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.