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.

ARTHUR CURTIS GOT TO THE KINTOPP an hour early for his appointment with Hans Reuter. The Kino was full already with a hundred film patrons in the narrow space, both men and women tonight, watching Sarah Bernhardt. He took his beer and wandered toward the screen, simulating a search for a closer seat while he looked for a back way out. There was none—which would make a fire a precarious proposition, and the effect of Reuter betraying him even worse.