THE FIRST ACT
"I am simply in my element here!" exclaimed the Kaiser ecstatically to
Vice-Admiral Sir George Warrender, as the twain stood surveying the
glittering array of steel-blue German and British men-of-war facing one
another amicably on the unruffled bosom of Kiel harbor at high noon of
June 25. From my perch of vantage abaft the forward
thirteen-and-one-half-inch guns of His Britannic Majesty's
superdreadnought battleship _King George V_, whither the quartette of
London correspondents had been banished during William II's sojourn in
the flagship, I could "see" him talking on the quarter-deck below,
speaking with those nervous, jerky right-arm gestures which are as
important a part of his staccato conversation as uttered words.
The Kaiser was inspecting _his_ flagship, for when he boarded us, almost
without notice, in accordance with his irrepressible love of a surprise,
Sir George Warrender's flag came down and the emblem of the German
Emperor's British naval rank, an Admiral of the Fleet, was hoisted atop
all the British vessels in the port. For the nonce the Hohenzollern War
Lord was Britannia's senior in command. Aboard the four great
twenty-three-thousand-ton battleships, _King George V, Audacious,
Centurion_ and _Ajax_ and the three fast "light cruisers" _Birmingham,
Southampton_ and _Nottingham_ there was, for the better part of an hour,
no man to say him nay. I wonder if he, or any of us at Kiel during that
amazing week, let our imaginations run riot and conjure up the vision of
the _Birmingham_ in action against German warships off Heligoland within
ten short weeks, or of the _Audacious_ at the bottom of the Irish Sea,
victim of a German mine, five months later?
Warrender's squadron had come to Kiel two days before. Another British
squadron was at the same moment paying a similar visit of courtesy and
friendship to the Russian Navy at Riga. The English said then, and
insist now, that their ships were dispatched to greet the Kaiser and the
Czar as sincere messengers of peace and good-will. The Germans, in the
myopic view they have taken of all things since the war began, are
convinced that the White Ensign which floated at Kiel six weeks before
Great Britain and Germany went to war was the emblem of deceit and
hypocrisy, sent there to flap in the Fatherland's guileless face while
Perfidious Albion was crouching for the attack. They say that to-day,
even in presence of the incongruous fact that Serajevo, which applied
the match to the European powder-barrel, wrote its red name across
history's page while the British squadron was still riding at anchor in
Germany's war harbor.
It was exactly ten years to the week since British warships had last
been to Kiel. I happened to be there on that occasion, too, when King
Edward VII, convoyed by a cruiser squadron, shed the luster of his
vivacious presence on the gayest "Week" Kiel ever knew. Meantime the
Anglo-German political atmosphere had remained too stubbornly clouded to
make an interchange of naval amenities, of all things, either logical or
possible. It was the era in which Germania was preparing her grim
battle-toilet for "the Day"--for all the world to see, as she, justly
enough, always insisted. They were the years in which her new
dreadnought fleet sprang into being. It was the period in which offer
after offer from England for an "understanding" on the question of naval
armaments met nothing but the cold shoulder in Tirpitz-ruled Berlin.
Not until the summer of 1914 had it seemed feasible for British and
German warships to mingle in friendly contact. Doctor von Bethmann
Hollweg quite legitimately accounted the arrangement of the Kiel
love-feast as an achievement of no mean magnitude, viewed in the light
of the ten acrimonious years which preceded it. The War Party,
realizing its harmlessness, and, indeed, recognizing its value for the
party's stealthy purposes, blandly tolerated it. Even Grand-Admiral von
Tirpitz was on hand to do the honors, and no one performs them more
suavely than Germany's fork-bearded sailor-statesman.
The day after Sir George Warrender's vessels crept majestically out of
the Baltic past Friedrichsort, at the mouth of Kiel harbor, to be
welcomed by twenty-one German guns from shore batteries, the symptomatic
event of the "Week" was enacted--the formal opening of the reconstructed
Kaiser Wilhelm Canal. I place that day, June 24, not far behind the
sanguinary 28th of June, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand fell, in its
direct relationship to the outbreak of the war. When the giant locks of
Holtenau swung free, ready henceforth for the passage of William II's
greatest warships, the moment of Germany's up-to-the-minute preparedness
for Armageddon was signalized.
For ten plodding years tens of thousands of hands had been at work
converting the waterway which links Baltic Germany with North Sea
Germany (Kiel with Wilhelmshaven) into a channel wide and deep enough
for navigation by battleships of the largest bulk. After an expenditure
of more than fifty million dollars the canal, dedicated with pomp and
ceremony in 1892 to the peaceful requirements of European shipping, was
now become a war canal, pure and simple, raised to the war dimension and
destined, as the German War Party knew, to play the role for which it
was rebuilt almost before its newly-banked stone sides had settled in
their foundations. When I watched proud William II, standing solemn and
statue-like on the bridge of his Imperial yacht _Hohenzollern_, as her
gleaming golden bow broke through the black-white-red strand of ribbon
stretched across the locks, I recall distinctly an invincible feeling
that I was witness of an historic moment. Germany's army, I said to
myself, had long been ready. Now her fleet was ready, too. With an
inland avenue of safe retreat, invulnerably fortified at either end,
Teuton sea strategists had always insisted that the Fatherland's naval
position would be well-nigh impregnable. That hour had arrived. There
was the Kaiser, before my very eyes, leading the way through the War
Canal for his twenty-seven-thousand-five-hundred-ton battleships and
battle cruisers, and even for his thirty-five-thousand-ton or
fifty-thousand-ton creations of some later day, for the War Canal was
made over for to-morrow, as well as for to-day. The German war machine
tightened up the last bolt when William of Hohenzollern emerged from
Holtenau locks into the harbor of Kiel, spectacular symbol of the fact
that German ironclads of any dimensions were now able to sally back and
forth from the Baltic to the North Sea and hide for a year, as the world
has meantime seen, even from the Mistress of the Seas. No wonder a
British bluejacket, forming the link of an endless chain of his fellows
dressing ship round the rail of the _Centurion_ in honor of the War
Lord, whispered audibly to a mate, as the _Hohenzollern_ steamed down
the line to her anchorage, "Say, Bill, don't he look jest like Gawd!"
Perhaps the Divinely-Anointed felt that way, too.
When the Kaiser had left the _King George V_ after a politely cursory
"inspection"--the only real "understanding" effected between England and
Germany at Kiel was a tacit agreement on the part of officers and men to
do no amateur spying in one another's ships--Sir George Warrender
summoned us from the turret and told us some details of the All-Highest
visitation. The Emperor had been "delighted to make his first call in a
British dreadnought aboard so magnificent a specimen as the _King George
V_" (she and her sisters being at the time the most powerful battleships
flying the Union Jack). He wanted the Vice-Admiral to assure the
British Government what pleasure it had done the German Navy "in sending
these fine ships to Kiel." He hoped nothing was being left undone to
"complete the English sailors' happiness" in German waters. That
extorted from Sir George Warrender the exclamation that German
hospitality, like all else Teutonic, was seemingly thoroughness
personified, for somebody had even been thoughtful enough to lay a
submarine telephone cable from the Seebade-Anstalt Hotel to the
Vice-Admiral's flagship, so that Lady Maude Warrender might talk from
her apartments on shore directly to her husband's quarters afloat.
"Yes," continued the Kaiser, who is a genial conversationalist and
_raconteur_, "I am in my element in surroundings like these. I love the
sea. I like to go to launchings of ships. I am passionately fond of
yachting. You must sail with me to-morrow, Admiral, in my newest
_Meteor_, the fifth of the name. I race only with German crews now.
Time was when I had to have British skippers and British sailors. You
see, my aim is to breed a race of German yachtsmen. As fast as I've
trained a good crew in the _Meteor_, I let it go to the new owner of the
boat. I am the loser by that system, but I have the satisfaction of
knowing that I am promoting a good cause." The confab was approaching
its end. "Oh, Admiral, before I forget, how is Lady ........ and the
Duchess of ........? I know so many of your handsome Englishwomen."
Sir George Warrender's captains and the officers of the flagship were
now grouped around him for a farewell salute to their Imperial senior
officer. The Kaiser spied the _King George V's_ chaplain, and leaning
over to him inquired, gaily, "Chaplain, is there any swearing in this
ship?" "Oh, never, Your Majesty, never any swearing in a British
dreadnought!" The War Lord liked that, for we who had been in the
Olympian heights for'd remembered his laughing aloud at this veracious
tribute to Jack Tar's world-famed purity of diction.
Kiel Week thenceforward was an endless round of Anglo-German
pleasantries. A Zeppelin, harbinger of coming events, hovered over the
British squadron at intervals, her crew wagging cheery greetings to the
ships while acquainting themselves at close range with the looks of
English dreadnoughts from the sky. British sailormen paid fraternal
visits to German dreadnoughts and German sailormen returned their calls.
The crew of the _Ajax_ gave a music-hall smoker in honor of the crew of
the big battle-cruiser _Seydlitz_, the Teuton tars being no little
awestruck by the complacency with which two heavyweight British boxers
pummeled each other a sea-green for six rounds and then smilingly shook
hands when it was all over. Germans never punch one another except in
gory hate, and they seldom fight with their fists. The Kaiser was host
nightly at splendid State dinners in the _Hohenzollern_ and Vice-Admiral
Warrender returned the fire with state banquets aboard the _King George
V_. The atmosphere was fairly thick with brotherly love. It was not so
much as ruffled even when the octogenarian Earl of Brassey, who wards
off rheumatism by an early morning pull in his row-boat, was arrested by
a German harbor-policeman as an "English spy" for approaching the
forbidden waters of Kiel dockyard. German diplomacy was typically
represented by Lord Brassey's zealous captor, for the master of the
famous _Sunbeam_ brought that venerable craft to Kiel to demonstrate
that Englishmen of his class sincerely favored peace, and, if possible,
friendship with Germany. Wilhelmstrasse tact was exemplified again
when, by way of apology to Lord Brassey, the Kiel police explained that
there was, of course, no intention of charging him with espionage. The
policeman who arrested him merely thought he was nabbing a smuggler! At
dinner that night in the _Hohenzollern_, the Kaiser chuckled jovially at
Lord Brassey's expense. England's greatest living marine historian
stole away from Kiel with the _Sunbeam_ in the gray dawn of the next
day, with new ideas of German courtesy to the stranger within the gate.
He had intended to stay longer.
[Illustration: A naval Zeppelin cruising over the British squadron at
Kiel.]
Of all the billing and cooing at Kiel there is photographed most
indelibly on my memory the glorious jamboree of the sailors of the
British and German squadrons in the big assembly hall at the Imperial
dockyard on the Saturday night of the "Week." There were free beer,
free tobacco, free provender for everybody, in typical German plenty. A
ship's band blared rag-time and horn-pipes all night long. Only the
supply of Kiel girls fell short of the demand, but that only made
merrier fun for the bluejackets, who, lacking fair partners, danced with
one another, and when the hour had become really hilarious, they tripped
across the floor, when they were not rolling over it, embracing in
threes, bunny-hugging, grotesquely tangoing, turkey-trotting and
fish-walking more joyously than men ever reveled before.
There, I thought, was Anglo-German friendship in being--not an ideal,
but an actuality. I am sure the British and German tars at Kiel that
boisterous Saturday night which melted into the Sunday of Serajevo
little dreamt that when next they would be locked in one another's arms,
it would be at grips for life or death.