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.
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.
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.
(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.”
(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.