Christian “I bless peace” by a noble, if heathen, “I fight war.”  Instead, he persuaded us all that he was under no obligation whatever to fight.  He persuaded Germany that he had not the slightest serious intention of fighting.  Sir Owen Seaman wrote in Punch an amusing and witty No-Intervention poem.  Sporting Liberals offered any odds that there would be no war for England.  And Germany, confident that with Austria’s help she could break France with one hand and Russia with the other if England held aloof, let Austria throw the match into the magazine.

The Battery Unmasked.

Then the Foreign Office, always acting through its amiable and popular but confused instrument Sir Edward, unmasked the Junker-Militarist battery.  He suddenly announced that England must take a hand in the war, though he did not yet tell the English people so, it being against the diplomatic tradition to tell them anything until it is too late for them to object.  But he told the German Ambassador, Prince Lichnowsky, caught in a death trap, pleaded desperately for peace with Great Britain.  Would we promise to spare Germany if Belgium were left untouched?  No.  Would we say on what conditions we would spare Germany?  No.  Not if the Germans promised not to annex French territory?  No.  Not even if they promised not to touch the French colonies?  No.  Was there no way out?  Sir Edward Grey was frank.  He admitted there was just one chance; that Liberal opinion might not stand the war if the neutrality of Belgium were not violated.  And he provided against that chance by committing England to the war the day before he let the cat out of the bag in Parliament.

All this is recorded in the language of diplomacy in the White Paper on or between the lines.  That language is not so straightforward as my language; but at the crucial points it is clear enough.  Sazonoff’s tone is politely diplomatic in No. 6; but in No. 17 he lets himself go.  “I do not believe that Germany really wants war; but her attitude is decided by yours.  If you take your stand firmly with France and Russia there will be no war.  If you fail them now, rivers of blood will flow, and you will in the end be dragged into war.”  He was precisely right; but he did not realize that war was exactly what our Junkers wanted.  They did not dare to tell themselves so; and naturally they did not dare to tell him so.  And perhaps his own interest in war was too strong to make him regret the rejection of his honest advice.  To break up the Austrian Empire and achieve for Russia the Slav Caliphate of South-East Europe whilst defeating Prussia with the help of France and of Russia’s old enemy and Prussia’s old ally England, was a temptation so enormous that Sazonoff, in resisting it so far as to shew Sir Edward Grey frankly the only chance of preventing it, proved himself the most genuine humanitarian in the diplomatic world.

Number 123.