The Kaiser's private study in the New Palace at Potsdam was a shrine to his own ego. It was a room of bombastic, overbearing grandeur, every surface cluttered with silver-framed photographs of himself in various military uniforms, naval charts detailing the growth of his beloved High Seas Fleet, and scale models of the latest German dreadnoughts. It was the nerve center of a restless, ambitious, and deeply insecure empire, and its master was in a state of near-apoplectic fury.
Kaiser Wilhelm II paced the length of the Persian carpet like a caged tiger, his good right arm windmilling through the air, his withered left arm tucked stiffly at his side. He brandished a decoded telegram from his ambassador in London, waving it as if it were a blood-stained battle standard.
"Piracy!" he roared, his voice echoing off the high, coffered ceiling. "This is what it comes to! The so-called masters of the sea, the paragons of fair play, have been revealed as common gangsters! Thugs! Devoid of honor, devoid of law, devoid of shame! They fire on an unarmed German mail steamer, on a civilian vessel, in peacetime! They murder my subjects! This is an insult of such profound arrogance, it makes my blood boil!"
His Chancellor, the ever-cautious Bernhard von Bülow, stood by the massive fireplace, his face a mask of weary resignation. He, along with the other assembled ministers and generals, had learned long ago that the best course of action during one of the Kaiser's rages was to simply let the storm blow itself out. To argue was to add fuel to the fire.
But one man in the room saw an opportunity in the Kaiser's fury. Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the grizzled, bearded architect of the German High Seas Fleet, stepped forward. He was a man of cold, strategic logic, and he knew that the Kaiser's emotional outrage was a tool that could be honed and directed.
"Your Majesty," Tirpitz began, his voice a calm, deep rumble that cut through the Kaiser's tirade. "This attack, while a despicable outrage, is also, from a strategic perspective, a gift."
The Kaiser stopped his pacing and glared at him. "A gift, Tirpitz? My flag has been defiled and my citizens murdered, and you call it a gift?"
"An unambiguous one, Your Majesty," Tirpitz replied, unflustered. "It is an undeniable casus belli, an act of war for which they have no legal or moral justification. But more importantly, it proves, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that the Chinese Emperor's thesis was correct. It proves that Great Britain will stop at nothing, will violate any law, will commit any atrocity, to prevent our rightful rise to power. The Chancellor's long-held hopes for a diplomatic solution, for a peaceful accommodation with our British cousins, are now revealed to have been a dangerous fantasy. We can no longer afford to be cautious. They have shown us their true face. We must show them ours."
Chancellor von Bülow, seeing the argument slipping away from him, made one last, desperate stand for sanity. "An incident is not a war, Your Majesty! It is a tragic and infuriating affair, but we can protest! We can demand reparations, an official apology! To use this as a pretext for a full-scale, global conflict would be to fall into a trap of our own making!"
The Kaiser, his rage now given a sharp, strategic focus by Tirpitz's words, rounded on his Chancellor, his eyes gleaming with a fanatical light.
"Pretext?" he spat, the word dripping with scorn. "You call this a pretext? This is an unprovoked military attack on the German flag! On German civilians! My alliance with the Dragon Emperor is no longer a strategic option, Bülow! It is now a moral necessity! It is a crusade! A holy crusade of the righteous, monarchical empires against the lawless, piratical shopkeepers of the British Empire!"
In that moment, the last vestiges of caution in the German high command were burned away by the white-hot fire of the Kaiser's rage. He strode to his desk, sweeping aside a stack of documents. His decision was made, and it would go far beyond the original, tentative proposal of the Chinese.
"The time for secret talks and cautious planning is over!" he declared. "We are no longer merely considering an alliance. We are committing to it, fully, unconditionally, and immediately! Germany will provide our noble ally in the East with a blank cheque of support!"
He began to issue a series of rapid-fire orders, each one a nail in the coffin of the old world order.
"Tirpitz!" he commanded. "You will immediately dispatch a squadron of our finest naval architects and submarine specialists to China. They will travel incognito, via neutral American ports if necessary. Their mission is to help the Qing Emperor build a modern submarine fleet, a fleet of U-boats based in their ports, capable of strangling British shipping lanes from Singapore to Shanghai. We will teach them the meaning of a naval blockade!"
The Admiral's eyes lit up. It was a bold, brilliant move.
"Von Falkenhayn!" he barked at the Chief of the General Staff. "You will establish a permanent, secret military mission in Beijing. You will coordinate with their high command on the grand, two-front war. We will synchronize our watches, and we will crush the Russian armies between us like a vise!"
Then, he turned his attention to the industrialists. "And someone get me the directors of Krupp and IG Farben! We will begin immediate, massive shipments of advanced industrial machinery to our allies. Heavy presses for artillery shells, precision lathes for rifle barrels, advanced chemical precursors for explosives! We will send it all, disguised as commercial cargo on neutral ships, directly to this Minister Yuan Shikai's railway project in Manchuria! We will turbocharge their war machine! We will turn China into an arsenal that will make Britain's factories look like blacksmiths' forges!"
This last order, born of pure strategic impulse, would have unintended and catastrophic consequences. It would place Yuan Shikai, the secret British spy, in the impossible position of receiving unconditional German aid, making him the central, unwitting nexus of the entire global conflict.
The Kaiser, his face flushed with the exhilaration of his world-altering decisions, finally sat down at his desk. He would send a new message to the Dragon Emperor, a personal message, from one sovereign to another.
"The insult to my flag," he dictated to a trembling aide, "will be answered with a fleet of iron. The blood of my citizens will be avenged with a world of fire. The German Eagle now flies wing to wing with the Golden Dragon. Your war is our war. Your enemies are our enemies. Let the seas boil and let the thrones of the old, corrupt empires tremble in fear."
The point of no return had been crossed. The cautious, diplomatic dance was over. Germany was now fully committed to a global war of annihilation against the British Empire and its allies.
Later that night, under the cover of a moonless sky and a cloak of impenetrable secrecy, a single, grimy German U-boat, the U-9, slipped out of its pen at the naval base in Kiel. Its crew had been told they were embarking on a long-range experimental patrol. Only its captain, a grim-faced, tight-lipped officer named Otto Weddigen, and the four quiet, scholarly-looking civilians he had taken on board, knew the truth. They were not going on patrol in the North Sea. They were beginning the first, perilous leg of a clandestine, three-month journey to the Far East. They were the first down payment on the Kaiser's blank cheque.
The global military alliance was no longer a piece of paper, a diplomatic promise. It was now a physical reality, a U-boat filled with Germany's deadliest secrets, cutting its way through the dark waters of the Baltic, on its way to change the technological and strategic landscape of the world forever.