Robert Fay landed in New York on April 23, 1915. He landed in jail just six months and one day later—on October 24th. In those six months he slowly perfected one of the most infernal devices that ever emerged from the mind of man. He painfully had it manufactured piece by piece. With true German thoroughness he covered his trail at every point—excepting one. And five days after he had aroused suspicion at that point, he and his entire group of fellow conspirators were in jail. The agents of American justice who put him there had unravelled his whole ingenious scheme and had evidence enough to have sent him to the penitentiary for life if laws since passed had then been in effect.

Only the mind that conceived the sinking of the Lusitania could have improved upon the devilish device which Robert Fay invented and had ready for use when he was arrested. It was a box containing forty pounds of trinitrotoluol, to be fastened to the rudder post of a vessel, and so geared to the rudder itself that its oscillations would slowly release the catch of a spring, which would then drive home the firing pin and cause an explosion that would instantly tear off the whole stern of the ship, sinking it in mid-ocean in a few minutes. Experts in mechanics and experts in explosives and experts in shipbuilding all tested the machine, and all agreed that it was perfect for the work which Fay had planned that it should do.

Fay had three of these machines completed, he had others in course of construction, he had bought and tested the explosive to go into them, he had cruised New York harbour in a motor boat and proved by experience that he could attach them undetected where he wished, and he had the names and sailing dates of the vessels that he meant to sink without a trace. Only one little link that broke—and the quick and thorough work of American justice—robbed him of another Iron Cross besides the one he wore. That link—but that comes later in the story.

Fay and his device came straight from the heart of the German Army, with the approval and the money of his government behind him. He, like Werner Horn, came originally from Cologne; but they were very different men. Where Horn was almost childishly simple, Fay’s mind was subtle and quick to an extraordinary degree. Where Horn had been humane to the point of risking his life to save others, Fay had spent months in a cold-blooded solution of a complex problem in destruction that he knew certainly involved a horrible death for dozens, and more likely hundreds, of helpless human beings. Horn refused to swear to a lie even where the lie was a matter of no great moment. Fay told at his trial a story so ingenious that it would have done credit to a novelist and would have been wholly convincing if other evidence had not disproved the substance of it. The truth of the case runs like this:

Fay was in Germany when the war broke out and was sent to the Vosges Mountains in the early days of the conflict. Soon men were needed in the Champagne sector, and Fay was transferred to that front. Here he saw some of the bitterest fighting of the war, and here he led a detachment of Germans in a surprise attack on a trench full of Frenchmen in superior force. His success in this dangerous business won him an Iron Cross of the second class. During these days the superiority of the Allied artillery over the German caused the Germans great distress, and they became very bitter when they realized, from a study of the shells that exploded around them, how much of this superiority was due to the material that came from the United States for use by the French and British guns. Fay’s ingenious mind formed a scheme to stop this supply, and he put his plan before his superior officers. The result was that, in a few weeks, he left the army and left Germany, armed with passports and $3,500 in American money, bound for the United States on the steamer Rotterdam. He reached New York on April 23, 1915.

One of Fay’s qualifications for the task he had set for himself was his familiarity with the English language and with the United States. He had come to America in 1902, spending a few months on a farm in Manitoba and then going on to Chicago, where he had worked for several years for the J. I. Case Machinery Company, makers of agricultural implements. During these years, Fay was taking an extended correspondence school course in electrical and steam engineering, so that altogether he had good technical background for the events of 1915. In 1906, he went back to Germany.

What he may have lacked in technical equipment, Fay made up by the first connection he made when he reached New York in 1915. The first man he looked up was Walter Scholz, his brother-in-law, who had been in this country for four years and who was a civil engineer who had worked here chiefly as a draftsman—part of the time for the Lackawanna Railroad—and who had studied mechanical engineering on the side. When Fay arrived, Scholz had been out of a job in his own profession and was working on a rich man’s estate in Connecticut. Fay, armed with plenty of money and his big idea, got Scholz to go into the scheme with him, and the two were soon living together in a boarding house at 28 Fourth Street, Weehawken, across the river from uptown New York.

To conceal the true nature of their operations they hired a small building on Main Street and put a sign over the door announcing themselves in business as “The Riverside Garage.” They added verisimilitude to this scheme by buying a second-hand car in bad condition and dismantling it, scattering the parts around the room so that it would look as if they were engaged in making repairs. Every once in a while they would shift these parts about so as to alter the appearance of the place. However, they did not accept any business—whenever a man took the sign at its face value and came in asking to have work done, Fay or Scholz would take him to a near-by saloon and buy him a few drinks and pass him along, referring him to some other garage.

The most of their time they spent about the real business in hand. They took care to have the windows of their room in the boarding house heavily curtained to keep out prying eyes, and here, under a student lamp, they spent hours over mechanical drawings which were afterward produced in evidence at the trial of their case. The mechanism that Fay had conceived was carefully perfected on paper, and then they confronted the task of getting the machinery assembled. Some of the parts were standard—that is, they could be bought at any big hardware store. Others, however, were peculiar to this device and had to be made to order from the drawings. They had the tanks made by a sheet-metal worker named Ignatz Schiering, at 344 West 42nd Street, New York. Scholz went to him with a drawing, telling him that it was for a gasolene tank for a motor boat. Scholz made several trips to the shop to supervise some of the details of the construction and once to order more tanks of a new size and shape.

At the same time Scholz went to Bernard McMillan, doing business under the name of McMillan & Werner, 81 Centre Street, New York, to have him make special kinds of wheels and gears for the internal mechanism of the bomb, from sketches which Scholz supplied. At odd times between June 10th and October 20th McMillan was working on these things and delivered the last of them to Scholz just a few days before he was arrested.

In the meanwhile, Fay was taking care of the other necessary elements of his scheme. Besides the mechanism of the bomb, he had to become familiar with the shipping in the port of New York, and he had to get the explosive with which to charge the bomb. For the former purpose he and Scholz bought a motor boat—a 28-footer—and in this they cruised about New York harbour at odd times, studying the docks at which ships were being loaded with supplies for the Allies and calculating the best means and time for placing the bombs on the rudder posts of these ships. Fay finally determined by experience that between two and three o’clock in the morning was the best time. The watchmen on board the ships were at that hour most likely to be asleep or the night dark enough so that he could work in safety. He made some actual experiments in fastening the empty tanks to the rudder posts, and found that it was perfectly easy to do so. His scheme was to fasten them just above the water line on a ship while it was light, so that when it was loaded they were submerged and all possibility of detection was removed.

The getting of explosives was, however, the most difficult part of Fay’s undertaking. This was true not only because he was here most likely to arouse suspicion, but also because of his relative lack of knowledge of the thing he was dealing with. He did know enough, however, to begin his search for explosives in the least suspicious field, and it was only as he became ambitious to produce a more powerful effect that he came to grief.

The material he decided to use at first was chlorate of potash. This substance in itself is so harmless that it is an ingredient of tooth powders and is used commonly in other ways. When, however, it is mixed with any substance high in carbons, such as sugar, sulphur, charcoal, or kerosene, it becomes an explosive of considerable power. Fay set about to get some of the chlorate.

But it is now time to get acquainted with Fay’s fellow conspirators, and to follow them through the drama of human relationships that led to Fay’s undoing. All these men were Germans—some of them German-Americans—and each in his own way was doing the work of the Kaiser in this country. Herbert Kienzle was a dealer in clocks with a store on Park Place, in New York. He had learned the business in his father’s clock factory deep in the Black Forest in Germany and had come to this country years ago to go into the same business, getting his start by acting as agent for his father’s factory over here. After the war broke out he had become obsessed with the wild tales which German propaganda had spread in this country about dum-dum bullets being shipped back for use against the soldiers of the Fatherland. He had brooded on the subject, had written very feelingly about it to the folks at home, and had prepared for distribution in the United States a pamphlet denouncing this traffic. Fay had heard of Kienzle before leaving Germany, and soon after he reached New York he got in touch with him as a man with a fellow feeling for the kind of work he was undertaking to do.

One of the first things in Fay’s carefully worked-out plan was to locate a place to which he could quietly retire when his work of destruction should be done—a place where he felt he could be safe from suspicion. After a talk with Kienzle he decided that Lush’s Sanatorium, at Butler, N. J., would serve the purpose. This sanatorium was run by Germans and Kienzle was well known there. Acting on a prearranged plan with Kienzle, Fay went to Butler and was met at the station by a man named Bronkhorst, who was in charge of the grounds at the sanatorium. They identified each other by prearranged signals and Fay made various arrangements, some of which are of importance later in the story.

Another friend of Kienzle’s was Max Brietung, a young German employed by his uncle, E. N. Brietung, who was in the shipping business in New York. Young Brietung was consequently in a position to know at first hand about the movements of ships out of New York harbour. Brietung supplied Fay with the information he needed regarding which ships Fay should elect to destroy. But first Brietung made himself useful in another way.

Fay asked Kienzle how he could get some chlorate of potash, and Kienzle asked his young friend Brietung if he could help him out. Brietung said he could, and went at once to another German who was operating in New York ostensibly as a broker in copper under the name of Carl L. Oppegaard.

It is just as well to get better acquainted with Oppegaard because he was a vital link in Fay’s undoing. His real name was Paul Siebs and for the purpose of this story he might as well be known by that name. Siebs had also been in this country in earlier days and during his residence in Chicago, from 1910 to 1913, he had gotten acquainted with young Brietung. He, too, had gone back to Germany before the war, but soon after it began he had come back to the United States under his false name, ostensibly as an agent of an electrical concern in Gothenburg, Sweden, for the purpose of buying copper. He frankly admitted later that this copper was intended for re-export to Germany to be used in the manufacture of munitions of war. He did not have much success in his enterprise and he was finally forced to make a living from hand to mouth by small business transactions of almost any kind. He could not afford a separate office, so he rented desk room in the office of the Whitehall Trading Company, a small subsidiary of the Raymond-Hadley Corporation. His desk was in the same room with the manager of the company, Carl L. Wettig.

When Brietung asked Siebs to buy him some chlorate of potash Siebs was delighted at the opportunity to make some money and immediately undertook the commission. He had been instructed to get a small amount, perhaps 200 pounds. He needed money so badly, however, that he was very glad to find that the smallest kegs of the chlorate of potash were 112 pounds each, and he ordered three kegs. He paid for them with money supplied by Brietung and took a delivery slip. Ultimately this delivery slip was presented by Scholz who appeared one day with a truck and driver and took the chemical away.

Fay and Scholz made some experiments with the chlorate of potash and Fay decided it was not strong enough to serve his purpose. He then determined to try dynamite. Again he wished to avoid suspicion and this time, after consultation with Kienzle, he recalled Bronkhorst down at the Lush Sanatorium in New Jersey. Bronkhorst, in his work as superintendent of the grounds at the sanatorium, was occasionally engaged in laying water mains in the rocky soil there, and for this purpose kept dynamite on hand. Fay got a quantity of dynamite from him. Later, however, he decided that he wanted a still more powerful explosive.

Again he applied to Kienzle, and this time Kienzle got in touch with Siebs direct. By prearrangement, Kienzle and Siebs met Fay underneath the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge, and there Siebs was introduced to Fay. They walked around City Hall Park together discussing the subject; and Fay, not knowing the name of what he was after, tried to make Siebs understand what explosive he wanted by describing its properties. Siebs finally realized that what Fay had in mind was trinitrotoluol, one of the three highest explosives known. Siebs finally undertook to get some of it for him, but pointed out to him the obvious difficulties of buying it in as small quantities as he wanted. It was easy enough to buy chlorate of potash because that was in common commercial use for many purposes. It was also easy to buy dynamite because that also is used in all quantities and for many purposes. But trinitrotoluol is too powerful for any but military use, and it is consequently handled only in large lots and practically invariably is made to the order of some government. However, Siebs had an idea and proceeded to act on it.

He went back to the Whitehall Trading Company, where he had desk room, and saw his fellow occupant, Carl Wettig. Wettig had been engaged in a small way in a brokerage business in war supplies, and had even taken a few small turns in the handling of explosives. Siebs had overheard him discussing with a customer the market price of trinitrotoluol some weeks before, and on this account thought possibly Wettig might help him out. When he put the proposition up to Wettig the latter agreed to do what he could to fill the order.

In the meanwhile Fay had sent another friend of Brietung’s to Bridgeport to see if he could get trinitrotoluol in that great city of munitions. There he called upon another German who was running an employment agency—finding jobs for Austro-Hungarians who were working in the munitions plants, so that he could take them out of the plants and divert their labour from the making of war supplies for use against the Teutons. The only result of this visit was that Brietung’s friend brought back some loaded rifle cartridges which ultimately were used in the bombs as caps to fire the charge. But otherwise his trip was of no use to Fay.

Carl Wettig was the weak link in Fay’s chain of fortune. He did indeed secure the high explosive that Fay wanted, and was in other ways obliging. But he got the explosive from a source that would have given Fay heart failure if he had known of it, and he was obliging for reasons that Fay lived to regret. Siebs made his inquiry of Wettig on the 19th of October. The small quantity of explosives that he asked for aroused Wettig’s suspicions and as soon as he promised to get it he went to the French Chamber of Commerce, near by, told them what he suspected, and asked to be put in touch with responsible police authorities under whose direction he wished to act in supplying the trinitrotoluol.

From that moment Fay, Siebs, and Kienzle were “waked up in the morning and put to bed at night” by detectives from the police department of New York City and operatives of the Secret Service of the United States. By arrangement with them Wettig obtained a keg containing 25 pounds of trinitrotoluol, and in the absence of Fay and Scholz from their boarding house in Weehawken, he delivered it personally to their room and left it on their dresser. He told Siebs he had delivered it and Siebs promptly set about collecting his commission from Fay.

Siebs had some difficulty in doing this, because Fay and Scholz, being unfamiliar with the use of the explosive, were unable to explode a sample of it and decided that it was no good. They had come home in the evening and found the keg on their dresser and had opened it. Inside they found the explosive in the form of loose white flakes. To keep it more safely, they poured it out into several small cloth bags. They then took a sample of it and tried by every means they could think of to explode it. They even laid some of it on an anvil and broke two or three hammers pounding on it, but could get no result. They then told Siebs that the stuff he had delivered was useless. Wettig volunteered to show them how it should be handled. Accordingly, he joined them the following day at their room in Weehawken and went with them out into the woods behind Fort Lee, taking along a small sample of the powder in a paper bag. In the woods the men picked up the top of a small tin can, built a fire in the stump of a tree, and melted some of the flake “T. N. T.” in it. Before it cooled, Wettig embedded in it a mercury cap. When cooled after being melted, T. N. T. forms a solid mass resembling resin in appearance, and is now more powerful because more compact.

However, before the experiment could be concluded, one of the swarm of detectives who had followed them into the woods stepped on a dry twig, and when the men started at its crackling, the detectives concluded they had better make their arrests before the men might get away; and so all were taken into custody. A quick search of their boarding house, the garage, a storage warehouse in which Fay had stored some trunks, and the boathouse where the motor boat was stored, resulted in rounding up the entire paraphernalia that had been used in working out the whole plot. All the people connected with every phase of it were soon arrested.

Out of the stories these men told upon examination emerged not only the hideous perfection of the bomb itself, but the direct hand that the German Government and its agents in this country had in the scheme of putting it to its fiendish purpose. First of all appeared Fay’s admission that he had left Germany with money and a passport supplied by a man in the German Secret Service. Later, on the witness stand, when Fay had had time enough carefully to think out the most plausible story, he attempted to get away from this admission by claiming to have deserted from the German Army. He said that he had been financed in his exit from the German Empire by a group of business men who had put up a lot of money to back an automobile invention of his, which he had worked on before the war began. These men, so he claimed, were afraid they would lose all their money if he should happen to be killed before the invention was perfected. This tale, ingenious though it was, was too fantastic to be swallowed when taken in connection with all the things found in Fay’s possession when he was arrested. Beyond all doubt his scheme to destroy ships was studied and approved by his military superiors in Germany before he left, and that scheme alone was his errand to this country.

Far less ingenious but equally damning was his attempt to explain away his relations with Von Papen. The sinister figure of the military attachÉ of the German Embassy at Washington leers from the background of all the German plots; and this case was no exception. It was known that Fay had had dealings with Von Papen in New York, and on the witness stand he felt called upon to explain them in a way that would clear the diplomatic service of participation in his evil doings. He declared that he had taken his invention to Von Papen and that Von Papen had resolutely refused to have anything to do with it. This would have been well enough if Fay’s explanation had stopped here.

But Fay’s evil genius prompted him to make his explanation more convincing by an elaboration of the story, so he gave Von Papen’s reasons for refusal. These were not at all that the device was calculated to do murder upon hundreds of helpless men, nor at all that to have any part in the business was to play the unneutral villain under the cloak of diplomatic privilege. Not at all. At the first interview, seeing only a rough sketch and hearing only Fay’s description of preliminary experiments, Von Papen’s sole objection was:

“Well, you might obtain an explosion once and the next ten apparatuses might fail.”

To continue Fay’s explanation:

“He casually asked me what the cost of it would be and I told him in my estimation the cost would not be more than $20 apiece. [$20 apiece for the destruction of thirty lives and a million-dollar ship and cargo!] As a matter of fact, in Germany I will be able to get these things made for half that price. ‘If it is not more than that,’ Von Papen said, ‘you might go ahead, but I cannot promise you anything whatever.’”

Fay then went back to his experiments and when he felt that he had practically perfected his device he called upon Von Papen for the second time. This time Von Papen’s reply was:

“Well, this thing has been placed before our experts and also we have gone into the political condition of the whole suggestion. Now in the first place our experts say this apparatus is not at all seaworthy; but as regards political conditions I am sorry to say we cannot consider it and, therefore, we cannot consider the whole situation.”

In other words, with no thought of the moral turpitude of the scheme, with no thought of the abuse of diplomatic freedom, but only with thoughts of the practicability of this device and of the effect upon political conditions of its use, Von Papen had put the question before technical men and before Von Bernstorff, and their decision had been adverse solely on those considerations—first, that it would not work, and second, that it would arouse hostility in the United States. At no stage, according to Fay’s best face upon the matter, was any thought given to its character as a hideous crime.

The device itself was studied independently by two sets of military experts of the United States Government with these results:

First, that it was mechanically perfect; second, that it was practical under the conditions of adjustment to a ship’s rudder which Fay had devised; and third, that the charge of trinitrotoluol, for which the container was designed, was nearly half the quantity which is used on our own floating mines and which is calculated upon explosion twenty feet from a battleship to put it out of action, and upon explosion in direct contact, absolutely to destroy and sink the heaviest superdreadnaught. In other words, beyond all question the bomb would have shattered the entire stern of any ship to which it was attached, and would have caused it to sink in a few minutes.

A brief description of the contrivance reveals the mechanical ingenuity and practical efficiency of Fay’s bomb. A rod attached to the rudder, at every swing the rudder gave, turned up, by one notch, the first of the bevelled wheels within the bomb. After a certain number of revolutions of that wheel, it in turn gave one revolution to the next; and so on through the series. The last wheel was connected with the threaded cap around the upper end of the square bolt, and made this cap slowly unscrew, until at length the bolt dropped clear of it and yielded to the waiting pressure of the strong steel spring above. This pressure drove it downward and brought the sharp points at its lower end down on the caps of the two rifle cartridges fixed below it—like the blow of a rifle’s hammer. The detonation from the explosion of these cartridges would set off a small charge of impregnated chlorate of potash, which in turn would fire the small charge of the more sluggish but stronger dynamite, and that in turn would explode the still more sluggish but tremendously more powerful trinitrotoluol.

The whole operation, once the spring was free, would take place in a flash; and instantly its deadly work would be accomplished.

Picture the scene that Fay had in his mind as he toiled his six laborious months upon this dark invention. He saw himself, in imagination, fixing his infernal box upon the rudder post of a ship loading at a dock in New York harbour. As the cargo weighed the ship down, the box would disappear beneath the water. At length the ship starts on its voyage, and, as the rudder swings her into the stream, the first beat in the slow, sure knell of death for ship and crew is clicked out by its very turning. Out upon the sea the shift of wind and blow of wave require a constant correction with the rudder to hold the true course forward. At every swing the helmsman unconsciously taps out another of the lurking beats of death. Somewhere in mid-ocean, perhaps at black midnight, in a driving storm, the patient mechanism hid below has turned the last of its calculated revolutions. The neckpiece from the bolt slips loose, the spring drives downward, there is a flash, a deafening explosion, and five minutes later a few mangled bodies and a chaos of floating wreckage are all that is left above the water’s surface.

This is the hideous dream Fay dreamed in the methodical 180 days of his planning and experimenting in New York. This is the dream to realize which he was able to enlist the coÖperation of half a dozen other Germans. This is the dream his superiors in Germany viewed with favour, and financed. This is the dream the sinister Von Papen encouraged and which he finally dismissed only because he believed it too good to be true. This is the dream Fay himself on the witness stand said he had thought of as “a good joke on the British.”

In this picture of infernal imaginings the true character of German plottings in this country stands revealed. Ingenuity of conception characterized them, method and patience and painstaking made them perfect. Flawless logic, flawless mechanism. But on the human side, only the blackest passions and an utter disregard of human life; no thought of honour, no trace of human pity. It happened in the case of Fay that the agent himself was ruthless and deserved far more than what the limit of existing law was able to give him when he was convicted of his crimes. But through all the plots Von Papen, Von Bernstorff, and the Imperial German Government in Berlin were consistent. Their hand was at the helm of all, and the same ruthless grasping after domination of the world at any price led to the same barbarous code of conduct in them all.