Thus, a year before she entered war, the United States supplied the scene of one of the outstanding intrigues of the war. How voluble was Adolph Pavenstedt in confessing his services as intermediary for the Kaiser; Pavenstedt was interned in an American prison camp ... a rather comfortable camp. Hugo Schmidt, who on his own testimony was the accredited manipulator of enormous sums for the German government, was ingenuous to a degree in his denial of any knowledge of what the money paid Bolo was to be used for; Schmidt was interned. Bolo was shot.
Revolution in India, a battle royal on the Central American isthmus, a revolution in Mexico, uprisings in the West Indies, a separate peace in France--these were ambitious undertakings. For three years they were cleared through Washington, D. C. We must accept that fact not alone with the natural feeling of chagrin which it evokes, but with an eye to the future. We should congratulate our smug selves that our country was concerned only with the processes of these intrigues, and was not subject directly to their results. And then we Americans should ask ourselves whether it is not logical that, our country having served as the most fertile ground for German demoralization of other nations, we should be on our guard for a similar plot against ourselves.
That plot will not come noisily, obviously. It will be no crude effort to suggest that "American troops are suffering at the hands of the French high command." It will not be phrased in terms which reek of the Wilhelmstrasse--earnest, plodding, grotesque German polysyllables. The German knows that an army must depend upon the hearts of its people, and he reasons: "I shall attack the hearts of the people, and I believe that if it is a good principle to attack my enemy from the rear through his people, it is also a good principle to attack his people from the rear. The heart is as near the back as it is the front, _nicht wahr_?" The plot will seem, in its early stages, part and parcel of our daily life and concern; we shall not see the German hand in it; the hand will be so concealed as not even to excite the enthusiasm of the German-American, often a good danger-signal. It will involve institutions and individuals whom we have trusted, and we shall take sides in the controversy, and we shall grow violently pro-this and anti-that. We shall grow sick of the wretchedness of affairs, perhaps, and we shall lose heart. That is precisely what Germany most desires. That is what Germany is striving for. That is why the nobility of our citizenship carries with it the obligation of vigilance. It is in the hope that each one of us Americans may learn how Germany works abroad, that we may be better prepared for her next step here, that this narrative has been written.