"Dear Papen: A secret agent who returned from Washington this evening made the following statement: 'The Washington people are very much excited about von Papen and are having a constant watch kept on him. They are in possession of a whole heap of incriminating evidence against him. They have no evidence against Count B. and Captain B-E (!).'"
And Boy-Ed, a trifle optimistically, perhaps, added:
"In this connection I would suggest with due diffidence that perhaps the first part of your telegram is worded rather too emphatically."
Von Papen was a man of war, a Prussian, the Feldmarschal of the Kaiser in America. In appearance he bespoke his vigor: he was well set up, rawboned, with a long nose, prominent ears, keen eyes and a strong lower jaw. He was energetic in speech and swift in formulating daring plans. In those first frantic weeks after the declaration of war he reached out in all directions to snap taut the strings that held his organization together--German reservists who had been peaceful farmers, shopkeepers or waiters, all over the United States, were mobilized for service, and paraded through Battery Park in New York shouting "Deutschland, Deutschland ueber alles!" to the strains of the Austrian hymn, while they waited for Papen's orders from a building near by, and picked quarrels with a counter procession of Frenchmen screaming the immortal "Marseillaise." Up in his office sat the attaché, summoning, assigning, despatching his men on missions that were designed to terrorize America as the spiked helmets were terrorizing Belgium at that moment.
And he, too, failed. Although von Papen marshaled his consuls, his reservists, his thugs, his women, and his skilled agents, for a programme of violence the like of which America had never experienced, the military phase of the war was not destined for decision here, and there is again something ironical in the fact that the arrogance of Captain von Papen's outrages hastened the coming of war to America and the decline of Captain von Papen's style of warfare in America.
The Kaiser's naval attaché at Washington was Karl Boy-Ed, the child of a German mother and a Turkish father, who had elected a naval career and shown a degree of aptitude for his work which qualified him presently for the post of chief lieutenant to von Tirpitz. He was one of the six young officers who were admitted to the chief councils of the German navy, as training for high executive posts. In the capacity of news chief of the Imperial navy, Boy-Ed carried on two highly successful press campaigns to influence the public on the eve of requests for heavy naval appropriations, the second, in 1910, calling for 400,000,000 marks. He spread broadcast through cleverly contrived pamphlets and through articles placed in the subsidized press, a national resentment against British naval dominion. His duties took him all over the world as naval observer, and he may be credited more than casually with weaving the plan-fabric of marine supremacy with which Germany proposed in due time to envelop the world.