cover image The Fourth Horseman: One Man's Mission to Wage the Great War in America

The Fourth Horseman: One Man's Mission to Wage the Great War in America

Robert Koenig, . . Public Affairs, $26 (349pp) ISBN 978-1-58648-372-2

The specter of germ warfare lends an overblown touch of drama to this tepid tale of espionage and sabotage in WWI. In 1915, Anton Dilger, an American citizen who became a surgeon in Germany and was recruited by German intelligence, arrived in Baltimore to set up a secret lab to mass-produce the bacteria that cause anthrax and glanders. His intended target was not people but horses and mules procured for the Allied armies in Europe. It's not clear how many, if any, equines died because of the plot, but the author allows that the numbers weren't significant. Equally ineffectual was Dilger's subsequent mission to draw Mexico into war with the U.S. Indeed, aside from some bombings of munitions installations that Dilger had little to do with, the German covert operations detailed here seem half-baked and mired in incompetence and squabbling. Journalist Koenig also uses Dilger's life to probe the conflicted loyalties of German-Americans during the war and the (weak) irony of a healer trying his hand at destruction (of animals, that is). The author's efforts to associate Dilger with latter-day anxieties about anthrax and other much-hyped bio-menaces don't make this story more compelling. Photos. (Jan.)