General Major Semmler climbed back up to the eighth floor for another look at the one man who could change that. He watched through the spy hole as Clyde Lynds’s eager assistants scurried. He saw that Lynds had had a cot moved in so he could work long nights. Semmler grunted approval at the sight. The scientist who was key to surmounting the shortcomings on the fourth floor was what Fritz Wunderlich’s drummer friends applauded as a “live wire.” Lynds was working, Semmler thought with a cold smile, just as hard as if he were locked in a Prussian dungeon with a gun to his head.
Semmler glided up the stairs to his lair on the ninth floor, confident that he had Clyde Lynds exactly where he needed him to save Germany from the fatal flaw of Der Tag. And, despite Isaac Bell’s repeated interference, the grand scheme of the Donar Plan was unfolding as it was destined to.
General Major Christian Semmler had soldiered abroad. Fighting in China and Africa, he had seen firsthand foreigners’ weaknesses and their strengths, and he knew better than any other officer in the kaiser’s army that Germany could never survive a war against all the world at once.
The Donar Plan — Semmler’s strategy to save Germany — had sprung to life in a rainstorm at Katrinahall, the hunting lodge on the Rominter Heath that was the jewel of his wife’s dowry. Kaiser Wilhelm II had come to shoot wild boar. A royal visit was a singular honor that aristocrats vied for at court. Semmler had stocked the estate with that in mind, but in fact the kaiser had always cast a warm eye on his youngest general major. He called Semmler a man’s man and a soldier’s soldier, and he chortled over rumors of deadly duels at school and reports of savage battles in Peking and with the Boers behind the English lines.
Semmler suspected another reason for His Majesty’s favor. He was acutely aware of his long arms and simian brows. He knew that “gorilla” or “monkey” looks would have doomed an ordinary soldier to a stagnant career in an army that revered the handsome features that epitomized superior races and ridiculed the ugly. But the kaiser’s own appearance was blighted by a birth defect — a withered arm that hung from his shoulder like a toy doll’s. Perhaps two refugees from the mirror felt a kinship?
When they were driven indoors by the rain, Semmler invited the kaiser into his library and entertained him by projecting films of galloping cavalry, armored trains, the new flying machines, and the ocean-churning dreadnoughts of Wilhelm’s beloved High Seas Fleet.
“Behold, Your Majesty, the newest weapon of all.”
The kaiser squinted at the screen. “Where is it?”
“The movies are a weapon, Your Majesty.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You know that the superior classes have always enjoyed theater and opera.”
“As they should.”
“The movies are an even bigger event in the lives of the workers. Millions crowd into Kintopps and tenement cinemas. They watch whatever appears on the screen. Mesmerized. Imagine millions upon millions assembled daily to watch the same thing — wanting to be mesmerized; hoping to be mesmerized. They are ripe for propaganda.”
“Propaganda?” The kaiser had frowned. “They boast in England that movies are a propaganda of democracy.”
“Movies are even better propaganda for love and hate, Your Majesty. Friendship and war. There are millions watching. They could watch your message.”
“What message, General Major?”
Christian Semmler stood face-to-face with Kaiser Wilhelm and said, “Friendship.”
“Friendship?…”
Semmler took a deep breath to remind himself that patience was the hunter’s deadliest virtue. He smothered his impulse to grip the kaiser by his shirtfront and shout that if propaganda could convince the German people to pay for a fleet of warships they didn’t need, propaganda could convince anyone of anything. But he could not shout that in so many words without instantly destroying his special rapport.
“With all the respect due the power of your splendid armies, Majesty, and your navy, when Der Tag dawns we will almost certainly have to fight England, France, and Russia simultaneously.”
“We will win,” the kaiser said. “Our rail lines will shuttle our armies from front to front, east to west, west to east. A two-front war holds no terrors.”
“To be sure, Your Majesty. But three fronts? Even Germany will be hard-pressed to fight on three fronts simultaneously…”
“America.”
“As you say, Your Majesty. America.”
It finally dawned on the kaiser. “Allies!”
“Allies, Your Majesty. The movies can defeat Germany’s enemies by turning them against one another. We will show propaganda movies that depict Germans and the immense German-American minority as America’s friends and the British, French, and Russians as her enemies. Can you imagine a more powerful weapon? Germany, their friend, and England, their enemy.”
The kaiser had looked at him sharply. “You’ve put great thought into this, haven’t you? This didn’t just pop into your mind.”
“Yes, Your Majesty. I have thought of little else for a long time. Der Tag must be Germany’s beginning, not her end.”
Kaiser Wilhelm flung his strong arm around Semmler’s shoulders.
“Do it,” he said. “Take whatever you need.”
“I need the Army, the diplomatic corps, the banks, and the steamship lines.”
“All will serve you.”
Semmler’s gifts included an unerring eye for a person’s nature and desires. Instead of responding with a soldierly salute, he extended a strong man’s hand. They clasped hard and stared each other in the face. “I swear a sacred oath: I will not let you down, Your Majesty.”
But the kaiser was famously mercurial. Before Semmler could suggest they rejoin the other guns at the hunt since the rain was slackening, the kaiser’s face took on a dreamy expression, and he said, with what turned out to be amazing prescience, “Wouldn’t it be fine if movies made music?”
“Music, Your Majesty?”
“Music! So that thousands watching in giant theaters could listen, too, and feel the emotion of the music. Music is key to effective propaganda. Music is visceral.”
“You are right, of course, Your Majesty, I will look into it.”
But there were few orchestras in the small theaters in most American towns. Nor would a tinny piano do much to stir emotions. He investigated the likelihood that movies themselves could make their own music and learned the sorry history of those attempts.
And then the strangest thing happened. Semmler had already set the Donar Plan in motion to show pro-German movies to American audiences. He had established the Imperial Film Manufacturing Company and was integrating exchange men and exhibitors to control film production, distribution, and exhibition when all of a sudden — like a comet roaring through the atmosphere — came news from Vienna of Sprechendlichtspieltheater, a talking pictures machine that actually worked.
The kaiser himself had virtually predicted it, and there it was. The invention that Beiderbecke and Lynds had named the Talking Pictures machine would transform movies into far more potent voices to persuade, cajole, and play on the emotions. Music and the human voice married to moving images would stir millions to go to war in the name of love.