CHAPTER XVII MEXICO, IRELAND, AND BOLO
Huerta arrives in New York—The restoration plot—German intrigue in Central America—The Zimmermann note—Sinn Fein—Sir Roger Casement and the Easter Rebellion—Bolo Pacha in America and France—A warning.
Germany learned during President Roosevelt's administration that the Monroe Doctrine was not to be tampered with. The United States stood squarely upon a policy of "hands off Latin America." But both commercial and diplomatic Germany were attracted by the bright colors of the somewhat kaleidoscopic political condition of the Central and South American nations. In political confusion, Mexico, at the outbreak of war, led all the rest. This suited Germany's purpose perfectly—provided that at least one faction in Mexico might be susceptible to her influence. The first three years of war proved to the satisfaction of the most skeptical that Mexican unrest would trouble the United States, and it was upon this theory that Germany long before 1914 baited her hook for Mexico.
Propagandists in our neighbor republic added fuel to the already brisk flame of native hostility to the Yankee. A considerable German commercial colony grew up, assimilated the language and customs of Mexico, and bade fair to be a strong competitor in the development of the huge natural resources waiting there for foreign capital. By 1914 Germany had evidently expected to be in a position sufficiently strong to enlist Mexico on her side in case the United States gave trouble. The reader will recall that Admiral von Hintze in the summer of 1914 had recommended Captain von Papen for a decoration for having organized a fair military unit of the Germans in Mexico. That same summer, however, saw Mexico with troubles of her own, and German efforts against the United States through Mexico had to be postponed.
Early in 1914 General Huerta, an unscrupulous, powerful and dissolute factionist, had executed a coup d'etat which placed him in the president's chair. He at once advertised for bids. The United States had no intention of protecting him, and in order to stop at its source any trouble which might prove too attractive to a foreign power, placed an embargo upon the shipment of American arms into Mexico. The American fleet was despatched to Vera Cruz to see that the order was carried out. The steamship Ypiranga, with a cargo of arms, succeeded in eluding the fleet, and under orders from the German admiral, and the direction of Karl Heynen, the arms were landed.
Huerta had promised the presidency to Felix Diaz. In order to get him out of the way he sent Diaz to negotiate a Japanese understanding. The United States gently diverted Señor Diaz from his mission. Huerta began to lose the grip he held; three other factionists, Villa, Carranza and Zapata, each at the head of an army, were aiming at his head, and shortly before the world went to war the old rogue fled to Barcelona.
There Rintelen negotiated with him in February, 1915, and out of their conferences grew a plan to restore him to the Mexican presidency. This plan would have meant war between Mexico and the United States, which was precisely what von Rintelen and his Wilhelmstrasse friends desired: American forces would have to be mobilized at the Rio Grande, and American munitions, destined for the Allies, would have to be commandeered and diverted to Mexico.
The aged general arrived in New York in April, and was interviewed and photographed. He told the public through the newspapers that he proposed to acquire an estate on Long Island and the public considered it not inauspicious that the veteran warrior should have come to pass the remainder of his stormy life in the world's most peaceful country. Fortunately for the peace of the United States not every one believed him.
Within a week of his arrival von Rintelen slipped into New York. He placed in the Havana branch of the Deutsches Bank and in banks in Mexico City some $800,000 to Huerta's credit, and within a short time the political jackals who lived on foreign subsidy began to prick up their ears. Von Papen and Boy-Ed had made trips to the Mexican border, arranging through their consular agents in the Mexican towns across the river the mobilization of Germans in Mexico, the storing of supplies and ammunition, and the deposit of funds in banks at Brownsville, El Paso, San Antonio and Douglas. Not all Mexicans in the United States were Huertistas, however, and one Raphael Nieto, Assistant-Secretary of Finance to Carranza, was quite as eager to follow Huerta's activities as were the agents of the United States. The Carranzistas joined forces with the Secret Service and found out that the plot had already begun to develop.
During the month of May, Huerta frequently met a member of the German Embassy at the Hotel McAlpin. Von Rintelen was clever enough not to negotiate in person, but he dined frequently with the Embassy member. Much of what had occurred at these conferences in the McAlpin was known to government agents, who had been concealed where they could take notes on the conversation. On June 1, 1915, General Huerta, with Jose Ratner, his "financial adviser," held a conference in the Holland House with a former Huertista cabinet minister, a son of the Mexican general, Angeles, and certain other personages who purposed to take part in the revolution for the sake of this world. One of the men present was a Carranza spy, and through him it became known that Huerta outlined that he had ten millions of dollars for immediate use in a plot to restore him to his former position, twice that sum in reserve, and that more would be forthcoming if necessary. Arms and ammunition, he said, would be shipped into Mexico secretly, supplies would be accumulated at certain border towns, and envoys had already been sent to incite desertion from the armies of Carranza and Villa.
Rintelen did not know that the Carranzistas had sold out to the authorities. Rintelen had already purchased some $3,000,000 worth of arms and cartridges, and he was prepared to see the enterprise to a successful conclusion. Incidentally he was quietly supplying six other Mexican factions with funds in case Huerta's measure of success should prove too intoxicating.
Because he was a figure of considerable international notoriety and indisputable news interest, the press had been following Huerta's movements with strict attention. Affairs at the border were not reassuring and there persisted the feeling that Huerta in the United States held promise of Huerta once more in Mexico. In July, his agent, Ratner, issued the following frank though apparently ingenious statement:
"General Huerta and those of us associated with him are confident that the whole Mexican situation will be cleared up within ninety days. We believe that to rule the country is a one-man job. And in that time we expect that one man to come forward and unite the country. General Huerta does not care to indicate the man he has in mind, but he is from our viewpoint a true patriot, and naturally that excludes both Carranza and Villa.
"General Huerta may or may not return to Mexico some day, and may or may not hold office there again. At present he is giving himself up wholly to an agreeable and home life in this city (New York)."
Whether or not General Huerta was to "return to Mexico some day" depended upon the temper of the United States. He knew that when he authorized the statement. He did not know—or else he was incredibly bold—that the Government was in possession of the whole story, and that orders had been issued from the highest source in the country not to let him return. One day in the late summer he slipped away, ostensibly to visit the San Francisco Exposition. Government agents shadowed him and let him make his own pace. He took the southern route, and traveled so quietly that his flight was not publicly marked until he had passed through Kansas City. As he approached the border he became as eager as a boy at the prospect of his 'return from Elba'; then, as he was almost in sight of the soil from which he had been exiled, he was arrested on a technical charge and jailed.
In August Rintelen fled the country. The Providence Journal had just published an irritating charge that Boy-Ed was carrying on negotiations with Mexico; the German Embassy denied the charge, although Boy-Ed with his knowledge of Mexico had assisted ably in the plot; and the excitement of official interest in Huerta's recent connections made von Rintelen nervous. When he was captured at Falmouth by the British, his man-Friday, Andrew V. Meloy, confessed that he had inadvertently tipped over the plot when he had innocently telephoned a Carranzista to find out, for safety sake, whether the Carranza party suspected Huerta. It was this Carranzista who made a few inquiries of his own, and succeeded in planting the spy in the Holland House meeting.
The aged general, although he was transferred to a more comfortable prison, took his confinement bitterly. His dream had been bright indeed, and it had been bluntly interrupted. As the autumn came on his health showed signs of failing, and his career of dissipation began to total the final reckoning. The illness became grave, and after two surgical attempts to save his life, he died in January, 1916, heartbroken.
Von Eckhart, the minister to Mexico City, was to Mexico what Bernstorff was to the United States and he employed faithfully the familiar tactics of his superior: revolution, editorial propaganda, filibustering and double dealing. In the fall of 1916 the fine German hand could be seen prompting a note sent by Mexico to the United States urging an embargo on the shipment on munitions and foodstuffs to the warring nations (Mexico had neither foodstuffs nor munitions to supply). And in December, 1916, Eckhart was robbed of the achievement of a conspiracy of fantastic proportions.
In order to appreciate the fantasy, one must bear in mind the temperament of a Central American. Eckhart and his colleague, Lehmann, German minister to Guatemala, proposed to harness that temperament to a German wagon and drive the Latin republics to the formation of "the United States of Central America," which presumably would have borne a Prussian eagle in the field of its ensign.
Carranza disliked Cabrera of Guatemala; so, too, did Dr. Irias, a Nicaraguan liberal. Certain factions in Honduras disapproved of their president; certain factions in Guatemala could be counted on to support revolution against Cabrera; Dr. Irias, the defeated candidate, disliked Emiliano Chammorra, the President of Nicaragua, enormously. What more natural than that they combine forces and with German money and arms kindle not one revolution but a series of them, with an invasion thrown in for good measure? Accordingly they conferred with a Salvadorean politician, a Cuban revolutionist, and an associate of the Costa Rican minister of war. The cast complete, they planned to assemble revolutionary forces, with German military advisers, on the coast of Salvador. Using Salvador as a base, attacks were to be made upon Nicaragua and Guatemala, and at the proper time Carranza was to invade Guatemala from the north. Colombia's services were to be enlisted by the promise of restoration of the Republic of Panama—originally a Colombian province. As soon as the combined revolutionaries had succeeded in overthrowing their governments, they were to form the United States of Central America, with Irias as president, and William of Hohenzollern as counsel.
Our levity is pointed not at the Central American temperament and political instability, but rather towards the grotesquely serious objective of the German plotters. If their military forces had been Prussian shock troops they would certainly have succeeded. The use of a Mexican gunboat to transport German officers with an airplane and wireless apparatus from Mexico to Salvador exposed the plan. President Cabrera of Guatemala had a small but effective force of thirty thousand men, and a well-equipped artillery, armed—and he was prepared for attack from either frontier. He also enjoyed the confidence of Washington, and he informed Washington at once what was afoot. The answer arrived presently in the shape of the American fleet, on a peaceful expedition to survey the Gulf of Fonseca, its newly acquired Nicaraguan naval base. The revolutions failed for want of revolutionists, the German enterprise failed for want of revolutions, and of the conspirators only one, Tinoco of Costa Rica, succeeded in capitalizing the unrest by a coup d'etat which made him president. The plot never reached maturity in Colombia or Panama.
Before dismissing it from consideration, however, it is worth a moment's analysis. With any degree of success it would have distracted the United States, and perhaps have involved her marine corps as well as her navy. It contained possibilities of war between Mexico and the United States. It projected a blow at the Panama Canal. It concerned a territory in which commercially as well diplomatically the United States had definite concern and in which Germany had already shown a greedy interest. Incidentally it reveals—in its offer to Colombia—the same diplomatic technique as that which was shortly to startle the United States into the last step towards war, the so-called "Zimmermann note."
At 3 A. M. (Berlin time) on January 19, 1917, the following message was sent by wireless to Count von Bernstorff from the Foreign Office:
"Berlin, January 19, 1917.
"On the first of February we intend to begin submarine warfare unrestricted. In spite of this it is our endeavor to keep neutral the United States of America.
"If this is not successful we propose an alliance on the following basis with Mexico: That we shall make war together and together shall make peace. We shall give general financial support and it is understood that Mexico is to recover the lost territory in New Mexico, Texas and Arizona. The details are left to you for settlement.
"You are also instructed to inform the president of Mexico of the above in the greatest confidence as soon as it is certain there will be an outbreak of war with the United States and suggest that the President of Mexico on his own initiative should communicate with Japan suggesting adherence at once to this plan; at the same time offer to mediate between Germany and Japan.
"Please call to the attention of the President of Mexico that the employment of ruthless submarine warfare now promises to compel England to make peace in a few months.
"(Signed) Zimmermann."
This document was decoded from the official dictionary cipher and laid in the hands of President Wilson almost immediately following the rupture of diplomatic relations. It was made public on February 28, when the public temper was at whitest heat. Mexico did not repudiate the note at once, and four days later despatched a denial of having received any such proposal as Zimmermann had suggested. Eckhart was forcing Carranza's hand with the lure of the projected Central American enterprise already outlined. (Eckhart had had Carranza so completely under his influence at one time that when the United States despatched to Mexico a friendly note warning her of the presence of German submarines in the Gulf, Mexico retorted—at Eckhart's literal dictation—that the United States might do well to ask the British Navy why it did not prevent German undersea craft from approaching the Americas.) The month of March fled by, and America went to war; since that date no official expression except one of praise for Mexico's attitude of amiable neutrality has issued from Washington.
Just as the proximity of Mexico to the United States had for a number of years past carried with it the possibility, almost the certainty, of differences between the two countries, rising out of the temperamental differences of their peoples, so for a longer period had Ireland and England suffered for their contiguity. It is a truism to remark that the Irishman cherishes his national grievances, but that characteristic accounts for a further phase of German intrigue on American soil. Hatred of England sent many thousands of Irish to the United States in the past fifty years. They found it a country to their liking, which England was not, and although they had become indissolubly attached to their adopted land, there were in America in 1914 (and there are in 1918) numerous Irish who had no dearer wish than that England come off second best in the great war. Allies after Germany's own heart they were, therefore. They had been cultivated long since: in 1909, when plans were being made for a centenary celebration in 1914 of the peace that had reigned between the United States and England, German-American and Irish-American interests began to raise a structure of their own, exploiting the prominence which certain Germans, such as Franz Sigel and Carl Schurz, had enjoyed in the construction of the nation. The programme of these interests included the erection of elaborate memorials over the graves of prominent German Americans, the dissemination of legends of German heroes in America, and more practically the frustrating of the projected Peace Centenary.
Many of the organizations thus united for a practical purpose found a clearing-house in the American Truth Society, of which Jeremiah O'Leary was the head. Although the Centennial Celebration itself was rudely interrupted by the advent of war, the German-Irish acquaintanceship was nourished by the German propagandists in America. They observed with pleasure the circulation by the Clan-na-Gael of cards informing the Irish in America that troops from Erin were being assigned to the most dangerous posts and the bloodiest attacks and subjected to the most severe enemy fire in France, and that the hated British were dragging Irish boys from their homes to fill up the ranks. Between September, 1914, and April, 1915, funds amounting to $80,000 for the purchase of arms and the printing of seditious papers and leaflets were forwarded from America to Dublin banks, and then mysteriously were withdrawn. An inflammatory publication known as Bull, published by O'Leary, and not barred from the mails until September, 1917, went broadcast over the United States, inciting bitterness against England, and found a greedy circle of readers in the German-American population. John Devoy, a Sinn Feiner of standing in America, fanned the flame with a newspaper known as the Gaelic American, published in New York, and it is this American-printed sheet which furnished the Irish revolutionists with material for a part of the plot which they were preparing for fruition in the year 1916.
Jeremiah A. O'Leary
In 1916 Sir Roger Casement, an Irish knight, made his way into Germany. He was permitted to visit the prison camp at Limburg where some 3,000 Irish prisoners of war were quartered, and he moved about among them attempting to obtain enlistments in an army which was to effect a coup in Dublin to overthrow the British government in the Castle and to proclaim an Irish Republic. He circulated numerous copies of the Gaelic American to arouse the men. He was variously received. Some of the prisoners held their release worth treason—but only fifty-odd. The greater majority rejected Sir Roger's offer, and some even chose to curse and spit at the suggestion that they break their oaths of allegiance to Great Britain. He succeeded, however, in enlisting German financial assistance, and in early April, 1916, a cargo of captured Russian arms and ammunition was forwarded to Kiel and loaded into the German auxiliary steamship Aud.
Some 11,000 revolutionists were in a state of mental if not martial mobilization in Ireland by this time. There were in Dublin some 825 rifles. But so cleverly were the volunteers' orders passed from member to member, that Sir Matthew Nathan, Under-secretary of State for Ireland, testified later that he did not know until three days before the outbreak occurred that German interests were coöperating. Evidently, however, sympathizers in America knew it full well, for in the von Igel papers captured in von Papen's office in New York was found the following message to von Bernstorff:
"New York, April 17, 1916.
"Judge Cohalan requests the transmission of the following remarks:
"The revolution in Ireland can only be successful if supported from Germany, otherwise England will be able to suppress it, even though it be only after hard struggles. Therefore, help is necessary. This should consist primarily of aerial attacks in England and a diversion of the fleet, simultaneously with Irish revolution. Then, if possible, a landing of troops, arms, and ammunition in Ireland, and possibly some officers from Zeppelins. This would enable the Irish ports to be closed against England and the establishment of stations for submarines on the Irish coast and the cutting off of the supply of food for England. The services of the revolution may therefore decide the war.
"He asks that a telegram to this effect be sent to Berlin."
Presumably such a telegram was sent, although on April 17 Sir Roger, with his recruits, was at Kiel. Three days before the Berlin press bureau had authorized the issuance of a despatch through the semi-official Overseas News Agency that "political rioting in Ireland is increasing." On the same day a news item was published in Copenhagen stating that Sir Roger had been arrested in Germany to allay any suggestion that he was engaged in any other enterprise. On the afternoon of Thursday, April 20, a German submarine stuck its conning tower out of water off Tralee, on the Irish coast. Three men presently emerged, unfolded a collapsible boat, and rowed ashore in it. The three were Casement and two of his henchmen, come home to Ireland to spread the news that German arms and German aid were at hand. Off the southwest coast the patrol ship Bluebell of the British Navy sighted, on Good Friday morning, a ship flying the Norwegian flag, and calling herself, in answer to the Bluebell's hail, the Aud, out of Bergen for Genoa. Under the persuasive effect of a warning shot from the Bluebell the Aud followed her as far as Daunt's Rock, where her crew of German sailors set fire to her, hoisted the German naval ensign, abandoned ship, and then surrendered under fire. The Aud sank, carrying the arms for Irish revolution with her. Sir Roger was arrested in hiding, and on Easter Sunday Dublin broke out in revolt. On Monday a cipher message reached O'Leary, telling him of the uprising hours before the British censor permitted the news story to cross the ocean. John Devoy burst out in a heated charge in the Gaelic American that—
"The sinking of the German ship loaded with arms and ammunition ... was the direct result of information treacherously given to the British Government by a member of the Washington Administration ... Wilson's officials obtained the information by an act of lawlessness, a violation of international law and of American law, committed with the deliberate purpose of helping England, and it was promptly put at the disposal of the British Government...."
This charge was denied at once from Washington. The specific "violation of international law and of American law" to which Devoy referred was generally supposed to be the seizure of the von Igel papers, for the accusation is the same as that which von Igel made when his office was raided. How Devoy knew that the von Igel papers contained information of the proposed expedition from Kiel to Ireland is a question which Devoy has no doubt had to answer to the Government of the United States since then. He and O'Leary, with Dennis Spellisy, who had collected large sums of money for the Sinn Fein cause, were loud in their protests against the execution of the ringleaders of the revolt on May 3rd, which put a sharp end to the endeavors of the revolutionists. That O'Leary was known to the German system of secret agents in America needs no further substantiation. To credit him with generalship, however, would be doing him too great honor and the Irish-American population injustice; O'Leary was bitterly pro-German, but so were hundreds of more prominent and influential Irish-Americans: one could find the names of several New York Justices upon the roster of the Friends of Peace. Sir Roger Casement petitioned for a Philadelphia lawyer at his trial for treason, and Sir Roger's sister attempted unsuccessfully to reach President Wilson, through his secretary, Joseph P. Tumulty, in an effort to bring about intercession in the doomed knight's favor. (Mr. Tumulty was approached more than once by persons whom he had reason to suspect of alloyed motives who desired to "set forth a case to the President.") The link between the old country and the new is close, the future of Ireland is one of more than usual interest and concern to the United States, and the fact that the great majority of Irish-Americans have subordinated their insular convictions to the greater conviction of loyalty to their adopted land is at once a fine augury of ultimate solution of the Irish question, and a dignified rebuke to the efforts which Germany has made through America to exploit Ireland.
On Washington's Birthday, 1916, there came to New York one who posed as a French publisher and publicist. He brought excellent letters of recommendation, and was well supplied with money. He was personable, and well sponsored, and he was correspondingly well received. Within a month he left the United States for France, with appropriate expressions of his appreciation of American hospitality.
In April, 1918, that same man faced a French firing squad, guilty of having attempted to betray his country, and of having traded with the enemy.
He was Paul Bolo Pacha, Paul Bolo by common usage, Pacha by whatever right is vested in a deposed Khedive to confer titles. Born somewhere in the obscurity of the Levant, he came as a boy to Marseilles. He was successively barber's-boy, lobster-monger, husband of a rich woman who left him her estate, then café-owner and wine-agent. Then he drifted to Cairo, and into the good graces of Abbas Hilmi, the Khedive. Abbas was deposed by the British in 1914 as pro-German, and went to Geneva; Bolo followed.
Charles F. Bertelli, the correspondent in Paris of the Hearst newspapers, naïvely related before Captain Bouchardon, a French prosecutor, the circumstances of his acquaintanceship with Bolo, which led to the latter's cordial reception at the hands of Hearst when he arrived in New York. " ... Jean Finot, Directeur of La Revue, ... had sent him a letter of introduction to Mr. Hearst and had requested me to accredit him with Mr. Hearst. He had said to me: 'Occupy yourself with the matter, Bolo has very great political power; he is the proprietor of Le Journal and it would be well that Hearst should know him.' ... I made the voyage with Bolo.... I spoke of Bolo to Hearst and the latter said to me, 'If he is a great proprietor of French newspapers, I should be very glad to....' As a compliment to Hearst, Bolo gave a grand dinner at Sherry's.... Bolo had two personal guests: Jules Bois and the German, Pavenstedt...." We need draw on Bertelli no further than to introduce the same Adolph Pavenstedt in whose offices Papen and Boy-Ed had sought refuge at the outbreak of war in 1914; Adolph Pavenstedt, head of the banking house of G. Amsinck & Co., through which the attachés paid their henchmen for attempts at the Welland Canal, the Vanceboro bridge, and at America's peace in general. Bolo had made Pavenstedt's acquaintance in Havana in 1913.
Four days after he landed in New York, and before the Hearst dinner (which was incidental to the plot) Bolo had progressed with his negotiations to betray France to a point where von Bernstorff sent the following message to the Foreign Office in Berlin:
"Number 679, February twenty-sixth.
"I have received direct information from an entirely trustworthy source concerning a political action in one of the enemy countries which would bring about peace. One of the leading political personalities of the country in question is seeking a loan of one million seven hundred thousand dollars in New York, for which security will be given. I was forbidden to give his name in writing. The affair seems to me to be of the greatest possible importance. Can the money be provided at once in New York? That the intermediary will keep the matter secret is entirely certain. Request answer by telegram. A verbal report will follow as soon as a trustworthy person can be found to bring it to Germany.
"Bernstorff."
Paul Bolo Pacha (on the right)
Herr von Jagow felt that even at that date peace with any belligerent was worth $1,700,000. He cabled back:
"No. 150, February twenty-ninth.
"Answer to telegram No. 679:
"Agree to the loan, but only if peace action seems to you a really serious project, as the provision of money in New York is for us at present extraordinarily difficult. If the enemy country is Russia have nothing to do with the business, as the sum of money is too small to have any serious effect in that country. So too in the case of Italy, for it would not be worth while, to spend so much.
"(Signed) Jagow."
The plan approved, the next step was to pay Bolo. Bernstorff's cablegram of March 5, Number 685, pleaded for the money.
"Please instruct Deutsches Bank to hold 9,000,000 marks at disposal of Hugo Schmidt. The affair is very promising. Further particulars follow."
The next day Hugo Schmidt, American representative of the Deutsches Bank, sent the following wireless through the station at Sayville to the Deutsches Bank Direktion, Berlin:
"Communicate with William Foxley (the Foreign Office) and telegraph whether he has placed money at my disposal for Charles Gladhill (Count von Bernstorff)."
The reply came three days later. It read:
"Replying your cable about Charles Gladhill (von Bernstorff) Fred Hooven (the Guaranty Trust Company of New York) will receive money for our account. You may dispose according to our letter of November 24, 1914, to Fred Hooven."
On March 11, Schmidt, who was working night and day to consummate the deal, wirelessed again to Berlin:
"Your wireless received. Paid Charles Gladhill (von Bernstorff) $500 (which signified $500,000) through Fred Hooven (the Guaranty Trust Company). Gladhill requires further $1,100 ($1,100,000) which shall pay gradually."
Bolo's affairs were promising well. He had brought with him from Paris a letter of introduction to the New York manager of the Royal Bank of Canada, stating that he was the publisher of Le Journal, which required a large quantity of news print paper every day, and that he had been commissioned by all of the other large newspaper publishers in Paris to arrange a contract for 20,000 tons monthly. Bolo confirmed his intention to perform this mission when he deposited in the Royal Bank of Canada $500,000 which Hugo Schmidt had drawn from the German government deposits in the National Park Bank and had given to Pavenstedt, who in turn checked it over to the French traitor. It was not the purchase of print paper which interested him, however, but the perversion, through purchase, of as many French newspapers as he could lay his slimy hands on; once in his possession, they could be made to carry out a sinister propaganda for a separate peace between France and Germany. Germany had offered, through Abbas Hilmi, to yield Alsace-Lorraine in return for certain French colonies, and to evacuate the occupied portions of French soil, and by painting such a settlement in bright colors to the people of France Bolo could have served Germany's ends effectively either by actually accomplishing some such settlement, or by weakening the morale which was so largely responsible for holding the German drive against Verdun, then in the first stages of its fury.
On March 17, the Deutsches Bank wirelessed to Schmidt:
"You may dispose on Fred Hooven (the Guaranty Trust Company) on behalf Charles Gladhill (von Bernstorff) $1,700 (which meant $1,700,000)."
Bolo had his million and three-quarters, which he had asked. He had made disposition of it through the Royal Bank, setting a portion aside to his wife's credit, depositing another portion to the credit of Senator Charles Humbert (part-owner with Bolo of Le Journal) and holding a reserve of a million dollars in the Royal Bank subject to his call. Then he took ship for France.
His final arrangements with Pavenstedt prompted von Bernstorff to send the following message on March 20 to the Foreign Office:
"No. 692, March 20.
"With reference to telegram No. 685 please advise our Minister in Berne that some one will call on him who will give him the password Sanct Regis who wished to establish relations with the Foreign Office. Intermediary further requests that influence may be brought to bear in France so far as possible in silence so that things may not be spoiled by German approval.
"(Signed) Bernstorff."
Von Bernstorff had been cautious enough during Bolo's sojourn in the United States to negotiate with him only through Pavenstedt, in order that the Embassy might not be compromised in an exceedingly hazardous undertaking if any suggestion of Bolo's real designs leaked out. He was fully prepared in such an event to repudiate Pavenstedt, and to state honestly that he had never seen or heard of Bolo, for until the day before he left, when Pavenstedt asked the Ambassador for the telegram of introduction quoted above, Bernstorff did not know Bolo's name. That he did know it then, and that he discussed Bolo with Berlin during April and May is evident from the following cable, sent from the Foreign Secretary to the Embassy at Washington on May 31:
"Number 206. May 31st. The person announced in telegram 692 of March 20th has not yet reported himself at the Legation at Berne. Is there any more news on your side of Bolo?
"Jagow."
There was not, although Bolo was keeping the cables hot with messages directing the further transfer of the nest-egg of $1,700,000 which he had acquired in his month in New York. He wanted the money credited to the account of Senator Humbert in J. P. Morgan & Co., then through Morgan, Harjes & Co. of Paris he directed the remittance of his funds to Paris, then cancelled those instructions and directed that his million be credited to him in Perrier & Cie., in which he was interested. What twists and turns of fate occasioned the juggling of these funds after he returned to France is not known, but certainly no bag of plunder ever passed through more artful manipulation. The explanation of its hectic adventures may lie in the fact that the spectacle of Bolo, commissioned to go to the United States to spend money for news print, and returning with nearly two millions of dollars, would have interested the French police.
For more than a year he covered his tracks. Shortly after his return the Bonnet Rouge, the declining publication which served ex-Premier Joseph Caillaux as mouthpiece, began to attract attention for its discussion of peace propaganda. A strain of pessimism over the conduct of the war began to make itself apparent in other journals. The arrest of Duval and Almereyda of the Bonnet Rouge disclosed certain of Bolo's activities and a search of his house in February revealed papers covering certain of his financial transactions in America. The United States was requested to investigate, and refused, as the affair was considered political, and it was not until we joined France in the war that the request was repeated, this time with better success.
Attorney-General Merton Lewis of New York State conducted an investigation which revealed every step of Bolo's operations in New York. His search of the records of the banks involved indicated that a fund of some $50,000,000 in cash and negotiable securities lay on deposit in America which the Deutsches Bank could place at the disposal of von Bernstorff and his fellow conspirators at any time for any purpose, and which was adequate as a reserve for any enterprise which might present itself. The evidence against Bolo was forwarded to Paris, and he was arrested. On October 4, 1917, Secretary Lansing made public the correspondence which the State Department had intercepted.
The French public became hysterically interested in the case. Senator Humbert promptly refunded the 5,500,000 francs which he had received from Bolo for 1,600 shares in Le Journal. Almereyda of the Bonnet Rouge committed suicide in prison; his death dragged Malvy, Minister of the Interior under Ribot, out of office under suspicion of trading with the enemy; the editor of a Paris financial paper was imprisoned on the same charge; "Boloism" became a generic term, and the French government, feeling a growing restlessness on the part of the public, encouraged the new diversion of spy-hunting which resulted in the exposure of negotiations between Caillaux and German representatives in Buenos Aires. Russia had been dissolved by similar German propaganda, Italy, after vigorous advances into Italia Irridenta, had had her military resistance sapped by another such campaign as Bolo proposed for France, and had retreated to the Po valley; the sum total of "Boloism" during the autumn and winter of 1917-1918 was an increased conviction on the part of the Allied peoples that the line must be held more firmly than ever, while the rear was combed for prominent traitors.
Thus, a year before she entered war, the United States supplied the scene of one of the outstanding intrigues of the war. How voluble was Adolph Pavenstedt in confessing his services as intermediary for the Kaiser; Pavenstedt was interned in an American prison camp ... a rather comfortable camp. Hugo Schmidt, who on his own testimony was the accredited manipulator of enormous sums for the German government, was ingenuous to a degree in his denial of any knowledge of what the money paid Bolo was to be used for; Schmidt was interned. Bolo was shot.
Revolution in India, a battle royal on the Central American isthmus, a revolution in Mexico, uprisings in the West Indies, a separate peace in France—these were ambitious undertakings. For three years they were cleared through Washington, D. C. We must accept that fact not alone with the natural feeling of chagrin which it evokes, but with an eye to the future. We should congratulate our smug selves that our country was concerned only with the processes of these intrigues, and was not subject directly to their results. And then we Americans should ask ourselves whether it is not logical that, our country having served as the most fertile ground for German demoralization of other nations, we should be on our guard for a similar plot against ourselves.
That plot will not come noisily, obviously. It will be no crude effort to suggest that "American troops are suffering at the hands of the French high command." It will not be phrased in terms which reek of the Wilhelmstrasse—earnest, plodding, grotesque German polysyllables. The German knows that an army must depend upon the hearts of its people, and he reasons: "I shall attack the hearts of the people, and I believe that if it is a good principle to attack my enemy from the rear through his people, it is also a good principle to attack his people from the rear. The heart is as near the back as it is the front, nicht wahr?" The plot will seem, in its early stages, part and parcel of our daily life and concern; we shall not see the German hand in it; the hand will be so concealed as not even to excite the enthusiasm of the German-American, often a good danger-signal. It will involve institutions and individuals whom we have trusted, and we shall take sides in the controversy, and we shall grow violently pro-this and anti-that. We shall grow sick of the wretchedness of affairs, perhaps, and we shall lose heart. That is precisely what Germany most desires. That is what Germany is striving for. That is why the nobility of our citizenship carries with it the obligation of vigilance. It is in the hope that each one of us Americans may learn how Germany works abroad, that we may be better prepared for her next step here, that this narrative has been written.