Anyone who read the newspapers knew how President Wilson had sent the U. S. Marines ashore at Vera Cruz. The USS Prairie had also intercepted the German cargo ship Ypringa. On board were 200 machine-guns and several tons of ammunition for Pancho Villa and Carranza’s troops, with thirty or forty German officers to train them. What had all that to do with Armageddon on the Western Front? I tried facetiousness.
“Let us hope, Holmes, that we shall be spared the sight of Pancho Villa and his bandits galloping down Baker Street with dripping swords!”
He said nothing but got up and went to the bureau. Unlocking a drawer, he took out a sheet of paper. I recognised it as the decryption of a diplomatic telegram. From the date, Holmes must have deciphered it within the last twenty-four hours. My eyes caught three sentences.
Despite the presence of General Pershing and the United States army upon their mutual frontier, the power to decide the Mexican question has passed from President Wilson to President Carranza, from General Pershing to Pancho Villa.
It was a contentious view but hardly a secret. I read what followed.
Whatever measures President Wilson may threaten in reply to our orders for unrestricted submarine warfare, his inclinations and those of the Congress are for peace. His scope for military action scarcely exists.
This was far more alarming. What were “our” orders? Who were “we?” There could only be one answer and it lay in the Wilhelmstrasse.
It is clearer and clearer that the American government has drawn back from breaking off relations with Germany because its military forces are not sufficient to face a war with Mexico.
A war between the United States and Mexico was surely a lunatic vision of the German High Command. But there was another line, edged with a chilling truth.
Without Tampico ’s oil-wells, the British fleet cannot leave Scapa Flow.
“A fevered brain in the Kriegsmarine!” I said contemptuously
“No, Watson. The brain is at this moment several thousand miles from Berlin.”
“Where does the cipher come from?”
“Our old friend number 13042,” he said quietly, “The German diplomatic code. It was employed yesterday by Count Bernstorff as Ambassador in Washington to communicate with Arthur Zimmermann at the Foreign Office in Berlin. It is Bernstorff’s weekly appreciation of what he calls The War Situation.’ The code and the cipher-tables are still those which came into our possession thanks to the German vice-consul at Abadan.” He put his pipe down and shrugged. “The message is only the latest of its kind.”
“But why should the Americans want to fight Mexico?”
Holmes’s eyebrows contracted, as if I had wilfully misunderstood him.
“They do not. It is Germany who wants America to fight Mexico. The Western Front is at a stalemate but Zimmermann, Bethmann-Holweg and the Kaiser believe that Germany can starve England into negotiation by unrestricted submarine warfare. Yet Germany knows she must not provoke America to fight her. If America is involved in Mexico, as three-quarters of her regular army already is, she can fight no war in Europe before Germany ’s U-boat campaign succeeds. Without a war in Mexico, American troops might land in France in a few months.”
“The whole thing is absurd.”
Holmes shrugged.
“I can only tell you that the ciphers from Bernstorff, which we have intercepted in the past few weeks, tell us that Mexico and Japan are already in negotiation with Berlin over the fruits of victory. Indeed, the Japanese battle-cruiser Asuma with troops on board is known to have anchored in the Gulf of California. I do not think that can be a lie told by an ambassador to his foreign minister.”
“But the German army cannot reach Mexico!”
He shook his head.
“In one sense, it is already there. Bernstorff boasts that the patriotic Union of German Citizens has twenty-nine branches in Mexico, supported by seventy-five branches of the veterans’ Iron Cross Society. He claims 50,000 willing recruits in the Americas and our own Foreign Office confirms it. The present 104 branches in Mexico include some 200 German officers who have entered the country recently as skilled workers but are ready to fight and are already training others. For that matter, there are also half a million Germans of military age in the United States.”
“They can hardly fight the rest of its population!”
“If only one in a thousand is prepared to sabotage ships, trains, and refineries, there will be 500 active agents. A score of time-bombs has gone off in the past few months on ships sailing from the eastern seaboard to Britain and France. Together with Mexico, it is enough to hold America back while we and the Germans fight it out.”
That night I lay awake and remembered a mad story I had heard a few years earlier. It was during gossip at my club, the Naval and Military. An officer of the Coldstreams, whom I knew only slightly, entertained us after dinner in the smoking-room with an account of how Japan, in an alliance with Mexico, might land troops on the very coast where the battle-cruiser Asuma was now said to have anchored. In a single spearhead to regain Mexico ’s “lost provinces,” the two countries would fall upon the peaceful and unsuspecting south-west of the United States. They would strike through Texas into Louisiana, invade the Mississippi valley and cut the nation in two before its inhabitants could rally. If Holmes was right this force, when reinforced by trained German troops, would easily outnumber Pershing’s 40,000 peacetime army. I was still awake when the winter morning dawned.
7
What became known as the Zimmermann crisis followed almost at once. A neutral Danish observer, the captain of a coaster returning home from the port of Kiel, passed information to our naval attaché in Copenhagen. The talk among officers of the German High Seas Fleet was of U-boat production already reaching the level necessary to sustain unrestricted warfare by mid-January 1917, six weeks away. An unknown number of the new submarines had sailed from Wilhelmshaven with stores, fuel and torpedoes for three months.
“Which can only mean operations off the American coastline from Florida to Maine,” said Holmes quietly, “No commander-in-chief would send his vessels to the Bay of Biscay or the Western Approaches for such a length of time and with no available port. It may take them three or four weeks to cross the Atlantic. They will be in the American coastal shipping lanes by early January, counting on a base in Mexico.”
There had been German threats to United States shipping before this. When the British liner Lusitania was sunk with the loss of many American lives, it had been all that President Wilson could do to hold the country back. America ’s own ships, like the Gulflight and the Sussex, had fallen victim to U-boats but still a fragile neutrality persisted. So far, each crisis had passed after a protest by Washington.
Woodrow Wilson continued to urge the combatants in the war to find a peace without victory, a peace without conquest, for the benefit of mankind. In this, Holmes was his supporter, though for more practical reasons. He argued that in a general war a million young Americans might die, for the sake of paltry gains on the Western Front, compared with a few dozen or a few hundred in the submarine war. It was a high price to pay for national pride.
As the latest U-boats sailed from Wilhelmshaven, the German diplomatic ciphers revealed that Arthur Zimmermann at the Foreign Office in Berlin, had been assured by the Kriegsmarine that Britain could be starved into negotiation in six or twelve months by the new fleet. Those in Whitehall who believed that American arms could yet change the course of war began to lose heart. It was surely too late.