CHAPTER XXVI. — RIOTS IN CHICAGO AND GERMAN PLOT TO RESCUE THE CROWN PRINCE
The first weeks of January, 1922, brought increasing difficulties and perplexities for the German forces of occupation in America. With comparative ease the enemy had conquered our Atlantic seaboard, but now they faced the harder problem of holding it against a large and intelligent and totally unreconciled population. What was to be done with ten million people who, having been deprived of their arms, their cities and their liberties, had kept their hatred?
The Germans had suffered heavy losses. The disaster to von Hindenburg’s army in the battle of the Susquehanna had cost them over a hundred thousand men. The revolt of Boston, the massacre of Richmond, had weakened the Teuton prestige and had set American patriotism boiling, seething, from Maine to Texas, from Long Island to the Golden Gate. There were rumours of strange plots and counter-plots, also of a new great army of invasion that was about to set sail from Kiel. Evidently the Germans must have more men if they were to ride safely on this furious American avalanche that they had set in motion, if they were to tame the fiery American volcano that was smouldering beneath them.
In this connection I must speak of the famous woman’s plot that resulted in the death of several hundred German officers and soldiers and that would have caused the death of thousands but for unforeseen developments. This plot was originated by women leaders of the militant suffrage party in New York and Pennsylvania (the faction led by Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont not approving) and soon grew to nation-wide importance with an enrolled body of twenty thousand militant young women, each one of whom was pledged to accomplish the destruction of one of the enemy on a certain Saturday night between the hours of sunset and sunrise.
By a miracle these women kept their vow of secrecy until the fatal evening, but at eight o’clock the plot was revealed to Germans in Philadelphia through the confession of a young Quakeress who, after playing her part for weeks, had fallen genuinely in love with a Prussian lieutenant and simply could not bring herself to kill him when the time came.
I come now to a sensational happening that I witnessed in Chicago, to which city I had journeyed after the Richmond affair for very personal reasons. If this were a romance and not a plain recital of facts I should dwell upon my meeting with Mary Ryerson and our mutual joy in each finding that the other had escaped unharmed from the perils of our recent adventures.
Miss Ryerson, it appeared, after the discovery of her daring disguise had been released on parole by order of General Langthorne, who believed her story that she had taken this desperate chance as the only means of saving Thomas A. Edison. Mary had heard the story of her brother’s heroic death and to still her grief, had thrown herself into work for the Red Cross fund under Miss Boardman and Mrs. C.C. Rumsey. She had hit upon a charming way of raising money by having little girls dressed in white with American flags for sashes, lead white lambs through the streets, the lambs bearing Red Cross contribution boxes on their backs. By this means thousands of dollars had been secured.
On the evening following my arrival in Chicago, I had arranged to take Miss Ryerson to a great recruiting rally in the huge lake-front auditorium building, but when I called at her boarding-house on Wabash Avenue, I found her much disturbed over a strange warning that she had just received.