Part 47

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.’

[Illustration:

© _Underwood and Underwood._

Exhausted French Soldiers Resting in a Farmyard

A pile of straw was a welcome couch to men who had been for days in the trenches near the Yser. Men under artillery fire were often unable to get any sleep for several days. Sometimes their nerves were so shattered that they were unable to sleep after they were relieved. Deafness from the concussion of their own heavy artillery was also a frequent occurrence.]

“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

He fixed the dynamite against a girder of the bridge above the Canadian bank of the river, adjusted the explosive cap, and touched his cigar to the end of the three-minute fuse. Then he stumbled back across the gale-swept icy bridge, and back into the hotel at Vanceboro, just as the dynamite exploded with a report that broke half the windows in the town, and twisted rods and girders on the bridge. Everybody in Vanceboro was aroused, but Horn, after a futile attempt to rub his hands and feet with snow, turned in and went to sleep. He had seen all he wanted to of dynamite. In a town turned out of doors with excitement, sleeping was in itself an act to arouse suspicion.

People remembered the tall Swede who had been hanging around Vanceboro for a couple of days, and the suitcase which he had been seen to hide in a wood-pile near the tracks. After some delay, during which Horn slept peacefully, the sheriff and a couple of Canadian constables were got on the job, and they took him at about noon in Teague’s Hotel. He was wearing German colors on both sleeves, for he had been told that they would be regarded, were he caught, in the light of a uniform. He offered little resistance, but in telling his story, he interpolated an innocent lie that caused the Canadian officials a good deal of anxiety. He had not brought the dynamite in his suitcase, he said, but had carried the empty suitcase to the bridge, where an Irishman from Canada, in response to the pass-word “Tommy,” had given him the dynamite. This detail he afterwards cleared up, when asked to set his name to a paper concluding, “I certify on my honor as a German officer that the foregoing statements are true.” He would not sign a lie and set his name to it as the truth.

“Too scrupulous for a spy,” one of the newspapers called him, in the perplexities awakened by this early manifestation of the afterwards famous bomb-plot, “and too thickheaded for an honest man.” Werner Horn was extradited to Canada, and everybody joined in congratulating the man, whoever he might have been, who slept in the lower berth the night Horn took an upper for Vanceboro. It had developed during the trial that the big German, to disencumber himself, had chucked the suitcase under the lower berth, against the shoes and the hot-water pipes, then had climbed into the upper, to sleep peacefully through the night as was his wont. The evil effects of dynamite were comparatively novel at that time, even to bomb-plotters.

FRUSTRATED DIABOLISM

A Ruthless Tool of German Duplicity Fails Only Because He Trusted the Wrong Man with His Secret

One of the most nefarious of the schemes formulated in Germany and financed by the German government for operation in this country in the period of our neutrality, and of which von Papen was aware, was that which one Robert Fay undertook to carry out in 1915. This man had invented an infernal machine, the purpose of which was to blow up ships at sea to prevent the transportation of munitions and food supplies from this country to France and England. The story was well told in the _World’s Work_ after Fay and his accomplices had been jailed.

The device was a box containing forty pounds of trinitrotoluol, to be fastened to the rudder post of a vessel, and so geared to the rudder itself that its oscillations would slowly release the catch of a spring, which would then drive home the firing pin and cause an explosion that would instantly tear off the whole stern of the ship, sinking it in midocean in a few minutes. Experts in mechanics and experts in explosives and experts in shipbuilding all tested the machine, and all agreed that it was perfect for the work which Fay had planned that it should do.

[Illustration: The Hand-to-Hand Fight on Board the Destroyer _Broke_]

Fay had three of these machines completed, he had others in course of construction, he had bought and tested the explosive to go into them, he had cruised New York harbor in a motor boat and proved by experience that he could attach them undetected where he wished, and he had the names and sailing dates of the vessels that he meant to sink without a trace. Only one little link that broke—and the quick and thorough work of American justice—robbed him of another Iron Cross besides the one he wore.

A PLOT HATCHED IN GERMANY

Fay and his device came straight from the heart of the German Army, with the approval and the money of his government behind him. He, like Werner Horn, came originally from Cologne; but they were very different men. Where Horn was almost childishly simple, Fay’s mind was subtle and quick to an extraordinary degree. Where Horn had been humane to the point of risking his life to save others, Fay had spent months in a cold-blooded solution of a complex problem in destruction that he knew certainly involved a horrible death for dozens, and more likely hundreds, of helpless human beings. Horn refused to swear to a lie even where the lie was a matter of no great moment. Fay told at his trial a story so ingenious that it would have done credit to a novelist and would have been wholly convincing if other evidence had not disproved the substance of it. The truth of the case runs like this:

Fay was in Germany when the war broke out and was sent to the Vosges Mountains in the early days of the conflict. Soon men were needed in the Champagne sector, and Fay was transferred to that front. Here he saw some of the bitterest fighting of the war, and here he led a detachment of Germans in a surprise attack on a trench full of Frenchmen in superior force. His success in this dangerous business won him an Iron Cross of the second class. During these days the superiority of the Allied artillery over the German caused the Germans great distress, and they became very bitter when they realized, from a study of the shells that exploded around them, how much of this superiority was due to the material that came from the United States for use by the French and British guns. Fay’s ingenious mind formed a scheme to stop this supply, and he put his plan before his superior officers. The result was that, in a few weeks, he left Germany, armed with passports and $3,500 in American money, bound for the United States on the steamer _Rotterdam_. He reached New York on April 23, 1915.

One of Fay’s qualifications for the task he had set for himself was his familiarity with the English language and with the United States. He had come to America in 1902, spending a few months on a farm in Manitoba and then going on to Chicago, where he had worked for several years for the J. I. Case Machinery Company, makers of agricultural implements. During these years, Fay was taking an extended correspondence school course in electrical and steam engineering, so that altogether he had a good technical background for the events of 1915. In 1906, he went back to Germany.

What he may have lacked in technical equipment, Fay made up by the first connection he made when he reached New York in 1915. The first man he looked up was Walter Scholz, his brother-in-law, who had been in this country for four years and who was a civil engineer and had studied mechanical engineering on the side. When Fay arrived, Scholz had been out of a job in his own profession and was working on a rich man’s estate in Connecticut. Fay, armed with plenty of money and his big idea, got Scholz to go into the scheme with him, and the two were soon living together in a boarding house at 28 Fourth Street, Weehawken, across the river from uptown New York,

A SHAM GARAGE

To conceal the true nature of their operations they hired a small building on Main Street and put a sign over the door announcing themselves in business as “The Riverside Garage.” They added verisimilitude to this scheme by buying a second-hand car in bad condition and dismantling it, scattering the parts around the room so that it would look as if they were engaged in making repairs. Every once in a while they would shift these parts about so as to alter the appearance of the place. However, they did not accept any business—whenever a man took the sign at its face value and came in asking to have work done, Fay or Scholz would take him to a nearby saloon and buy him a few drinks and pass him along by referring him to some other garage in the neighborhood.

The most of their time they spent about the real business in hand. They took care to have the windows of their room in the boarding house heavily curtained to keep out prying eyes, and here under a student lamp, they spent hours over mechanical drawings which were afterward produced in evidence at the trial of their case. The mechanism that Fay had conceived was carefully perfected on paper, and then they confronted the task of getting the machinery assembled. Some of the parts were standard—that is, they could be bought at any big hardware store. Others, however, were peculiar to this device and had to be made to order from the drawings. They had the tanks made by a sheet metal worker named Ignatz Schiering, at 344 West 42nd Street, New York. Scholz went to him with a drawing, telling him that it was for a gasoline tank for a motor boat. Scholz made several trips to the shop to supervise some of the details of the construction and once to order more tanks of a new size and shape.

At the same time Scholz went to Bernard McMillan, doing business under the name of McMillan & Werner, 81 Center Street, New York, to have him make a special kind of wheels and gears for the internal mechanism of the bomb, from sketches which Scholz supplied. At odd times between June 10th and October 20th McMillan was working on these things and delivered the last of them to Scholz just a few days before he was arrested.

In the meanwhile Fay was taking care of the other necessary elements of his scheme. Besides the mechanism of the bomb, he had to become familiar with the shipping in the port of New York, and he had to get the explosive with which to charge the bomb. For the former purpose he and Scholz bought a motor boat—a 28-footer—and in this they cruised about New York harbor at odd times, studying the docks at which ships were being loaded with supplies for the Allies and calculating the best means and time for placing the bombs on the rudder posts of these ships. Fay finally determined by experience that between two and three o’clock in the morning was the best time. The watchmen on board the ships were at that hour most likely to be asleep or the night dark enough so that he could work in safety. He made some actual experiments in fastening the empty tanks to the rudder posts, and found that it was perfectly feasible to do so. His scheme was to fasten them just above the water line on a ship while it was light, so that when it was loaded they were submerged and all possibility of detection was removed.

THE ROAD TO BETRAYAL