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.
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.