But perhaps the most dramatic of all the intercepted messages (except the Luxburg and Zimmerman notes, of which the story cannot yet be told) were those which revealed the part played by well-known Irish-American leaders in the ill-fated Casement revolution in Ireland. The story of the Casement expedition is too familiar to need to be retold. And comment upon the political morals of Justice Cohalan and John Devoy becomes superfluous in the light of these messages. American citizens (one of them signally honoured with public office in New York), both held their Irish blood superior, in their duty of loyalty, to the United States, using their citizenship as a cloak under which to strike at Great Britain, which has been for a quarter century the chief bulwark of this country against Germany’s plan to conquer us and to impose upon our country the most hateful tyranny in the history of the world.
[CHAPTER VIII]
The Tiger of Berlin Meets the Wolf of Wall Street
Franz Von Rintelen was the German tiger who missed his spring. He was the most powerful, the most dangerous, agent of the Kaiser in the United States: and to-day he nurses his hatred of us behind prison bars. But he did not retire to confinement until after our Government completed an extremely difficult and tedious investigation that was made necessary by his care in concealing the insidious work of propaganda and destruction in which he had engaged.
Rintelen was a tiger in the implacable hatred he bore this country and in the ferocity with which he carried that hatred into action. Sent to America in 1915 to hinder the shipment of munitions to the Allies, he sought first to poison the press, then to corrupt labour, and, not content with these things, he finally tried to hire thugs to burn, to dynamite, and to assassinate, where other persuasions failed; and he did succeed in setting fire to thirty-six ships at sea, causing millions of dollars of loss, and imperiling hundreds of human lives.
Rintelen had, however, the other side of the tiger’s character—its graces. When the —— made port at New York on April 3, 1915, it bore as passenger one Émil Gasché, a Swiss. The moment Gasché passed the customs officers Gasché ceased to exist, and in his place appeared handsome young Von Rintelen, unexpectedly arrived in America for his fourth visit and renewing pleasant acquaintanceships in society and in Wall Street. He was “the same old chap,” to quote his own description of himself in one of his letters—rich, of a family long accustomed to riches; well-bred, of a family long proud of its aristocratic connection with the Imperial Court at Berlin (his father had long been the equivalent of our Secretary of the Treasury); young, the youngest of the chief bankers of Germany; handsome, with the good looks that come of regular features and of a slender frame hardened by athletics and made distinguished by the bearing of an officer; a sportsman, who raced his yacht in the Emperor’s regattas at Kiel—an affable, cultivated, witty, accomplished man of the world. No wonder he had been popular on his former visits. On one of them he had opened in New York a branch of the Deutsche Bank, one of the greatest of the government-controlled banks of Germany, and on another he had widened these financial relationships with Wall Street. He had travelled the country over and knew people everywhere; and he knew about hundreds more, even to their private affairs in money and politics and those intimate weaknesses that pass into the gossip of the smoking-room. He spoke the language with only the slightest accent but in its purest form, and was adept in our peculiar kind of humour—altogether, a fine and likable fellow, who liked us.
Until the war. And until the Germans, stung by the lost illusions of a quick and glorious victory, facing the gray outlook of a long and bitter struggle, looking about for some one to blame for their plight, and wearied of “strafing” England, found a new narcotic in a hatred of America. America, that made the cartridges and shells that patched up the unpreparedness of France and Britain and Russia, which Germany had calculated as one of the factors in the equation of victory. America, that—as their rising rage made their voices shriller—“is murdering our sons and brothers on every battlefield from Switzerland to the sea for the sake of blood-bought gold.”
This cry became an article of fanatical faith to the German people. It became likewise a very practical problem to the hard-headed leaders in Berlin. If they could cut off this supply of munitions, the Allies could be beaten. There was no hope of cutting it off at sea—the British Navy would attend to that. It must be stopped at its source: stopped in America, by a made-to-order public opinion, or by corruption, or by violence—but stopped.
“Whom shall we send to America?” was their problem. Rintelen was chosen. He could be trusted—he was a director of the Deutsche Bank, he knew America. He was given credit at the Hamburg-American Line office in New York for $547,000, authority for as many millions more as he wanted, independent powers as great as the German Ambassador’s at Washington, the instructions of the German Government, and the blessing of the Fatherland.