Celebrated Spies and Famous Mysteries of the Great War

Despite its publication's proximity to the Great War, this book offers highly detailed stories of events that, to this day, remain relevant and of interest. To the 1919 reader, how the last Romanoff Czar, Nicholas II, and his family perished remained a mystery. Excerpts from the Czar's personal diary from his forced abdication in 1917 to his final entries in 1918 remove much of the mystery from where he was and how his family faired. Textbooks and documentaries on World War I rightly highlight the sinking of the Lusitania as the primary catalyst that swung America's public opinion to such an extent as to enter the war against the German Empire. However, with more than a century of perspective, we can tend to simplify major social and political shifts, missing key events and details that were also critical to change. The events detailed in this immediate post-war vantage point as fresh, if not always complete, and include the enemy combatant trials and executions of the English nurse, Miss Edith Cavall and the British captain of the merchant ship, Brussels, both of which caused an international outcry against the German war efforts. Stories of spies (real or accused) include the trials and executions of Ram Chandra, Sir Roger Casement, Mata-Hari, Bolo Pasha, to name a few. While much has been learned about the truth of these "mysteries" in the century since this book's original publication, lost has been the emotion, the intrigue and the relief associated with these stories still so fresh to the post-war general population.