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 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 a 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 and 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,