"Mohammedan squadron of the cavalry regiment in Nowschera deserted over Chang, southwest Peshawar. Soldiers threw bombs against the family of the Maharajah of Mysore. One child and two servants killed, his wife mortally wounded.
"In Ceylon a state of war has been declared."
In February, 1915, Jodh Singh, a former student of engineering in the United States, was in Rio de Janeiro. He was directed by a fellow Hindu to call upon the German Consul, and the latter gave him $300 and instructions to proceed to the German consul in Genoa, Italy, for orders. Thence he was forwarded to Berlin, where he attended the meetings of the newly formed Indian Revolutionary Society and absorbed many ideas for procedure in America. Supplied with more German money he came to New York and was joined by Heramba Lal Gupta, a Hindu who had been a student at Columbia, and Albert H. Wehde, an art collector. The three went to Chicago, and Singh called at once upon Gustav Jacobsen, the real estate dealer who will be recalled in the Kaltschmidt bomb plots in Detroit. Jacobsen assembled a group of German sympathizers which included Baron Kurt von Reiswitz, the consul, George Paul Boehm (mentioned in instructions to von Papen to attack the Canadian Pacific Railway) and one Sterneck. At the conference Jodh Singh, Boehm, Sterneck and Gupta were detailed to go to the far East: Singh to Siam, to recruit Hindus for revolutionary service; Gupta to China and Japan to secure arms; Boehm to the Himalayas, to attack the exploring party of Dr. Frederick A. Cook, the notorious, to impersonate Dr. Cook, and thus travel about the hills spreading sedition. Wehde, with $20,000 of von Reiswitz's money, Boehm and Sterneck sailed for Manila, and apparently escaped thence to Java, to meet two officers from the Emden, for the three are at this writing fugitives from justice; Jodh Singh was arrested in Bangkok and turned over to the British authorities.
In the diary of Captain Grasshof of the German cruiser Geier, interned in Honolulu, appears the following entry, establishing Wehde's call in Hawaii, and the complicity of the Consulate there in his plans:
"At the Consulate I met Mr. A. Wehde from Chicago, who is on way to Orient on business.
"One of the Hindoos sent over by Knorr (naval attaché of German Embassy at Tokio) left for Shanghai on the 6th. In Hongkong there are 500 Hindoos, 200 officers and volunteers, besides one torpedo boat and two Japanese cruisers.
"K-17 (A. V. Kircheisen) was almost captured in Kobe. The first officer of the China warned him and he immediately got on board again as soon as possible. K-17 informed me that the Japs have sold back to the Russians all the old guns taken from the latter during the Russo-Japanese war."
Reiswitz in June added $20,000 more to the fund for revolution in India. Gupta, to whom von Papen had paid $16,000 in New York, went on to Japan with Dhirendra Sarkar, a fellow conspirator.
The presence of the two plotters in Japan became known to the authorities and soon thereafter to the public. They were shadowed everywhere, and a complete record was kept of their activities; the newspapers discussed them, and it was common property that they gave a banquet on the night of November 9, 1915, to ten other Hindus, to toast a plot for revolution in India. On November 28 they were ordered by the chief of police to leave Japan before December 2, which was tantamount to a delivery into the hands of the British, as the only two steamers available were leaving for Shanghai and Hong Kong, both ports well supplied with British officers. On the afternoon of December 1 the two plotters escaped in an automobile to the residence of a prominent pro-Chinese politician (a friend of Sun Yat Sen) and were concealed there, between false walls, until May, 1916, when they stowed away on a ship bound for Honolulu. Sarkar returned to India, Gupta to America. When the round-up came, in 1917, Jacobsen, Wehde and Boehm were each convicted of violation of section 13 of the Federal Penal Code, and sentenced to serve five years in prison and pay $13,000 fines; Gupta's sentence was three years, his fine $200.
The scene shifts for a moment from the Orient to the Occident, and the twenty-fifth floor of the building at 60 Wall Street, New York, on the morning of April 19, 1916. There von Papen had had his office; there when he was sent home in December, 1915, he had left in charge a sharp-eyed youth named Wolf von Igel as his successor. Von Igel, at eleven o'clock, was surveying the result of several hours' work in sorting and arranging neat stacks of official papers for shipment to the German Embassy at Washington, for he had got word that trouble was brewing, and that the documents would be safer there. An attendant entered. "A man wants to see you, Herr von Igel," he announced. "He won't tell his business, except that he says it is important."