56 The Great War other great battle — one more of the endless series of " decisive battles of the world " — might be fought. It remained also to look, out upon the troubled German Ocean where the battle fleets of the rivals for sea empire, rivals as keen as Carthage and Rome, must presently decide the supremacy of the ocean. And as the curtain fell upon this first act it was impossible not to feel that on the human side a single figure dominated, and that figure was the German Kaiser. " We Germans fear God and nothing else," Bismarck had said, and deserted by Italy, at war with France, Russia, Great Britain, Belgium, with no ally but shaken Austria, William II stood forth from the storm like Napoleon, launch- ing his mighty armies against the world. History would settle the rights and wrongs, fate and the " heaviest artillery " might once more determine the issue, but the Kaiser was the central figure in the closing prelude.