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.
Mr. Rathom, who has enough to laugh over at the expense of
Deutschland-über-alles for the rest of his life, has not shown to the
world more than one-twentieth of his mirth-provoking materials. But how
we do wish that by hook or by crook William the Witless might be told
just how stupid his diplomatic representatives really were, and how
much their stupidity helped the Allies.
It has been said that liars need long memories; and it can safely be
added that they also need as much intelligence as pet monkeys. A rogue
who pays his fellow rogues =by checks on his bank account= is utterly
hopeless. The only proper place for him is the cooling room of an
asylum for idiots.
The playgrounds of the great American schoolboy have produced many a
nugget of worldly wisdom. One of them is the unanswerable admonition
that "Cheating never thrives."
All mankind hates treachery under the cloak of friendship. After
Boy-Ed, Papen, Bernstorff, Dumba and Albert, what will we think of the
Germans and Austrians who are sent to us after the war, to represent
their governments? How can Americans regard them as anything else
than spies and traitors of the same brands as their predecessors,
who will lie to us, and knife us in the back as often and as deeply
as the interests of their governments may seem to require? All such
"diplomats" deserve to be hanged by the governments to which they are
sent. Fancy the next "His Excellency, the German Ambassador" being
presented to the President of the United States a few months from now,
shaking hands, and proffering "friendship"!