Chapter I: The Curtain Raiser

Countess Hannah von Bismarck missed her aim. The beribboned bottle of "German champagne" with which she meant truly well to baptize the newest Hamburg-American leviathan of sixty thousand-odd tons on the placid Saturday afternoon of June 20, 1914, went far wide of its mark. The Kaiser, impetuous and resourceful, came gallantly and instantaneously to the rescue. Grabbing the bottle while it still swung unbroken in midair by the black-white-red silken cord which suspended it from the launching pavilion, Imperial William crashed it with accuracy and propelling power a Marathon javelin-thrower might have envied squarely against the vast bow. The granddaughter of the Iron Chancellor, a bit crestfallen because she had only thrown like any woman exclaimed: "I christen thee, great ship, _Bismarck_!" and the milky foam of the _Schaumwein_ trickled in rivulets down the nine- or ten-story side of the most Brobdingnagian product which ever sprang from shipwrights' hands. Then, with ten thousand awestruck others gathered there on the Elbe side, I watched the huge steel carcass, released at last from the stocks which had so long held it prisoner, glide and creak majestically down the greasy ways midst our chanting of _Deutschland, Deutschland, ueber Alles_. Half a minute later the _Bismarck_ was resting serenely, house-high, on the surface of the murky river five hundred yards away. The Kaiser and Herr Ballin shook hands feelingly, the royal monarch smiling benignly on the shipping king. The military band blared forth _Heil Dir im Siegeskranz_, and the last fete Hamburg was destined to know for many a troublous month had passed into history.

Countess von Bismarck had missed her aim! I wonder if there are not many, like myself, who witnessed the ill-omened launch and who endow it now with a meaning which events of the intervening year have borne out? For, surely, when the Great General Staff at Berlin reviews dispassionately the beginnings of the war, as it some day will do, there will be an absorbingly interesting explanation of how the machine which Moltke, the Organizer of Victory, handed down to an incompetent namesake and nephew missed _its_ aim, too--the winning of the war by a series of short, sharp and staggering blows which should decide the issue in favor of the Germans before the next snow. The argument has been advanced, in vindication of Germany's innocent intentions, that the Hamburg-American line would never have launched the mighty _Bismarck_ if the Fatherland was planning or contemplating war. But the ship was not to have made her maiden transatlantic voyage until April 1, 1915, the centenary of her great patronym's birth. The German Staff expected to dictate a glorious peace long before that time, and might have done so but for Belgium, Joffre, "that contemptible little British army," and other miscalculations. If the Staff, like Countess von Bismarck, had not missed its aim, the _Bismarck_ would have poked her gigantic nose into New York harbor on scheduled time, a mammoth symbol of Germany, the World Power indeed, and fitting incarnation of the new Mistress of the Seas. Who knows but what perhaps grandiose visions of that sort were in the far-seeing Herr Ballin's card-index mind?

The Kaiser customarily visits the Venice of the North on his way to Kiel Week, the yachting festival invented by him to outrival England's Cowes, and the launch of the _Bismarck_ was timed accordingly. From Hamburg the Emperor proceeds aboard the Imperial yacht _Hohenzollern_ up the Elbe to Brunsbuettel for the annual regatta of the North German Yacht Squadron, a club consisting for the most part of Hamburg, Bremen and Luebeck patricians with the love of the sea inborn in their Hanseatic veins. There was no variation from the time-honored programme in 1914. William II even adhered to his unfailing practice of delivering an apotheosis of the marine profession at the regatta-dinner of the N.G.Y.S. aboard the Hamburg-American steamer on which Herr Ballin is wont to entertain for Kiel Week a party of two or three hundred German and foreign notables. There was no glimmer of coming events in the guest-list of S.S. _Victoria Luise_, for it included Mr. John Walter, one of the hereditary proprietors of _The Times_, and several other distinguished Englishmen soon to be Germany's hated foes.

By that occult agency which determines with diabolical delight the irony of fate, it was ordained that Kiel, 1914, should be the occasion of a spectacular Anglo-German love-feast, with a squadron of British super-dreadnoughts anchored in the midst of the peaceful German Armada as a sign to all the world of the non-explosive warmth of English-German "relations." That, at any rate, was the design of that unfortunately nebulous element in Berlin, headed by Doctor von Bethmann Hollweg, known as the Peace Party; for had certain highly-placed Germans acting under the Imperial Chancellor's inspiration had their way, the British Admiralty yacht _Enchantress_, the official craft of the First Lord of the Admiralty and actually bearing that dignitary, Mr. Winston Churchill, M.P., would have been convoyed to Kiel by Vice-Admiral Sir George Warrender's ironclads. The Kaiser's approval of the Churchill project--as I happen to know--had been sought and secured. Eminent friends of an Anglo-German rapprochement in London had done the necessary log-rolling in England. Matters were regarded in Germany so much of a _fait accompli_ that an anchorage diagram issued by the naval authorities at Kiel only a fortnight before the "Week" indicated the precise spot at which Mr. Churchill and the _Enchantress_ would make fast in the harbor of Kiel Bay.

But Mr. Churchill did not come. I know why. Grand-Admiral von Tirpitz, to whom the half-American _enfant terrible_ of British politics was a pet aversion, did not want him at Kiel. Mr. Churchill's visit might have resulted in some sort of an Anglo-German naval _modus vivendi_, or otherwise postponed "the Day." The German War Party's plans, so soon to materialize, would have been sadly thrown out of gear by such an untimely event, and von Tirpitz is not the man to brook interference with his programmes. Had not the German Government, under the Grand-Admiral's invincible leadership, persistently rejected the hand of naval peace stretched out by the British Cabinet? Was it not Mr. Churchill's own proposals to which Berlin had repeatedly returned an imperious No? Could Germany afford to run the risk of being cajoled, amid the festive atmosphere of Kiel Week, into concessions which she had hitherto successively withheld? Von Tirpitz said No again. For years he had been saying the same thing on the subject of an armaments understanding with Britain. He said No to Prince Buelow when the fourth Chancellor suggested the advisability of moderating a German naval policy certain to lead to conflict with Great Britain. He said No to Doctor von Bethmann Hollweg when Buelow's successor timorously suggested from time to time, as he did, the foolhardiness of a programme which meant, in an historic phrase of Buelow's, "pressure and counter-pressure." Von Tirpitz had had his way with two German Chancellors, his nominal superiors, in succession. He never dreamt of allowing himself to be bowled over now by an amateur sailor from London, who, if he came to Kiel, would only come armed with a fresh bait designed to rob the Fatherland of its "future upon the water."

Until a bare two weeks before the date of the arrival of the British Squadron in German waters, nothing was publicly known either in London or Berlin of the projected trip of Mr. Churchill to Kiel. Von Tirpitz thereupon had resort to the weapon he wields almost as dexterously as the submarine--publicity--to depopularize the scheme of the misguided friends of Anglo-German peace. It was not the first time, of course, that the Grand-Admiral had deliberately crossed the avowed policy of the German Foreign Office. Von Tirpitz now caused the Churchill-Kiel enterprise to be "exposed" in the press, in the confident hope that premature announcement would effectually kill the entire plan. It did. Tirpitz diplomacy scored again, as it was wont to do. Whereof I speak in this highly pertinent connection I know, on the authority of one of von Tirpitz's most subtle and trusted henchmen. To the latter's eyes, I hope, these reminiscences may some day come. He, at least, will know that history, not fiction, is recited here.