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 Brunsbüttel for the annual regatta of the North German Yacht Squadron, a club consisting for the most part of Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck 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.