Page:Britain's Deadly Peril.djvu/120

 whiskers which German naval officers traditionally affect. When he took up his duties at Washington he was a man of about forty-five, and ranked in the German navy as lieutenant-commander. But his career of usefulness as Naval Attaché, with an office in the shipping quarters of New York, has been irretrievably impaired by the charges of Stegler, whose wife produced many letters in proof of the allegation that the attaché was the mainspring of a conspiracy to secure English-speaking spies for service to be rendered by German submarines and other German warships on the British side of the Atlantic.

The plot, exposed in every paper in the United States, was a low and cunning one, and quite in keeping with the methods of the men of "Kultur." Mrs. Stegler, a courageous little woman from Georgia, saw how her husband—an export clerk in New York—was being drawn into the German net as a spy, and she stimulated her husband to give the whole game away. To the United States police, Stegler, at his wife's suggestion, was perfectly frank and open. He exposed the whole dastardly plot. He stated that Captain Boy-Ed engineered the spy-plot that cost Lody his life, and declared that in his dealings with the attaché the matter of going to England as a spy progressed to a point where the money that was to be paid to his wife for her support while he was in England was discussed. Captain Boy-Ed, Stegler went on to say, agreed to pay Mrs. Stegler £30 a month while he was in England, and furthermore agreed that if the British discovered his mission and he met the fate of Lody, Mrs. Stegler was to receive £30 a month from the German Government as long as she lived!