3. THE BLUNDER OF WORLD-WIDE TREACHERY.
While America was sound asleep in the lap of Peace, and England slumbered with only her sea eye open, Germany armed herself to the teeth, and planted throughout England, France, America, Belgium, Holland, Russia and India the most colossal spy-and-traitor system ever developed. She secretly armed her African colonies so that on receipt of the famous "Willie-is-ill" telegram, each one of her colonies instantly was ready to fight.
In 1911, while crossing Lake Tanganyika, Central Africa, on a steamer, an American lady said to a German officer who sat beside her at the dinner table, "Have you and your comrade been shooting?" "Not yet!" said the officer, significantly; whereat his brother officer laughed heartily, as if at a good joke. Later it became known that the business of those two officers was the supplying of machine guns to German East Africa. And still later it was learned that those guns were shipped to Dar-es-Salaam in piano-boxes, marked "Pianos." No wonder Dar-es-Salaam was so ready to begin fighting on August 2, 1914!
There are times when the blunderings of German "statesmen" are so crude and raw that, when they harm no one, they are comical. Even amid the horrors of war all America is laughing over the wholesale discomfiture and final undoing of Dr. Dumba, Papen, Boy-Ed (an anything-but-precocious Boy), and Bernstorff, by a restless American newspaper man with a taste for amateur detective work after amateur crooks.
One would naturally suppose that men officially designated by their wise and honorable government to play dirty tricks on the people of a friendly nation would at least have as much intelligence as ordinary horses and dogs. But, no; not so with that Austro-German galaxy of shining stars.
One lonesome and harmless American newspaper man, John R. Rathom, of the Providence Journal, had the gall to plant an employee in a secretarial position at Excellency von Bernstorff's elbow. Also, he put a bright American girl stenographer (with a red pencil) in the office of the Austrian Consul-General in New York. And not content with those outrages, he generously planted an office on each side of the German fake-passport factory in New York, instead of on one side only.
And it was a Providence Journal man who with most criminal carelessness changed portfolios with the astute Dr. Albert of Austria, and staged a fight in a street car,—without extra charge,—while that horrible mistake was being made. And the saddest part of it all is that nearly forty-eight long hours elapsed ere the lynx-eyed Doctor noticed the substitution, and made a fuss about it.
Mr. Rathom's most delightful story is of his girl stenographer sitting demurely on a big box of incriminating papers, just prior to its shipment to Germany, sharing her frugal lunch with the shrewd Papen, and dreamily drawing two large red hearts on the box-cover, to which the sentimental Von thoughtfully and tenderly added a red transfixing arrow. This spooning led to the cheap and easy identification of the box in Merrie England. It reads like a foolishly impossible romance; but the joke of it is, it is quite true.
"Oh, mon! but it was peetiful!"
With all their training in treachery, and education in plotting and lying and concealment, Dumba, Bernstorff, Papen, Boy-Ed and Albert were one and all the most stupid donkeys that ever came down the pike. Not one of them knew the first principles of the self-protection system that (temporarily) keeps expert liars and thieves and forgers from being caught. Just fancy keeping check-stubs, and receipts, and copies of letters, in lawless proceedings! Great is "German thoroughness"—in being caught with the goods by an amateur sleuth, acting on his own brass hook.