When we were officially notified that the Kaiser would proceed next morning by special train to Berlin, we made our own preparations to depart. The British squadron had still a day and a half of its scheduled visit to complete, and Vice-Admiral Warrender told us he would remain accordingly. The German Admiralty had extended him the hospitality of the new War Canal for the cruise of his fleet into the North Sea, but he decided to send only the light cruisers by that route and take his battleships home, as they had come, by the roundabout route of the Baltic. On Monday noon, June 29, I went back to Berlin, to live through five weeks of finishing touches for the grand world blood-bath. CHAPTER IV THE STAGE MANAGERS Armageddon was plotted, prepared for and precipitated by the German War Party. It was not the work of the German people. What is the "War Party"? Let me begin by explaining what it is _not_. It is not a party in the sense of President Wilson’s organization or Colonel Roosevelt’s Bull Moosers. It maintains no permanent headquarters or National Committee, and holds no conventions. The only barbecue it ever organized is the one which plunged the world into gore and tears in August, 1914, though its attempts to drench Europe with blood are decade-old. You would search the German city directories in vain for the War Party’s address or telephone number. No German would ever acknowledge that he belonged to Europe’s largest Black Hand league. You could, indeed, hardly find anybody in Germany willing even to acknowledge that the War Party even existed. Yet, unseen and sinister, its grip was fastened so heavily upon the machinery of State that when it deemed the moment for its sanguinary purposes at length ripe, the War Party was able to tear the whole nation from its peaceful pursuits and fling it, armed to the teeth, against a Europe so flagrantly unready that more than a year of strife finds Germany not only unbeaten but at a zenith of fighting efficiency which her foes have only begun to approach.