Germany, let it be understood, wants South America and has wanted it for many years. Not as a possession—the Wilhelmstrasse is not insane—but as a customer and an ally. Like many other nations, Germany has seen in the countries of Latin America an invaluable market for her own goods and an unequaled producer of raw supplies for her own manufacturers. She has sought to control that market to the best of her abilities. But she has also done what no other European nation has dared to do—she has attempted to form alliances with the South American countries which, in the event of war between the United States and Germany, would create a diversion in Germany’s favor, and effectively tie the hands of the United States so far as any offensive action was concerned. There was just one stumbling block to this plan: the Monroe Doctrine. It was patent to German diplomats that such an alliance could never be secured unless the South American countries were roused to such a degree of hostility against the United States that they would welcome an opportunity to affront the government which had proclaimed that doctrine. And Germany, casting about for a means of making trouble, had encouraged the Japanese-Mexican alliance, hoping for intervention in Mexico and the subsequent arousal of fear and ill-feeling toward the United States on the part of the South American countries. _And Germany had been so anxious for the United States to intervene in Mexico that she had not only encouraged a treaty which would be inimical to your interests, but had made certain that knowledge of this treaty should come into your government’s hands by placing it there herself!_ The United States did not intervene and Germany for the moment failed. But Germany did not give up hope. The intrigue against the United States through Mexico had only begun. It has not ended yet. CHAPTER VI. _My letter again. I go to America and become a United States soldier. Sent to Mexico and sentenced to death there. I join Villa’s army and gain an undeserved reputation._ I must leave Europe behind me now and go on to the period embraced in the last five years. A private soldier in your United States Army—the victim of an attempt at assassination in stormy Mexico—major in the Mexican army; once again German secret agent and aide of Franz von Papen, the German Military Attaché in Washington; prisoner under suspicion of espionage, in a British prison, and finally your Government’s central witness in the summer of 1916, in a case that was the sensation of its hour—these are the roles I have been called on to play in that brief space of time.