Confessions of Aleister Crowley

478 For some time I had been contemplating the military situation in its largest sense. I had been thinking of water, air and earth as units. I had been at some pains to study the question of the necessary limitations of the three arms of war. I knew the history of Napoleon gazing glumly across the Channel, after his triumphant snatch at Europe. I had written a paper in The Fatherland called "The Future of the Submarine". I pointed out that hardly anyone had believed in the naval value of these craft until three British cruisers were sunk in fifteen minutes. I pointed out that this demonstration would convince treasuries. Every nation would mobilize all the brains and all the gold and all the influence to find a means of opening the wound. I prophesied a development of the submarine as astounding as that of railways and automobiles --- which dated from the hour when they were proved practicable and useful. On January 3rd, 1917, I returned to the charge with an article which was ostensibly a criticism of Count von Reventlow's Vampire, but in reality my own sermon on that text. The Patriot Bottomley has quoted one of my best passages, that in which I proposed to reduce England to the status of a German colony. (The Germans printed it without a smile!) I was very proud of that article. It proved that all island races were primarily fishermen, who lived by snatching fish and must therefore become pirates. The argument is quite in the style of a real German professor. I advocated the "Unrestricted Submarine Campaign". I secretly calculated, rightly as the gods would have it, that so outrageous a violation of all law would be the last straw, and force America to throw off the burden of neutrality. My German friends were loud in their congratulations. It was confidently whispered among the cognoscenti that von Bernstorff's judgment swayed at its impact. He withdrew his objections to that brutality, that insane savagery, that brought America into the war. But there's a tick in every sleeping-bag. My countrymen stayed right with me to the finish! In what high glee did I not keep my secret rendezvous with a friend from a certain British consulate, waving my article, and crying, "The damned fools have printed it --- and it's going to turn the trick!" He read it; his face fell; he turned disgustedly and growled, "I didn't know you were a German." The secret service people, while considering my application for employment, asked a friend of mine to explain my attitude. "We don't understand him," they wailed piteously; "we don't understand him at all." "Cheer up," said my friend; "you're not the first people to fail to understand Mr. Aleister Crowley!" It is rather irrelevant; but it is certainly very amusing and very characteristic, the following incident of my campaign. I had asked the Honourable A. B. to help me consolidate my position with the Germans by heating the {755} branding irons of infamy for me in the fire of publicity. I therefore attributed it to his ingenuity when I heard that the police had raided the office of an acquaintance of mine in Regent Street. They didn't know what I was after, took my articles at their face value, and thought to annoy, perhaps to intimidate my by the raid. The person they arrested was a motherly old fool who had been prophesying with tea leaves for about twenty years at the same old stand, with the full knowledge of the police. The ordinary course in prosecuting a fortuneteller is for a polite young man to hand, with deference and apologies to his prospective victim, a summons to appear before a magistrate. But the charge against this woman was factitious. They wanted to get at me, at me barely more than three thousand miles away, and confidently supposed to be sitting in a luxurious suite at the Ritz-Carlton, quaffing beaker after beaker of champagne to the health of the Kaiser, as I conspired with the fanatical brewers of Milwaukee. One would really have thought that modern education would have taught the police that the best zoologists agree unanimously that it is hard to please a tortoise by stroking its shell. And a comparatively brief course of logic might easily have enriched this theorem (by a syllogism