Part 48

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.

Fay’s fellow conspirators 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.

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 Lusk’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 Breitung, a young German employed by his uncle, E. N. Breitung, who was in the shipping business in New York. Breitung supplied Fay with the information he needed regarding munitions-laden ships which Fay should elect to destroy.

[Illustration:

© _Underwood and Underwood._

German Prisoners Recaptured After an Escape from Fort McPherson]

Fay asked Kienzle how he could get some chlorate of potash, and Kienzle asked his young friend Breitung if he could help him out. Breitung 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, though 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 become acquainted with young Breitung. 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 reëxport 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 Breitung 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 Breitung and took a delivery slip for it. Ultimately this delivery slip was presented by Scholz, who appeared one day with a truck and driver and took the chemical away.

POTASH TOO WEAK

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 Lusk 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 kinds of 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, and without any delay.

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. He agreed to do what he could to fill the order.

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 and 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 twenty-five 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.

TAKEN INTO CUSTODY

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. Siebs repeated their complaint to Wettig, and 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 TNT in it. Before it cooled, Wettig embedded in it a mercury cap. When cooled after being melted, TNT 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.

EXPLAINED TOO MUCH

Far less ingenious and 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 implication 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 because the Fay device was calculated to do murder upon hundreds of helpless men, nor because 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.’”

[Illustration:

_Courtesy of Leslie’s Weekly._

The French Nation Celebrates

One of the most impressive features of the national holiday observances in Paris on July 14th, 1918, was the parade by Russian troops led by a giant color-bearer marching along the Grand Boulevard amid the applause of enormous crowds. These were a portion of the army sent by the Czar, to fight for the Allies in France. Persistent rumors that thousands of Russians were landed in England to fight on the Western front proved a hoax.]

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 proposition any further.”

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.

PERFECTED DEVILRY

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 superdreadnought. 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 beveled 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.

WHAT FAY PICTURED

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 harbor. 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 midocean, perhaps at black midnight, in a driving storm, the patient mechanism hid below has turned the last of its calculated revolutions. The neck piece 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.

HERE’S TO CONSTABLE RITCHINGS

It Is Probable that His Record is Unique in the Annals of War Since Spartan Days

Few men have the modest estimate of duty in relation to self that has given an unsought celebrity to Arthur Ritchings of Cardiff, Wales. If his conduct may be taken as evidence of his philosophy of life, doing one’s duty in the world confers no particular distinction on the individual—the discharge of a moral obligation establishing no title to swank, swagger or puffed-upness. Possibly it is necessary to be a Welshman to appreciate Ritchings’ mental attitude, for it seems that the people of Cardiff saw nothing abnormal or eccentric in the behavior of their townsman, regarding it quite as a matter of course. Indeed it was a London paper that acquainted the Cardiffians that they had in their midst a hero deserving of especial respect. We get the particulars from the same source.

When Germany fell foul of Belgium, Arthur Ritchings was a member of the Cardiff Constabulary, in plain terms, a policeman. As soon as England declared war in 1914, Ritchings threw aside his truncheon, and other police insignia, and enlisted in the Army as a private. He served in that capacity for three years, doing the job with thoroughness, having an eye single to duty. Though unobtrusive in all his doings, not in the least inclined to celebrate in canticles of self-praise his deeds in trench or field, he nevertheless came to the notice of his superiors finally, and in November, 1917, his bravery won him promotion on the field. He was made second lieutenant. But he went right ahead in his normal way, yet, having once attracted their attention, he could not keep out of the view of his superiors, and so in February, 1918, they called him up and gave him to understand that in their opinion he measured up to a captaincy. But Ritchings just went right on being Ritchings, and so they made him a major. Then they made him a lieutenant colonel, and there is no conjecturing what they would have had to do with him had the war continued a little longer. As it was they made him a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, pinned on his breast the Croix de Guerre with palms, gave him the Military Cross, and did what they could to persuade him that as he had been a gallant and daring soldier so also had he been an able and decisive officer. In the meantime the Germans had done what they could to further his interests by wounding him on six different occasions.

Now, the war having been fought and won, his duty no longer commanding the wear of khaki, Lieutenant Colonel Ritchings retired from the Army and returned to his native Cardiff. His townsmen welcomed him, congratulating him that he had managed to escape death for a further enjoyment of the unemotional serenity of the sturdy Welsh town. The Chairman of the Municipal Bench publicly declared that he was glad to see Ritchings back, and spoke approvingly of the fact that his war record was a credit to the town.

HIS HOME HONORS

Then Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Ritchings—with four years of active military service to his credit and field rank worn at the front, with a breast-load of decorations and the proved ability to command over 3,000 fighting men—stepped over to police headquarters, took up his truncheon and resumed his familiar duties as a common policeman in a mining town, where the care of drunks and disorderlies alone taxed his military genius.

There the matter might have ended but for the interests of a person who had no particular business to come fussing around in Cardiff affairs. This person happened to be one of those ordinary mortals who hold the notion that certain honors attached to heroism and military achievement are not sufficiently represented by mere medals and things, and this person thought it in high degree outrageous that a man who had lifted himself by valor from private to lieutenant colonel should be permitted to walk a beat and swing a club as a means of serving the Crown. This indignant person wrote a passionate letter to the London _Times_, with the result that Cardiff took a second view of the situation, and the Watch Committee (a sort of police commissioner) took the ex-lieutenant colonel off his beat and gave him the lofty job of training the police to the proper dignity of constabulary service.

This, however, did not entirely satisfy outside admirers of Ritchings, honorable as it might seem to Cardiffians, so the Lord Mayor was pressed for information whether there was any intention of appointing the distinguished officer to a higher and more responsible position on the force. That dignitary (and a Lord Mayor truly esteems himself a dignitary in England) went to the extent of admitting that he thought that he might say that all the members of the Watch Committee were in sympathy with the idea, and that he had no doubt that when the opportunity occurred Colonel or Constable Ritchings would be given a place better suited to his merits.