the entire interned crew and corps of officers of the interned German steamships, which were lying in the Hudson, available for his purposes? Scheele got all the lead and tin and like material he needed there. The Scheele cigar bomb, as it came to be called, was only three or four inches long and an inch or two in diameter. Inside of it was a thin partition made of tin. In a cavity at one end was placed a certain chemical; in the other end, divided from it for the time being by a partition sheet of tin, was a strong corrosive acid. When the ends were sealed the work was done.
It was relatively simple to put two or three of these in a pocket and casually go aboard a ship, or through the influence of simple and kindly German neighbor people, have someone else go aboard the ship and drop such a bomb into a coal bunker; or better, among the cargo. The bomb needed absolutely no attention on the part of anyone. Scheele, a competent, thorough, painstaking German scientist of Germany's highest and best type, left nothing to chance. He experimented from time to time, and verified his experiments. He knew how thick to make that partition of tin. He could make it of just such a thickness that the acid could eat through it in two or three or four days, so that if a certain steamship carried that bomb on the high seas for two or three or four days, in the course of time the acid would eat through the tin. Then, in the combination of the chemicals, heat would be generated and a fire was absolutely certain.
These things sound like the invention of a diseased mind—like the romance of some excited intellect concerning itself with unreal and impossible events belonging in another age—another world than ours. But they are true, actually true. Scheele, backed by these influential Germans in New York, backed by the diplomatic representatives of the German Government itself—we might as well say by all Germans also—actually did these things in this country.
Not one, but many ships broke into flames in mid-Atlantic. Sometimes the damage was not complete, but quite frequently the loss of a merchant ship was absolute. We cannot tell how many millions of dollars of the world's prop-
