For sitting and waiting was all we ever did. While my superiors were hesitating to give the decisive word the first Canadian contingent had left for England, and it had been decided to postpone the attempt till another crucial moment for Canada.
So the affair ended tamely, and the authorities of the United States never guessed how close they had come to being plunged into a complication which might have made the Trent affair or the Alabama affair of Civil War days seem small by comparison.
I have told you I was obviously in New York with a purpose, and hoped to be unable to escape the attentions of detectives and Federal Secret Service agents. They could have stopped us at any moment, and they did not. Why? Because they thought me an impractical fool, a theatrical plotter, harmless, and wanted to let me thoroughly compromise myself before they stopped me. If the true circumstances had been like the seeming ones, that would have been thoroughly sound policy, in accordance with the best detective tradition. But——
The real circumstances were very different. My men and I were a blind. We had our explosives and meant to use them if we could. But the serious dynamiting was not assigned to us at all, but to men already in Canada, men thoroughly organized, men whose names in no way suggested German sympathies and who were not at all suspected, and never would be as long as we made-to-order German plotters were at hand.
Imagine, then, what the effect would have been on public opinion if those orders had not been countermanded. The Welland Canal and others would have gone up, and we would have seemed to be the perpetrators—we, whom the United States Government might so easily have stopped if it had cared to. I have been concerned in various plots in my time, but never in one of a more devilish ingenuity than this one that failed, or failed in part.
III—THE MACHINATIONS OF THE GERMAN WAR OFFICE
I have tried, in writing here, not to speak with too much awe of myself and my doings. But now I crave your indulgence for a moment to call your attention to a very serious aspect of the affair. This plot of mine that seemed to fail, Werner Horn's attempt against the bridge at Vanceboro, the talk of German wireless stations in the woods of Maine, all the rumors of invasions of Canada planned by German reservists in the United States, were not so harmless and fruitless as they seemed. They served to stir up talk. They were meant to stir up talk and create the belief that some men of German descent, living in America, were less American in their loyalty than they were German.
Who made that talk? The German press agencies, under Franz von Papen. And why? To set all German-Americans apart from their neighbors by rendering their loyalty suspicious; to band all German-Americans together for self-protection, and so to dyke Germany from the rising tide of world-wide disapproval. It was the most coolly calculated betrayal I have ever come in contact with.
But it was not my part to register disapproval, as the film directors say. I came back to New York, reported to Capt. von Papen and received instructions to go to Germany, on the Bridgeman Taylor passport, and report in Berlin to Department III. B of the General Staff. Oct. 8, 1914, I sailed for Italy, carrying a letter of introduction from Capt. von Papen recommending me to the German Consul General at Genoa. He also gave me $200 to pay for my passage.
After the abandonment, at the last moment, of the plot to blow up the locks of the Welland Canal with dynamite paid for by Capt. Franz von Papen, at the time German Military Attaché at Washington, I sailed from New York for Genoa, Italy, whence the German Consul General sent me on to the Prussian Consulate in Munich. From there I went to Berlin, arriving Oct. 17, 1914. By order, I reported to the General Staff, Department III., B, to the Foreign Office and to the Colonial Office, being questioned at each place regarding my impressions of affairs on the North American Continent.