Gupta, in short, found himself displaced. His expedition had been a failure. Chakravarty had had his job for nearly six months. He tried to negotiate with Chakravarty for a restoration of some of his lost prestige, but the little man would not have much to do with him. In January, 1917, the French secret service intercepted at the Swiss border a letter postmarked New York, November 16, 1916, and addressed as follows:
“Mr. Albourge
“Hotel Des Alpas
“Territel
“Montreau, Switzerland.”
The letter was in cipher, and was seized and returned to French agents in the United States, and by them turned over to the American authorities for investigation, at about the time when diplomatic relations were broken off with Germany. Search here disclosed little. The letter was typewritten, and the only clue to its message was a hint suggested by a sub-address on the back of the envelope:
“Mr. Chatterjee”
who was apparently a Hindu. (This, by the way, was the same Chatterji who persists in cropping up in the wings of this story from time to time). Now there is no “Hotel Des Alpas” in Montreux; the name of the inn referred to is the “Hotel des Alpes.” Again, the name “Territel” was apparently a misspelling of “Territet,” and “Montreau” probably meant “Montreux.” When we captured Gupta we found in a memorandum book not only the address cited above, but the same misspellings—pretty conclusive proof that he was the author of the letter. This address was later found with the same misspellings, in the mailing list of Ghadr, the revolutionary paper published in California. Thus little errors combined to forge important links.
The code of the Gupta letter was a popular and scholarly volume by an American author: Price Collier’s “Germany and the Germans,” published in New York in 1913. The letter was so written that the words which contained the meat of each sentence were carefully enciphered. The letter said, for example:
“... I do
not believe there
are very many men
including
98-5-2
98-1-1
98-1-9
98-4-1
98-5-8
98-3-3
———
”Who can show much
better results a-
long the line of
97-1-3
97-1-11
97-6-5
97-8-4
———
132-1-1
———
“Undertook”
Turning to page 98 of “Germany and the Germans,” we see that the second letter of the fifth line is b; the first letter of the first line is h; the ninth letter of the first line is u; the first letter of the fourth line is p; the eighth in the fifth line is e; and the third in the third line n. Sum total: B-h-u-p-e-n—a Hindu name. On page 97, the first few lines read:
“am willing to concede that perhaps even an emperor
has been baptized with the blood of the martyrs,
and feels himself to be in all sincerity the instrument
of God; if we are to understand this one, we must
admit so much.
“In certain ...” etc.
Thus 97-1-3 is w, 97-1-11 is o, 97-6-5 is r, 97-8-4 is K; total w-o-r-k. 132-1-1 is I. Our translation reads therefore: