The lines of the Norddeutscher-Lloyd were stretched like the tentacles of an octopus over the Indian Ocean and the Eastern Pacific, and at the outbreak of the war it was sucking trade from every British, French, Dutch, and Scandinavian line that plied to the ports of Australia, Malaysia, China, and the Philippines upon which it had fastened its slimy grip. The "N.D.L." was more than a German steamship line; it was Germany itself--Germany beginning to rivet down the edges of its "places in the sun." It was Herr Heiniken, the president of this great instrument of "Deutschland Ueber Alles," who, in Hongkong in 1911, exclaimed to a diplomat with whom he was discussing the Kaiser's Agadir bluff: "War! that, sir, is the one thing I want to avoid. What do we want to spend money and men on war when--within ten years at our present rate of progress--we can win everything that the most successful war could possibly give us? War might be a short cut to German world-power; and again, it might not. But hegemony by the trade route--provided only we continue to enjoy the freedom we have today--is sure. Our ships and merchants have already won half the battle, and victory is in sight if they are only allowed to go on." Herr Heiniken was a hard-headed, clear-seeing man, and one shudders to think how much truth there was in the words quoted. But the slower, more round-about "trade route" to world-power did not suit the hot-headed Junkers, and they forced their country to attempt to reach by the short-cut of war what was almost within the reach of their merchants and shippers. And that day at Bremerhaven we saw one of the results. There, sluddered down into the slime from which he rose, his tentacles all either severed or drawn in, was the remains of the "N.D.L." octopus. Miles and miles of what were once black-and-buff freighters and liners were lying so deep in harbour silt that it would have taken a dredger to get them out of their slips. The tangles of sagging, weed-fringed mooring cables running over and about them--for all the world as though they had been meshed in the web of a Gargantuan spider--accentuated the helpless immobility of craft that had once flaunted the arrogant red, white, and black bunting of the German merchant marine in the uttermost corners of the Seven Seas.