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It is possible that he thought he had a better chance of carrying it out than could have been the case were they to be present, when he got the Emperor and Tirpitz to keep away from Berlin after the meeting at Potsdam on July 5.
After his fall, von Tirpitz, in a letter to some admirers who had sent him verses and a wreath, advocated holding the coast of Flanders as a necessity for the war against England and America. The successor of von Tirpitz was Admiral von Holtzendorff, whose brother is Ballin's right hand man in the management of the Hamburg American Line.
His opponents, however, most of the great Agrarians and National Liberals, the men behind Tirpitz, continue to work for a new submarine campaign in which all neutrals will be warned that their vessels will be sunk without notice if bound to or from the ports of Germany's enemies.
On May twenty-sixth, I arranged that the Colonel should meet von Tirpitz at dinner in our house. We did not guess then what a central figure in this war the great admiral was going to be. At that time and until his fall, he was Minister of Marine, which corresponds to our Secretary of the Navy Department, and what is called in German Reichsmarineamt.
Von Tirpitz' ambition undoubtedly led him to consider himself as a promising candidate for Bethmann-Hollweg's shoes. The whole submarine issue, therefore, became not only a question of military expediency and a question for the Foreign Office to decide in connection with the relations of America to Germany, but also a question of internal politics, a means of forcing the Chancellor out of office.
I mention this because the Admiral appears not to have quite understood my position. I have no doubt that the Emperor understood it. At the end of the conversation I felt for once a little tired, and was glad when the Emperor asked von Tirpitz to drive me back to the Hotel Bristol. I thought the manner of the latter during the journey highly polite and correct, but not wholly sympathetic.
Soon after the Germans are reading the war correspondence from their own front we are reading it, and laughing at jokes in their comic papers and at cartoons which exhibit John Bull as a stricken old ogre and Britannia who Rules the Waves with the corners of her mouth drawn down to the bottom of her chin, as she sees the havoc that von Tirpitz is making with submarines which do not stop us from receiving our German jokes regularly across the Channel.
Bismarck does not appear to have known much while in office about Tirpitz, and when the latter desired later on to enlist his outside support he did not find it at first easy. But, having with some difficulty got the assent of the Emperor to a new ship being named after Bismarck, he in the end got from the latter permission to visit him at Friedrichsruh in 1897. There Tirpitz arrived at noon.
On August fifth, with our Naval Attache, Commander Walter Gherardi, I called upon von Tirpitz, to learn from him which ports be considered safest for the ships to be sent from America with gold for stranded Americans. He recommended Rotterdam.
And he did seem to enjoy seeing them very much, and Admiral Tirpitz and his staff took all kinds of notes while asking all kinds of questions." The reminiscence seemed to make the three other men a trifle uncomfortable. "Oh! what difference does it make after all?" said Rebener. "Let's get down to business.
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