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. There, I thought, was Anglo-German friendship in being--not an ideal, but an actuality. I am sure the British and German tars at Kiel that boisterous Saturday night which melted into the Sunday of Serajevo little dreamt that when next they would be locked in one another’s arms, it would be at grips for life or death. CHAPTER III THE PLOT DEVELOPS Von G. is a Junker. He is also Germany’s ablest special correspondent. A Junker, let the uninitiated understand, is a Prussian land baron, or one of his descendants, who considers dominion over the earth and all its worms his by Divine Right. If, like von G., a Junker is an army officer besides, active or _ausser Dienst_, and had a grandfather who belonged to Moltke’s headquarters in 1870-71, he is the superlatively real thing. So, as my mission in Germany was study of the Fatherland in its characteristic ramifications, I always felt myself richly favored by the friendship and professional comradeship of von G. He was Junkerism incarnate. Several years’ residence in the United States had signally failed to corrode von G.’s Junker instincts. Indeed, it intensified them, for he was ever after a confirmed believer in the ignominious failure of Democracy. It was he who popularized "Dollarica" as a German nickname for "God’s country."