“Upon him rested the task of spending between $2,000,000 and $3,000,000
a week for German propaganda. He spent thirty millions at least in
secret agency work, also known by the uglier names of bribery,
sedition and conspiracy. He admitted that he wasted a half million.
“His methods were quiet and successful, and his participation in the
offenses against America’s peace might have passed unproven had he not
been engaged in a too-absorbing conversation one day in August, 1915,
upon a Sixth Avenue elevated train. He started up to leave the train
at Fiftieth Street, and carelessly left his portfolio behind him—to
the tender care of a United States Secret Service man. It contained
documents revealing his complicity in enterprises the magnitude of
which beggars the imagination. The publication of certain of those
documents awoke the slumbering populace to a feeling of chagrin and
anger almost equal to his own at the loss of his dossier. And yet he
stayed on in America, and returned with the ambassadorial party to
Germany only after the severance of diplomatic relations in 1917,
credited with expert generalship on the economic sector of the American
front.
“Germany’s military attaché to the United States was Captain Franz
von Papen. His mission was the study of the United States army. In
August, 1914, it may be assumed that he had absorbed most of the useful
information of the United States army, which at that moment was no
superhuman problem. In July of that year he was in Mexico, observing,
among other matters, the effect of dynamite explosions on railways.
He was quite familiar with Mexico. According to Admiral von Hintze he
had organized a military unit in the lukewarm German colony in Mexico
City, and he used one or more of the warring factions in the southern
republic to test the efficacy of various means of warfare.
[Illustration:
© _Bain._