight for their own countries. You will probably find that many of the Germans had been denationalized and were finishing up the process.’”

AMERICA’S HIGH-CLASS SPIES

America had a monopoly of the so-called high-class spies, according to this authority. The average German spy was described as a man who has one or more convictions hanging over his head—an unsentenced criminal—and these men were paid only about $250 a month. The statement continues:

“‘The last spy we caught was only a day or so ago. We had been after him for some time and he was traveling with a perfectly good American passport.

“‘The high-class spies with you are responsible for the sabotage, for the strikes on the docks and in the factories. They are pacifists, anticonscriptionists. It is a situation terribly serious for you. They are going to delay what they can not prevent. Don’t flatter yourselves that the important spies have been driven out. If I had been a spy in America and the warning had been given to me so long in advance, I would have laid my lines very well. Look out for those lines; you may trip.

“‘What should be done with a spy in America? He should be shot as soon as his espionage has been proved. No weakness should be permitted because he has many affiliations there.

[Illustration: French Peasants Sent to the Front by Germans

In certain areas in France the German commanders feared that the inhabitants would give information to the French armies, and so moved all the population either into concentration camps near the front or to points a long way in the rear of the lines. Here is shown a wagon train filled with peasants who had been forced to leave their homes with only the few necessities these civilian heroes could carry.]

“‘I was in Germany eight years ago. Everywhere I was asked, “Are you ready to fight America?” That was the pretty little German game. Even then they were dying to rub into us the fact that America was our enemy. In the beginning, when the commercial party—Herr Ballin and his clique—were in power, they pretended a great affection for you. It was contrary to their desire that the submarine warfare became so terrible—not because they hated its brutalities, don’t make any mistake about that, but because they thought it a diplomatic blunder. Then and now they have a press which harps on the unfriendly feeling that exists between you and us. That often reiterated phrase that “America is fighting Great Britain’s battles for her” was made in Germany.

“‘I’m not such a fool as to think that America loved us in the past, but that she ever hated us as the Germans have said and that we have hated her as they still say in subtle, indefinable ways in some of your papers, is unbelievable by either of the parties concerned. Nations have faults as do individuals. We’ve made mistakes. We may have talked a little too much about the _Shannon_ and _Chesapeake_ and you too much about Bunker Hill and that tea-party in Boston Harbor. Let’s have an end to it—it all helps Germany too much. Take away the text-books from your children which teach them to hate us. If you try it, the German school-teachers will try to keep them, see if they don’t.

“‘America ought to love us now if she has not in the past, if national love is founded on respect, as it should be. We can point to ourselves with pride. We have given up in this war the thing we most believed in—personal freedom. We have made untold sacrifices and we are ready to give up everything—everything. Anything in your press that makes you see these facts in a distorted way is false, spy-work of the subtle, underground, submarine mentality sort that the Germans excel in.

“‘Look out for it. It isn’t the work of the “lovely lady spy” or that of the man with a conviction suspended while he does their dirty work that you are in danger from. It is just where I have pointed out.

“‘You asked me a while ago what England would do in case Germany won. I will tell you and you can draw from it the lesson of spy—and other German effort.

“‘If Germany should win, there won’t be any one here when it happens to know anything about it.’”

EDITH CAVELL’S BETRAYER

A Traitor of Belgium Posing as an Allied Soldier Served the Germans

The basest of the spies in the German Service of whom there is any account probably was Gaston Quien, the betrayer of Edith Cavell. He was a degraded moral type, and had been convicted of various minor offenses before the war, being a “bad citizen.” He was at St. Quentin when the Germans arrived there, and according to testimony he at once placed himself on familiar terms with them. He was nicknamed “Doublemetre” (Two-yarder) because of his great stature. The Germans saw that they could make use of him, and proceeded to do so.

The circumstances of his employment were about as follows:

In 1915 the German commanders in Northern France and Belgium were angered at the fact that hundreds of Belgian and Allied soldiers hidden in various villages were eventually smuggled through the lines into Holland or France by an organization known to have its headquarters in Brussels.

[Illustration: A Loan Poster]

Quien opportunely arrived in Brussels and posed as an Allied aviator who had been obliged to alight behind the German lines, and, after burning his plane, had evaded capture. Along with several French soldiers, he was hidden for a time at the château of Prince and Princess Crouy. There Louise Thuliez, the school teacher decorated early in 1919 with the Legion of Honor, secretly passed him on to Brussels, by way of Mons. At Brussels he was lodged for several days in Miss Cavell’s nursery. Finally an engineer named Capiau and Mme. Bodart accompanied him and a group of Allied soldiers to the Dutch frontier, where, by payment of $15 a head to smugglers, they were conducted into Dutch territory.

Once at The Hague, Quien made no further effort to get into France. Instead, he returned to Brussels and betrayed to the Germans the entire organization for helping Allied soldiers out of Belgium.

Miss Cavell was tried and executed soon afterward. Miss Thuliez also was sentenced to death, but pardoned. Princess Crouy, Mme. Bodart and Capiau were sentenced to twelve years at hard labor. An architect named Bauco, also betrayed by Quien, was shot at the same time Miss Cavell met her fate. Quien continued in the employ of the Germans in various capacities, finally establishing himself in Interlaken, where he worked with their most noted spies. After the armistice he was arrested and tried for treason in a Belgian court. He was found guilty, but was not executed, pending an appeal.

EDITH CAVELL

_By_

George Edward Woodberry

The world hath its own dead; great motions start In human breasts, and make for them a place In that hushed sanctuary of the race Where every day men come, kneel, and depart.

Of them, O English nurse, henceforth thou art, A name to pray on, and to all a face Of household consecration; such His grace Whose universal dwelling is the heart.

O gentle hands that soothed the soldier’s brow, And knew no service save of Christ the Lord! Thy country now is all humanity! How like a flower thy womanhood doth show In the harsh scything of the German sword, And beautifies the world that saw it die!

By permission of _Scribner’s Magazine_ and author.

[Illustration:

Painting by Joseph Cummings Chase.

Corporal John R. O’Brien

_Second Division, 23rd Infantry, Company K_

After his platoon commander had been severely wounded and his sergeant had been killed on June 6, 1918, he assumed command, kept the men on the line, controlled their fire, and by good advice and judgment conserved life.]

THE SPY MILL

It Did Not Wait for Winds to Swing Its Arms for German Guidance

In a book, recently published, called _Espions, Espionnage_, one story has to do with a windmill: “Celebrated along the whole Aisne front, there existed at Craonne a mill boldly designated, ‘Mill of the Spy.’... The miller, devoted to the interests of our enemies, had found the means of informing them of the movements of our troops by disposing the arms of the mill in different positions.” The French has a beautifully final sound—“the miller, devoted to the interests of our enemies.” “But to tell the truth, neither the miller himself nor the actual information which he was able to impart, made a great deal of difference in the fighting. What it was, that made, or almost made, the difference, I believe, has never been satisfactorily ascertained. The miller at least was not there, then. Of course he may have had confederates, but if so, the destruction of the mill was so sudden, so complete, that there was left no trace of them.”

The information given by the mill to the Germans was almost entirely negligible, and would have penetrated to them anyway through the medium of the spies with which both lines were always swarming. Of course, at first, before they realized the agency of the mill, the French were not a little troubled and disconcerted by the amount of data the Germans seemed to possess, and the speed with which it was acquired. For instance, for a while the Boches amused themselves with knowingly greeting each regiment as it moved up to take its turn in the front line trench. There was a measure of clairvoyance implied in the big white board with black lettering that would go up on top of the German barbed wire as surely as there was a change of guard on the French side: “Bonjour, 77e!” or the number of French trench casualties: “Morts ——,” “Blessés ——.” And so it went on day after day.

A week of this, in dull, rainy weather, was enough to set nerves on edge, but then they caught the miller, whose execution put, it was thought, the quietus on the mill. And upon the morning of the 27th of November, they moved forward stealthily to the surprise attack.