April II, 1 9 1 8 
Land & Water 
13 
German Plots Exposed 
Enter Werner Horn 
By French StrOther, Managing Editor, "The Woria-s work," New York 
No villainy icas loo bad to check the German Embassy at Washington 
in its plots against A merica, then a Neutral State. The attempt to blow 
up with dynamite the Vanceboro Bridge that divides the State oj Maine 
from Canada is described here. Von Papen, German Military Attache 
at Washington, again plays a leading part in this dramatic episode. 
THE real mys- 
tery 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 He with a straight face, who was used by the 
villainous von Bernstorff and von Papen only after they 
had hed 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 Wash- 
ington and lied with smihng 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 de- 
vising) 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 
tlie authorities in Cologne 
pennitting him to go to Central 
America for two years. This 
furlough writes him down as 
an " Oberleutnant on inactive 
service": which means, roughly, 
he was a first-Ueutenant 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 a 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 
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, in New York Harbour. 
Now began a series of conferences with vop 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 29th, 
1914, a big German in rough clothes and cloth cap, entered 
the Grand Central Station, carrying a cheap brown suit- 
case. A porter seized it from him with an expansive Muile. 
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 suit-case carelessly against the steam-pipes under 
Lower 3, and clambered to the upper. A suit-case full of 
dynamite — and the man in Lower 3 slept on I 
Several people on the Maine Central train that left North 
Station, Boston, at eight o'clock the next morning, after- 
wards identified the big blond German who left it at Vance- 
boro, Maine, at six forty-five that evening None of them 
recalled his luggage. 
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 
liis suit-case 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 Office and told 
an inspector there about the 
suspicious stranger. The in- 
spector hurried down the rail- 
road track and met Horn 
returning from the inter- 
national 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 an hotel. When his 
name was next demanded he 
gave it as Olaf Hoom, 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 insf>ector, 
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, 
sharp eyes saw the stranger, 
after this interview, recover the suit-case 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 luggage, but his mother, 
who happened to have occasion to enter Horn's room in his 
absence on the following Monday, noticed the suit-case, 
tried to lift it, and wondered how any one could carry it. 
Horn was a marked man from the moment he arrived in 
town. 
Evidently he sensed the suspicions he aroused, for he 
made no effort to proceed about his business that niglit, 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 suit-case and dis- 
appeared. Instead of going to the station, he liid out in 
the woods until the last train for the night should go by. 
At eleven he was encountered in the railroad cutting above 
Werner Horn 
He had just found another But the" Misses Hunter's 
The smile faded long before they reached car 34 of the one- the bridge by an employee of the Maine Central RaUroad 
