Donald Thomas - Sherlock Holmes and the King’s Evil

In order that the plan did not seem too easily revealed, it was allowed to appear that the author of the feature had got the wrong end of the stick, as Holmes put it, and that he believed the East Coast was being prepared against an attack by the Germans. Officers of the German High Command knew that they did not intend to invade Eastern England. Therefore they were bound to assume that the journalist had got the rumour wrong and that it must be the British who were going to attack Belgium. In the confusion, they had felt compelled to switch an entire division or so to the defence of the empty sands round Ostend.

Both sides were now changing ciphers with greater frequency, every day on the stroke of midnight. It was a race which Holmes was prepared to run. Before the end of the year, he penetrated the most complex of all, the German diplomatic code. This was, in truth, a gift from the Kaiser’s vice-consul in Persia. The unfortunate diplomat had fled in his pyjamas, abandoning his luggage, after witnessing a failed German attack on the Abadan oil pipeline. This paved the way for our final victory in “the war of ghosts and shadows.”

By the autumn of 1916, the neutral nations included Holland, Latin America and, most significantly, the United States. Many in the Admiralty and the War Office spoke wistfully of a new order of things. To put it plainly, they meant the entry of the United States into the war on the Allied side.

Homes “drudged” by day, as he called it, and read by night. Increasingly his thoughts seemed to be elsewhere. One evening, he was occupied by a history of the Russo-Japanese war of 1904, when Britain had backed Japan against Russian expansion in the Pacific. In the outcome, a primitive Asiatic nation had defeated a great European power.

I noticed later what Holmes had written in the margin.

“ Japan will remain our ally in the present war until she has acquired Germany ’s possessions in China and the Pacific. If ever the war should go against us, it will be in her interest to turn her eyes upon the possessions of Britain and the United States in the Far East.”

It was a cynical but not impossible conclusion.

A day or two later he was absorbed by John Reed’s account of the 1910 Mexican revolution, Insurgent Mexico. What had we to do with that? Mexico ’s recent history seemed to me no more than a chronicle of one tyrannical revolutionary succeeding another, by courtesy of Pancho Villa and his bandits. Next evening, while he was engaged at his work-table, I saw that he had jotted a note in the margin of this book as well. “ United States military strength 40,000. Three-quarters of these with General Pershing in Mexico or on the frontier.”

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.