Sherlock Holmes and the King's Evil: And Other New Tales Featuring the World's Greatest Detective

by Donald Thomas

  Counterfeit cipher messages must correspond in most details to subsequent events. It was the few significant variations which would plant false information in the intelligence bureau of the Wilhelmstrasse. On one occasion, at least, Admiral Beatty altered by two days the date on which he was to take the Home Fleet to sea on gunnery exercises, in order that this should verify the counterfeit version of the war code ciphers. It was a small price to pay for giving apparent authenticity to a masterpiece of deception.

  On the basis of false information fed to Berlin through the counterfeit cipher tables my friend engineered what became known sardonically in Room 40 as “The Sherlock Holmes Invasion of Belgium.” This was at a time when detachments of our troops were being withdrawn from the Western Front to reinforce the expeditionary force to Salonika. As Holmes remarked, it seemed desirable that the Germans should be induced to withdraw units of their own troops in return.

  In messages based on the new ciphers, the intelligence bureau of the Wilhelmstrasse was allowed to read an ingenious fiction of closely-guarded movements by our small naval craft on the eastern coast of England. Flat-bottomed boats of the kind used for landing troops on a sandy coast were being marshalled there. A further message contained an instruction to stop at short notice all cross-channel shipping between England and neutral Holland. The order would remain in force for a fortnight, so that merchant shipping should not compromise the movement of an invasion fleet on course for the coast of Belgium.

  These enciphered orders, based upon the counterfeit code and its appendix, then revealed details of an imminent invasion of that coast, in the rear of the German army in France. It was gratifying that the enemy’s High Command diverted some 20,000 men to the defence of the Belgian sands and dunes along the North Sea. Little by little, the Admiralty’s orders to an imaginary invasion fleet were received in Berlin. The vessels would sail in three groups, from Harwich, from Dover, and from the mouth of the Thames. The command for the temporary prohibition of sea traffic to Holland was authorised, though not yet issued.

  As a final persuasion of the truth of this story, a special edition of the Daily Mail was printed. This was done in consultation with Admiral Hall and the paper’s editor. It consisted of only twenty-four copies for sale in Holland, where it was routinely bought by German agents. The paper contained a front-page paragraph reporting “Great Military Preparations on the East Coast” and “Flat Bottomed Boats.” Within hours, this was followed by a further edition of the Mail with the whole story blacked out, as if the censor had intervened.

  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.”

  6

  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 Eng
land 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.

  During that Christmas season of 1916 and into the New Year, Sherlock Holmes was a stranger in Baker Street. If he slept in his own bed, he was gone before breakfast and absent until after midnight. Often he slept on a camp bed at the Old Admiralty Building, in a shabby panelled office allotted to him by Signals Intelligence. When grander accommodation was offered, he declined it. He worked alone in his “cubby hole” and there was little sign of him elsewhere in the building. The departure of the U-boats on their voyage kept our wireless interception busy day and night with ciphers to be decoded.

  The New Year brought us the freezing January of 1917. I had taken three days leave to go alone to the Exmoor cousins at Wiveliscombe. I returned to Baker Street very early one morning, before the office workers were at their desks. An overnight sleeper had brought me on the train from Taunton to Paddington. There was no sign of Holmes in our rooms. It appeared as if he had not been in the house since my departure. I summoned Mrs Hudson.

  “Why, Dr Watson, sir, I thought he must have gone down to Devon with you, after all. There’s been no sign of him here since you left.”

  I called a cab off the rank and set off at once for Whitehall. If Holmes had been away for three days and two intervening nights, it must be at Room 40. When I arrived, only those who had been on watch since the day before were still there and the new watch had not yet taken over. I went to the Watchkeeper’s Office. Here the printed intercepts arrived through pneumatic tubes. A row of clocks told the time across the world from London to New York to Tokyo and back to Berlin. Closed circuit telephone lines ran to the Director of Naval Intelligence, the War Office, Special Branch at Scotland Yard, and the Prime Minister in Downing Street. The waste-paper baskets were usually full of pages, crumpled and discarded during the long night, all of which would be emptied into the Horse Guards incinerator by Royal Marine sergeants.

  As a rule, several of the night watch would sit at their desks until 10am. In the morning light, their faces were pale from exhaustion and drawn from lack of sleep, eyes staring unnaturally bright from the dark shadows of their sockets. Even then, if necessary, they would wrestle for several hours more with some new naval or diplomatic cipher which had been changed at midnight in Berlin or Vienna.

  This morning, Holmes was in the Watchkeeper’s Office alone. He sat in a wooden chair, the desk before him clear, head back, arms folded and eyes closed. Yet he was not asleep. His eyelids lifted as I came in.

  “Where are the others?” I asked.

  “They have gone,” he said wearily, “There was no purpose in staying. They had no work to do.”

  “And the ciphers?”

  “They have vanished.” He stood up. “The diplomatic ciphers between Berlin and Washington, that it is say everything that matters in the present state of affairs, have disappeared from the ether. So far as we are concerned, they are neither being sent nor received. There have been no intercepts for the past two days.”

  I stared out of the window, across the mist of St James’s Park where two Jersey cows were grazing on the frosted grass that stretched between us and Buckingham Palace. I tried to make sense of what he had just said.

  “Surely the signals are being sent. Now, of all times, when Wilson and Zimmermann are trying to avoid war. Zimmermann must be in contact with Bernstorff and their Washington embassy.”

 
; Holmes sighed.

  “Not through his own signals. Negotiations between the two countries are at a delicate stage. The last messages that we received merely confirmed that Chancellor Bethmann-Holweg had agreed to consider President Wilson’s fourteen-point proposal for a general peace on all fronts. I have a private assurance of that, from Edward Bell at the American Embassy. Bell tells me in confidence that President Wilson authorised the use of America’s own diplomatic telegraph for transmission of German peace proposals in code.”

  “And what of the U-boat fleet heading for the American coastline?”

  “So far as we are concerned that has vanished off the map. So far as the Americans know, it never existed. For a time, it was communicating through Sayville, Long Island, disguised in the codes of commercial or steamship company telegrams. That has ceased.”

  “How will Berlin’s signals carry to Washington?”

  “During the present negotiations, Zimmermann has requested that his own telegrams to Robert Lansing at the State Department shall be transmitted from Berlin with those of the American Embassy, in the American diplomatic code. The route is through neutral cables from Berlin to Stockholm, then to Buenos Aires and so to Washington. Wilson’s Ambassador in Berlin, James Gerard, has agreed.”

  “To transmit German diplomatic intelligence? Preposterous!”

  “Perhaps. However Gerard and Secretary Lansing have accepted this, apparently on Wilson’s instructions. Still worse, they have accepted Zimmermann’s insistence that his telegrams to Bernstorff must be transmitted by the Americans in the usual German diplomatic code—undeciphered—so that they remain confidential to Bernstorff. These telegrams are forwarded, unexamined, from the State Department to the German Embassy. Lansing and Wilson have no idea of the contents. Negotiations between the two countries are too delicate to permit the risk of interception in London or elsewhere.”