"It's a good thing," said von G. quietly.
For many days and nights I wondered what the Junker meant. I think I know now. He meant that the War Party (of which he was a very potent and zealous member) had at length found a pretext for forcing upon Europe the struggle for which the German War Lords regarded themselves vastly more ready than any possible combination of foes. The first year of the war has amply demonstrated the accuracy of their calculations. Germany's triumphs in the opening twelvemonth of Armageddon were the triumphs of the superlatively prepared. If Serajevo had not come along when it did--with the German military establishment just built up to a peace-footing of nearly one million officers and men and re-armed at a cost of two hundred and fifty million dollars; with von Tirpitz's Fleet at the acme of its efficiency; with the Kiel Canal reconstructed for the passage of super-dreadnought ironclads--Germany's readiness for war might have been fatally inferior to that of her enemies-to-be. The Fatherland was ready, armed to the teeth, as nation never was before. The psychological moment had dawned.
This was the reassuring state of affairs at home. What did the War Party see when it put its mailed hand to the vizor and looked abroad, across to England, west over the Rhine to France, and toward Russia? It saw Great Britain on what truly enough looked to most of the world like the brink of revolution in Ireland. It saw a France, of which a great Senator had only a few days before said that her forts were defective, her guns short of ammunition and her army lacking in even such rudimentary war sinews as sufficient boots for the troops. It saw a Russia stirred by industrial strife which seemed to need only the threat of grave foreign complications to inflame her always rebellious proletariat into revolt. Serajevo had all the earmarks of providential timeliness.
"It's a good thing," said the sententious von G.
The "trippers" from Hamburg and nearer-by points in Schleswig-Holstein, whom the Sunday of Kiel Week attracts by the thousand, were far more stunned than von G. by the news from Bosnia, which put so tragic an end to their seaside holiday. The esplanade, which had been throbbing with bustle and glittering with color, did not know at first why all the ships in the harbor, British as well as German, had suddenly lowered their pennants to half-mast, or why the Austrian royal standard had suddenly broken out, also at the mourning altitude. The Kaiser was racing in the Baltic. "Old Franz Josef," some said, "has died. He's been going for many a day." Presently the truth percolated through the awestruck crowds. The sleek white naval dispatch-boat Sleipner tore through the Bay, Baltic-bound. She carries news to William II when he governs Germany from the quarter-deck of the Hohenzollern. Sleipner dodged eel-like, through the lines of British and German men-of-war, ocean liners, pleasure-craft and racing-yachts anchored here, there and everywhere. In fifteen minutes she was alongside the Emperor's fleet schooner, Meteor V, which had broken off her race on receipt of wireless tidings of the Archducal couple's murderous fate. The Hohenzollern had already "wirelessed" for the fastest torpedo-boat in port to fetch the Kaiser and his staff off the Meteor, and the destroyer and Sleipner snorted up, foam-bespattered, almost simultaneously. The Emperor clambered into the torpedo-boat and started for the harbor.
It was the face of a William II, blanched ashen-gray, which turned from the bridge of the destroyer to acknowledge, in solemn gravity, the salutes of the officers and crew of the British flagship, as the Kaiser's craft raced past the King George V. Always stern of mien, the Emperor now looked severity personified. His staff stood apart. He seemed to wish to be alone, absolutely, with the overwhelming thoughts of the moment. Three minutes later, and he stepped aboard the Hohenzollern. Now another pennant showed at the mainmast of the Imperial yacht--the blue and yellow signal flag which means: "His Majesty is aboard, but preoccupied." I wonder if posterity will ever know what monumental reflections flitted through the Kaiser's mind in that first hour after Serajevo? Did he, like von G., think it was "a good thing," too? I suppose the first stars and stripes to be half-masted anywhere in the world that dread sundown were those which drooped from the stern of Utowana, Mr. Allison Vincent Armour's steam-yacht, anchored in the Bay off Kiel Naval Academy. A puffing little launch took me out to the Utowana as soon as I had gathered some coherent facts, which I wanted to present to Mr. Armour and his guests, American Ambassador and Mrs. James W. Gerard, of Berlin, who had motored to Kiel the day before. Mrs. Gerard's sister, Countess Sigray, is the wife of a Hungarian nobleman, and the Ambassador's wife, if my memory serves me correctly, once told me of her sister's acquaintance with both of the assassinated Royalties. We Americans discussed the immediate consequences of the day's event--how the Kaiser would take it, how it would affect poor old Emperor Francis Joseph. William II and Admiral von Tirpitz had been the Archduke's guests at Konopischt in Bohemia only a few weeks before. The Kaiser and the future ruler of Austria-Hungary had become great friends. They were not always that. There had been a good deal of the William II in Franz Ferdinand himself. People often said it was a case of Greek meet Greek, and that two such insistent personalities were inevitably bound to clash. Others said that the Archduke, inspired by his brilliantly clever consort, always insisted that German overlordship in Vienna would cease when he came to the throne. Still others knew that despite antipathies and antagonisms, the two men had at length come to be genuinely fond of each other, and that their ideas and ideals for the greater glory of Germanic Europe coincided.
These things we chatted and canvassed, irresponsibly, on Utowana's immaculate deck. All of us were persuaded of the imminency of a crisis in Austrian-Serbian relations in consequence of Princip's crime. But I am quite sure not a soul of us held himself capable of imagining that, because of that remote felony, Great Britain and Germany would be at war five weeks later. Beyond us spread the peaceful panorama of British and German war-craft, anchored side by side, and the thought would have perished at birth.
Returned to the terrace of the Seebade-Anstalt, one found the atmosphere heavily charged with suppressed excitement. Immaculately-groomed young diplomats, down from Berlin for the Sunday, were twirling their walking-sticks and yellow gloves which were not, after all, to accompany them to Grand-Admiral Prince Henry of Prussia's garden-party. That, like everything else connected with Kiel Week, had suddenly been called off.
A party of Americans flocked together at the entrance to the hotel to exchange low-spoken views on the all-pervading topic. There was big Lieutenant-Commander Walter R. Gherardi, our wide-awake Berlin Naval Attaché, resplendent in gala gold-braided uniform, and Mrs. Gherardi, who had motored me around the environs of Kiel that morning; Albert Billings Ruddock, Third Secretary of the Embassy, and his pretty and clever wife; and Lanier Winslow, Ambassador Gerard's private secretary, his effervescent good nature repressed for the first time I ever remembered observing it in that unbecoming and unnatural condition. Secretary Ruddock's father, Mr. Charles H. Ruddock, of New York, completed the group.
I met Mr. Ruddock, Sr., six months later in New York. "Do you remember what you told me that afternoon at Kiel, when we were discussing Serajevo?" he asked. I pleaded a lapse of recollection. "You said," he reminded me, "'this means war.'"