THE INSIDE STORY OF WERNER HORN
AND
THE FIRST GLIMPSE OF THE SHIP BOMBS
The real mystery in the case of Werner Horn is this: Who was the
man in Lower 3? (If he had only known----!) Because, except for
this one missing fact, the story of Werner Horn is as clear as day.
It is the story of a brave man, too honest to lie with a straight
face, who was used by the villainous Von Bernstorff and Von Papen
only after they had lied without a quiver, on at least three vital
points, to him. He meant to fight the enemy of his country as a
soldier fights, and they cynically sent him on an errand which
they meant should be an errand of miscellaneous crime, including
murder. He was to go to a felon’s death for this one of the many
devilish plots they were concocting against American lives, while
they lived in luxury in Washington and lied with smiling faces
to the representatives of the people whose hospitality they were
betraying. There have been few more despicably outrageous, more
cold-blooded crimes than this--except that other one (also of their
devising) in the ship bombs case; but that is another story, to be
told later.
The story of Werner Horn begins in Guatemala. Horn was the manager
of a coffee plantation at Moka. He had seen ten years of service
in the German Army when, in 1909, he got a furlough from the
authorities in Cologne permitting him to go to Central America
for two years. This furlough writes him down as an “Oberleutnant
on inactive service.” That means, roughly, that he was a first
lieutenant of the German Army, out of uniform but subject to call
ahead of all other classes of men liable for military duty. Then
came the war.
Two hours after word of “The Day” reached Moka, Werner Horn
was packed and on his way to Germany. From Belize he sailed to
Galveston, where he spent two weeks looking in vain for passage.
Then on to New York, where he tried for a month to sail. Finding
that impossible, he went to Mexico City and there learned that
another man in Guatemala had his job. He had just found another
one, on an American coffee plantation at Salto de Aguas, in
Chiapas, and was about to go there by launch from Frontera, when
he got a card telling him to try again to get to Germany. By
December 26th he was back in New Orleans, and a few days later he
was lodging in the Arietta Hotel on Staten Island.
[Illustration: HORN’S APPLICATION FOR A FURLOUGH
Issued by the military authorities of Cologne, on the Rhine near
the Dutch border, permitting him to leave Germany for two years.
The furlough was later extended, as Horn was gone nearly five years
before the war broke out]
Now began a series of conferences with Von Papen. Horn was afire
with honest zeal to serve the Fatherland, and Von Papen was
unscrupulous as to how he did it. When he could not get passage for
him back to Germany, Von Papen determined to use this blond giant
(Horn is six feet two) for another purpose. He then unpacked his
kit of lies.
A little after the midnight of Saturday, December 29, 1914, a big
German in rough clothes and cloth cap entered the Grand Central
Station carrying a cheap brown suitcase. A porter seized it from
him with an expansive smile. The smile faded long before they
reached Car 34 of the one o’clock New Haven train to Boston. “Boss,
yoh sho’ has got a load o’ lead in theah,” was his puffing comment
as he got his tip. The German grinned, and a few minutes later
swung the suitcase carelessly against the steam-pipes under Lower
3, and clambered to the upper. A suitcase full of dynamite--and the
man in Lower 3 slept on.
Several people on the Maine Central train that left North Station,
Boston, at eight o’clock the next morning, afterward identified
the big blond German who left it at Vanceboro, Maine, at six
forty-five that evening. None of them recalled his baggage.
[Illustration: WERNER HORN’S PLAN OF ESCAPE
The pencilled line left from Vanceboro and down to Princeton was
Horn’s own mark upon the map of the route by which he hoped to
escape after he had blown up the international bridge. He did not
know the country and hence did not calculate upon the wilderness he
was planning to traverse, unguided, in the dead of a New England
winter. The pencilled ring around St. John, N. B., gives the cue
to his purpose in blowing up the bridge--St. John was a port from
which the war supplies from America to Great Britain could be
shipped for use against the Germans]
But trust the people in a country town to catalogue a stranger.
Horn went directly from the train about his errand; which was
reckoning without the Misses Hunter and the twelve-year-old
Armstrong boy. They saw him toiling through the snow, marked the
unusual weight of his suitcase from the way he carried it, saw him
hide it in the woodpile by the siding--and then they talked. Soon
Mr. Hunter hurried to the Immigration Station and told an inspector
there about the suspicious stranger. The inspector hurried down the
railroad track and met Horn returning from the international bridge
that spans the St. Croix River a few hundred feet away. He asked
where the stranger was going. Horn’s reply was to ask the way to a
hotel. When his name was next demanded he gave it as Olaf Hoorn,
and said he was a Dane. The inspector then asked what he was in
town for, and Horn said he was going to buy a farm. And, finally,
the inspector asked him where he came from. When Horn explained in
detail that he had come from New York via Boston the inspector,
with a true legal mind, decided that he “had no jurisdiction,” and
let it go at that. His concern in life was with “immigrants” from
Canada--and this man had proved that he had come from “an interior
point.” Hence he could do nothing officially, for the moment.
But the Misses Hunter’s sharp eyes saw the stranger, after this
interview, recover the suitcase from the woodpile before going
on to Tague’s Vanceboro Exchange Hotel for the night. The host at
the hotel was not on duty when Horn registered, and never saw his
baggage, but his mother, who happened to have occasion to enter
Horn’s room in his absence on the following Monday, noticed the
suitcase, tried to lift it, and wondered how any one could carry
it. Horn was a marked man from the moment he arrived in the town.
Evidently he sensed the suspicions he aroused, for he made no
effort to proceed about his business that night, or the next. But
shortly before eight o’clock on Monday night Horn gave up his room
and said he was going to Boston on the eight o’clock train. He took
his suitcase and disappeared. Instead of going to the station, he
hid out in the woods until the last train for the night should go
by. At eleven he was encountered in the railroad cut above the
bridge by an employee of the Maine Central Railroad, who got such
unsatisfactory answers to his questions that he talked the matter
over with a fellow workman in the roundhouse, though without
results. So Werner Horn marched out alone upon the bridge--alone
except for his cigar and his suitcase, the spirit of the Fatherland
upon him and the lying words of Von Papen in his ears.
He had need of the fire of patriotism to warm his blood and to
steel his courageous spirit. It was a black winter night. The
mercury was at thirty degrees below zero, the wind was blowing at
eighty miles an hour, the ice was thick upon the cross-ties beneath
his stumbling feet. The fine snow, like grains of flying sand, cut
his skin in the gale.
But Werner Horn was a patriot and a brave man. Von Papen had told
him that over these rails flowed a tide of death to Germans--not
only guns and shells, but dum-dum bullets that added agony to
death. He must do his bit to save his fellow soldiers; must help
to stop the tide. Destroy this bridge, and for a time at least
the cargoes would be kept from St. John and Halifax. It was a
short bridge, but a strategic one, and the most accessible. So
Horn stumbled on. He must get beyond the middle. Von Papen had
not urged it, but Werner Horn had balked about this business from
the first--not through lack of courage (he would go as a soldier
upon the enemy’s territory and there fire his single shot at any
risk against their millions), but he would not commit a crime for
anybody, not even for the Kaiser; nor would he trespass on the soil
of hospitable America. Hence on each sleeve he wore the colours
of his country: three bands, of red and white and black. Von
Papen had beguiled him into thinking these transformed him from a
civilian to a soldier. Twice as he struggled through the darkness
he slipped and fell, barely saving himself from death on the ice
below. Each time he clung doggedly to his suitcase full of dynamite.
Suddenly a whistle shrieked behind him, and in a moment the glaring
eyes of an express train’s locomotive shone upon him. Horn clutched
with one hand at a steel rod of the bridge and swung out over black
nothingness, holding the suitcase safe behind him with the other.
The train thundered by, and left him painfully to recover his
uncertain footing on the bridge. The second of Von Papen’s lies had
been disproven.
He had promised Horn that the last train for the night would have
been gone at this hour, for Horn had said he would do nothing that
would put human lives in peril. But Horn thought only that Von
Papen had misunderstood the schedules.
A few moments after he had got this shock, another whistle screamed
at him from the Canadian shore, and again he made his quick,
precarious escape by hanging out above the river by one hand and
one foot. He now decided that all schedules had been put awry, and
that he must change his plans to be sure of not endangering human
beings. To accomplish this, he cut off and threw away most of the
fifty-minute fuse that he had brought along, and left only enough
to burn three minutes. No train would come sooner than this, and
then the explosion would warn everybody of the danger.
In doing this, Horn deliberately cut himself off from hope of
escaping capture. He had planned such an escape--an ingenious plan,
too, except that it was traced on a railroad time-table map of the
Maine woods in winter by a strange German fresh from the tropics.
He had meant to walk back one station westward, then cut across the
open country to the end of a branch line railroad, and then ride
back to Boston on another line than that on which he had come east
to Vanceboro. It was a clever scheme, except that it missed all the
essentials, such as the thirty miles of trackless woods, the snow
feet-deep upon the level, the darkness of winter nights, and the
deadly cold. Still, Horn childishly believed it feasible, and he
did a brave and honourable thing to throw it overboard rather than
to cause the death of innocent people.
He fixed the dynamite against a girder of the bridge above the
Canadian bank of the river, adjusted the explosive cap, and
touched his cigar to the end of the three-minute fuse. Then he
stumbled back across the gale-swept, icy bridge, made no effort
to escape, and walked back into the hotel in Vanceboro, with both
hands frozen, as well as his ears, his feet, and his nose. A moment
after he entered the hotel the dynamite exploded with a report that
broke the windows in half the houses in the town and twisted rods
and girders on the bridge sufficiently to make it unsafe but not
enough to ruin it.
Everybody in Vanceboro was aroused. Host Tague, of the Exchange
Hotel, leaped from his bed and looked out of the window. Seeing
nothing, he struck a light and looked at his watch, which said
1:10, and then he hurried into the hall, headed for the cellar, to
see if his boiler had exploded. In the hall he faced the bathroom.
There stood Werner Horn, who mildly said “Good morning” to his
astonished host. Tague returned the greeting and went back to get
his clothes on. He had surmised the truth, and Horn’s connection
with it. When he came back out into the hall, Horn was still in
the bathroom, and said: “I freeze my hands.” Small wonder, after
five hours in that bitter gale. Tague opened the bathroom window
and gave him some snow to rub on his frozen fingers, and then
hurried to the bridge to see the damage. He found enough to make
him press on to the station on the Canadian side, and then come
back to Vanceboro, so that trains would be held from attempting to
cross it.
[Illustration: WERNER HORN’S COMMISSION IN THE GERMAN ARMY (front)]
[Illustration: (back) Found in an ironbound trunk in his room in
the Arietta Hotel on Staten Island. His position was approximately
that of a first lieutenant, returned to civil life, but of the
class first subject to duty in the event of war]
When he got back to his hotel, Horn asked to have again the room he
had given up that evening. Tague had let it to another guest, but
gave Horn a room on the third floor. There the German turned in and
went to sleep.
Meanwhile, human nature as artless as Werner Horn’s was at work in
Vanceboro. The chief officer of law thereabouts was “John Doe,” a
deputy sheriff, chief fish and game warden, and licensed detective
for the state of Maine. His later testimony doubtless would have
had a sympathetic reader in the Man in Lower 3 (if only he had
known): “I was asleep at my home, which is about three or four
hundred feet from the bridge; heard a noise about 1:10 A. M., which
I thought was an earthquake, a collision of engines, or a boiler
explosion in the heating plant. The noise disturbed me so that I
could not get to sleep. (And the Man in Lower 3 slept on!) I got up
in the morning at about half-past five; met a man who said they had
blown up the bridge.”
But while Mr. Doe was about his disturbed slumbers, the
superintendent of the Maine Central Railroad was making a
Sheridan’s Ride through the night by special train from
Mattawamkeag, fifty miles away. He, at least, was on the job--he
had brought along a claim agent of the road, to take care of
damage suits. When they reached the Vanceboro station, they sent
for Mr. Doe, and when he arrived at seven o’clock, Canada also was
represented by two constables in uniform. This being a case for Law
and not for Commerce, Mr. Doe took charge. He told the others that
the first thing to do was to cover all the stations by telegraph
and arrest all suspicious parties. Then he led his posse to the
hotel.
There Mr. Tague told them about the German peacefully asleep
upstairs. He led them to the upper floor and pointed out the room,
but went no farther, as he thought there might be shooting. His
sister, being of the same mind, sought the cellar. Doe knocked upon
the door.
“What do you want?” called Werner Horn.
“Open the door,” commanded Doe.
The door swung open, and the big German sat back on his bed. Then
he saw the Canadian uniforms and jumped for his coat. Doe shoved
him back, and one of the constables got the coat, and the revolver
in it. When Doe told Horn he was an American officer, Horn stopped
resisting and said:
“That’s all right, then. I thought you were all Canadians. I
wouldn’t harm any one from here.”
Doe handcuffed Horn to his own arm and took him to the Immigration
Station to make an inquiry. Here Horn told a straightforward story,
but with one embellishment that caused more excitement than all
the rest, and that ultimately revealed his own character in its
clearest light. This story was that he had not brought the dynamite
in his suitcase, but that, by prearrangement, he had carried the
empty suitcase to the bridge and there met an Irishman from Canada,
to whom he gave the password “Tommy,” and that this Irishman had
given him the explosive and then disappeared.
“Tommy” immediately became a sensation who overshadowed Horn
himself. Canadian officers scoured the Canadian shore for days,
looking for this dangerous renegade, and Americans were as zealous
on our side of the river.
But Horn himself was in a dangerous position. Lynching bees were
discussed on both sides of the river, and probably only prompt
action by the local authorities prevented one. Both to hold Horn
for more serious prosecution and to get him out of peril, he
was charged in the local police court with malicious mischief in
breaking the window glass in one of the houses in Vanceboro; he
pleaded guilty and was at once removed to Machias, the county seat,
to serve thirty days in jail. Five days after the explosion, the
Department of Justice had Horn’s signed confession, taken in person
by the Chief of the Bureau of Investigation.
It was in the giving of this confession that Werner Horn revealed
himself most fully as a patriot and a gentleman, and, all
unconsciously, revealed that the cynical Von Papen was a liar, a
cold-blooded criminal, and, for the second time in the first months
of the war, the secret hand behind the violations of American
neutrality instigated through him and Bernstorff at the behest of
the Imperial German Government.
When the government agent saw Horn in jail at Machias, and warned
him that what he said would be used against him in proceedings
for his extradition into Canada, or prosecution here, Horn told
the same straightforward story, with the same embellishment
about “Tommy.” “I met a white man,” so Horn said, “whom I had
never seen before, but who was about 35 or 40 years of age clean
shaven--‘Tommy’--I was told to say ‘Tommy’ when I met him--I
cannot say anything that would involve the consulate or the
embassy--Germany is at war--I received, however, an order which was
from one who had a right to give it, a verbal order only--received
it two or three days before leaving New York for Vanceboro.”
Later he said: “I cannot speak of the rank of the man who gave
the orders--I cannot even say that he was an officer. No one was
present when the orders were given me in New York City. I cannot
tell more because it was a matter for the Fatherland. I would
rather go to Canada [where he knew they wanted to lynch him] than
to tell more about my orders--this would be impossible--at least
until after the war is over.”
Horn admitted he had met Von Papen several times at the German Club
in New York City, but no art could compel him to admit that he had
got his orders from him. But, as the agent noticed, his manner gave
his words the lie; and whenever he tried to tell anything that
was inaccurate he did so with great difficulty and embarrassment.
But finding him determined, at whatever risk, to withhold this
information, and determined, too, to stick to the absurd story
about “Tommy,” the agent wrote out by typewriter a statement of
the facts as he had given them for Horn to sign.
Horn read the statement over and said that he would sign it. Then
the agent took out his pen, added a few items of new information,
and wrote these words:
“I certify on my honour as a German officer that the foregoing
statements are true,” and handed Horn the pen to sign it. Horn read
the last sentence and seemed nonplussed. He turned back through the
pages of the statement, blushed, scratched his head, and finally
grinned up at the agent with the one word:
“Tommy.”
The agent grinned in turn:
“You mean it’s all right except for Tommy?”
“Yes.”
Horn would not sign a lie and pledge his honour it was truth. A
close scrutiny of the cut on page 57 will show where the period
after the word “true” has been erased, so that the sentence could
go on to say, before he signed it, “except as to ‘Tommy’--that I
did not buy the nitro-glycerine but received it in New York and
took it with me in the suitcase. I cannot say from whom I received
it. Werner Horn.”
[Illustration: WERNER HORN’S CONFESSION (first page)]
[Illustration: (last page) In which he unintentionally revealed
the guilty purposes of Von Papen to violate American neutrality
and commit a crime against human life, and which Horn refused to
sign upon his “honour as a German officer” until it was altered to
remove the fantastic tale about a confederate in Canada. By looking
closely the erasure of the period after the word “true” can be
seen, made to permit this correction to be added]
If Werner Horn had been less honest, less humane, the black
wickedness of his Imperial masters would have been less clearly
visible. He was the one who was punctilious to respect American
neutrality--while they flouted it. He was the one who risked
his own life rather than imperil others--while they sat snug in
Washington devising means to place on the rudders of American ships
the bombs that would add another horrid chapter to their crimes.
A mere criminal at Vanceboro might have been accused of exceeding
their criminal instructions--Werner Horn refused to carry out the
instructions they had given.
One cannot forbear to publish here a humorous incident in this
case, in no way related to its immediate currents, but so
characteristic of the American attitude in general at that time.
Here was a drama of international politics, fertilizing the germs
of war--the seeds of our own entrance into the conflict, with its
present expenditures of billions in treasure and its prospective
expenditure of human blood and tears. Into this epic picture walks
a Yankee trader with a bottle of liniment for frost bite in his
hand, and asks for a “testimonial.” It is significant, because
it was a faithful miniature of America at large in February,
1915--asleep to the perils of its “isolation,” but wide awake to
the main chance in war-begotten trade. Well could Von Papen and
Von Bernstorff, well could the Kaiser in Berlin, afford to smile a
little longer, and marvel again at a people still “so stupid.”
But the American Government was on still other German plotters’
trails. They were not asleep, nor stupid. Even while they went
through the long, legal processes in which German intrigue tried
in vain to save Werner Horn from delivery to Canadian justice (and
Horn was supplied with good counsel and every facility for making
his defence), among the Yankee traders there was alert activity
as well as dormant patriotism. The way in which the Department of
Justice, through these merchants, lawyers, doctors, men of the
“main chance,” soon had a network of special agents in every city,
town, and hamlet in the country, is one of the cleverest pieces of
American Government detective work born of the war.