Authors: Andrew Williams
I took passage at once and arrived in Santander on October 13. Unfortunately the Spanish flu has taken such a toll on the country’s railway service that it was another forty-eight hours before I was able to catch a train to the capital. Madrid was in the grip of the disease; its trams have stopped running, its buildings are draped in black, the church bells toll from dawn to dusk and the people walk its streets in fear. A hundred thousand Spaniards have died already, and one of the many thousands more infected was Senor Alberto Donde. Our naval attaché, de Saumarez, had learnt from his contact in the Guardia Civil that Donde had admitted himself to the city’s German Sanatorium.
I arrived at the hospital with fruit and a book at approximately five o’clock in the afternoon and was told Senor Donde was very ill and unable to receive visitors. Fortunately the German nursing staff were too hard pressed to be vigilant and with the help of a Spanish orderly I was able to locate Donde. The sanatorium was full of very sick people but Donde had been allocated a private room.
Although much changed, I recognised the face of the man in the bed at once. Dr Dilger was asleep, struggling to breathe, his fevered skin tinged with blue and there was blood on his pillow. It took no particular knowledge of the disease to see that he was dangerously ill. After a few minutes he opened his eyes and saw me there. I didn’t expect him to recognise me because I was wearing a mask but he gave a short laugh and said: ‘De Witt.’ I said that I was sorry to see him in such a state, a remark he found amusing. Throughout our short conversation his eyes never left my face. They were larger than I remembered because his cheeks were thinner and drawn tightly from the cheekbones. He said very little because every word was an effort, his speech punctuated by a cough that racked his body and left him clutching at his abdominal muscles. It was impossible not to feel sorry for the man.
I wasted no time in explaining to him the purpose of my visit. The war was almost over and his country’s Secret Service was searching for him with the intention of bringing him to trial for treason. He interrupted me to point out painfully but forcefully that he was not an American citizen, but a subject of His Imperial Majesty the Kaiser. That was as maybe, I said, but Germany would not be able to protect him, that in peacetime he would be an embarrassment, a much easier one to eradicate than the stench he had left in the cellar of his house in Chevy Chase. Something sad in his expression suggested he was quite aware of his situation.
As instructed, I offered him immunity from prosecution in exchange for information about his activities and the biological campaign. This offer provoked a fit of coughing and a nosebleed and it was a while before he was well enough to speak. Britain and America were ‘dishonourably starving the German people into submission’, he said, but its armies were undefeated and a time would come when they would fight again and ‘secure the final victory’. Nothing would induce him to serve the enemies of the Fatherland, nothing, he declared with great feeling. I reminded him that his brother and sisters were in America and might be tried for treason, but if he agreed to my terms they would be offered protection too. Before he could answer, a German nurse entered and tried to drive me from the room. As far as Dilger was concerned, our conversation was over and he had rejected my proposition out of hand, but I asked him to consider his precarious position and that of his family and left him an address where he could send a message. I said that come what may I would visit him again in the morning and wished him a peaceful night.
Although I was with him for only fifteen minutes I was left with the impression that he enjoyed an abiding hatred of Great Britain and would ever be her implacable enemy; for the country of his birth he felt nothing but contempt. He cut rather a sad figure, consumed not only by the disease but by his anger. It was half past five in the afternoon when I left the sanatorium. Walking out to the street in search of a taxicab I noticed a German diplomatic motor car parked at its gates. Only later was I able to identify the man at its wheel as the naval attaché, Commander Krohn.
I spent the evening at our embassy in the company of de Saumarez, who arranged for a car to take me back to the sanatorium first thing the following morning. But at six o’clock I was woken by the lieutenant hammering on my bedroom door. His police contact had informed him by telephone that Senor Donde had died of the Spanish influenza a few hours before. His death was sudden but it did not strike me as strange. I made my way to the sanatorium without delay, in the rather forlorn hope of retrieving some intelligence from his personal effects. I explained to the duty doctor and a hospital matron that I was an old comrade and friend who knew the late Senor Donde’s family well. The German naval attaché, Krohn, was with Senor Donde to the end, they said; he was making all the necessary arrangements, and they refused point-blank to let me see the body. I was in no doubt they had been schooled and were repeating their lines, and that they were very afraid. After a few minutes of fruitless wrangling they instructed a watchman to escort me from the sanatorium. A short time later, I climbed through a window at the side of the building and found my own way to Dilger’s room. But it was not his any longer: his body had gone and his bed had been allocated to another victim of influenza. Stopping a nurse in the corridor, I said I was Commander Krohn’s assistant at the embassy and would she please take me to Senor Donde’s body.
It was lying beneath a stained sheet in a makeshift mortuary with twenty others, the case containing his few belongings on the floor beneath the table. Pulling back the sheet, I confirmed it was the body of Anton Dilger. There were red fingermarks and signs of bruising about his neck consistent with strangulation. I cannot be certain but am of the view that Dilger’s last visitor was there to ease his passage, a simple task with one so weak. Commander Krohn was surely acting upon orders from Berlin, but the doctor may have hastened his end by mentioning my offer of protection for information. His case had been searched already, its contents thrown thoughtlessly back inside. I checked the seams of his clothes, his shaving kit, pulled the spines from his books; there was a photograph of the opera singer, Frieda Hempel; another of his father; and one of Dilger and a companion with horses – the inscription on the back: ‘With your nephew Peter on the farm’. The only other item of note was a decoration: the Iron Cross Second Class. A label on the case suggested it was to be sent to a Frau Elizabeth Lamey at an address in Berlin.
Anxious not to be discovered beside the body, I slipped out of the hospital and returned to the embassy where I sent a coded signal with the news of Dilger’s death to Director MI 1[c] at the SS Bureau and DNI at the Admiralty. The following day (October 18) Dilger was buried in a mass grave for victims of the influenza virus in one of the city’s cemeteries.
(signed)
Commander Sebastian Wolff RN Retd
The plot of
The Poison Tide
is drawn from real events and the lives of those who took part in them, a story of what was and might have been. For those who like to pull the threads of the history from the fiction, here is a brief outline of the unvarnished facts and some of my sources.
As the armies of the European powers marched into battle in the summer of 1914, Irish leaders in America met the German Ambassador and his military attaché to discuss support for a rebellion. The former British diplomat and humanitarian campaigner Sir Roger Casement was present at some of their meetings. Since leaving government service he had become a prominent supporter of Home Rule for his native Ireland.
With the intention of pressing Ireland’s cause in person, Casement left America in the autumn of 1914 and took passage to Germany. Adler Christensen travelled with him as his valet. Slipping through the British blockade of the Atlantic they reached Christiania, as Norway’s capital Oslo was called at that time. During their short stay in the city Christensen approached the British Legation and offered to betray Casement. He spoke to the minister at the Legation, Mansfeldt Findlay, and presented him with confidential papers including a German cipher for which he was paid a small amount. From their conversation with Christensen the British inferred his relationship with Casement was probably of ‘an improper character’. It was the first suggestion they received that Roger Casement was engaged in a homosexual relationship, an offence punishable with imprisonment at the time.
Christensen would later tell Casement and the German authorities that the British had taken him from a hotel lobby and interrogated him but he had refused to give them any information. For many details of Casement’s life, love and politics I drew on Brian Inglis’ biography,
Roger Casement.
Reinhard Doerries’ books
Prelude to the Easter Rising
and
Imperial Challenge
were a source for the German-Irish connection, as were
My Three Years in America
, the memoirs of the German ambassador in Washington, Count von Bernstorff.
In Berlin, Casement’s principal intelligence contact was Count Rudolf Nadolny of the General Staff. As the head of Section P, Nadolny was charged with masterminding covert operations against British and French interests in America and elsewhere around the world. Although the papers relating to Section P’s activities were destroyed at the end of the war, we know from coded telegrams sent to the German Embassy in Washington that Casement furnished the count with the names of Irish republicans who would be prepared to assist with ‘far-reaching sabotage in the United States’. In return Casement was allowed to visit prisoners of war in Germany and recruit his Irish Brigade, much as I relate in
The Poison Tide
.
Casement arrived in Berlin with great hopes, confident the Germans were ‘fighting for European civilisation at its best’. But isolated from comrades and decision-making in Ireland and America, and cast down by his inability to persuade his countrymen in the camps to join his brigade, he suffered an emotional collapse. In December 1915 he wrote with characteristic humanity that, ‘it is dreadful to think of all the world beginning the New Year with nothing but Death – killing and murdering wholesale, and destroying all that makes life happy . . . I feel very sad, and it has been the most unhappy Christmas I have ever spent.’ By then he had learnt from his friends in America that his ‘treasure’, Adler Christensen, had been spending money raised for their living expenses on a girlfriend.
Robert Monteith’s
Casement’s Last Adventure
offers a first-hand account of Casement’s time in Germany and his attempts to recruit an Irish Brigade. His friend, the Princess Blücher, wrote of Casement’s visits to her in
An English Wife in Berlin
. At the other end of the social scale Madeleine Doty’s
Short Rations
is a vivid account of the effect of the British blockade on the lives of the ordinary Berliners that she knew.
The news that a date had finally been set for a rising in Ireland reached Berlin on 17 February 1916. A telegram from the German Ambassador in Washington announced ‘revolution shall begin Easter Sunday’. The Irish requested up to 50,000 rifles, machine guns, field artillery and German officers. Count Nadolny offered only 20,000 rifles. Casement was landed from a U-boat on 20 April and arrested after only a few hours ashore. The trawler carrying his guns was intercepted by the Royal Navy. He was tried in London and condemned to death. To undermine the case of those seeking his reprieve, Captain Hall, the Director of Naval Intelligence, circulated salacious extracts from his diaries with details of payments made for sexual services and his descriptions of breathless encounters with young men he had met on diplomatic missions for His Majesty’s Government. For accounts of Casement’s execution at Pentonville Prison and the opinion of the public at home and abroad, I drew on newspaper reports, in particular the coverage of the
New York Times
.
The aristocrat at the heart of the German–Irish intrigue had lost patience with Casement long before the Easter Rising. By the spring of 1916 Count Nadolny’s principal concern was the sabotage campaign he was orchestrating against Allied interests in neutral America and on three other continents.
In the Prologue to
The Poison Tide
, Count Nadolny echoes German Staff thinking that the war would be unprecedented in its reach, fought not just by soldiers but by the people. ‘It will,’ the War Book of the German General Staff predicted, ‘destroy the total moral and material resources’ of the enemy. The conflict was framed in terms of a Darwinian struggle. ‘War gives a biologically just decision . . .’ the influential German general Friedrich von Bernhard wrote, ‘. . . not only a biological law, but a moral obligation, and, as such, an indispensable factor in civilisation.’ Or, as Count Nadolny predicts in my story, ‘victory will be secured by those who prove the fittest’. If victory was a ‘moral obligation’ then the means used to secure it were of little consequence. The British First Sea Lord, Admiral John Fisher, put it like this: ‘the essence of war is violence. Moderation in war is imbecility.’ And in this Total War everyone would play a part – scientists and doctors too.
Preparations for a German biological weapons programme seem to have begun in early 1915. Count Nadolny directed its operations for the General Staff, while Professor Carl Troester was responsible for the culturing of anthrax and glanders bacilli at the Military Veterinary Academy in Berlin. How and when Anton Dilger was recruited and why he agreed to risk his life serving German interests in his native America are matters of speculation. His involvement in the campaign, the help he received from his family, the house in Chevy Chase and the network of Albert, Hinsch and Hilken was much as I relate in
The Poison Tide
. To help my story I have changed the chronology of his activities in the United States, some of his family relationships, but above all the target of the campaign. There is no evidence to suggest Anton Dilger and his associates were intending to attack Allied soldiers or civilians, only the horses, mules and cattle they needed for the waging of the war.