“Our enemies are feeling the grip of the fist that holds them by the neck.  They are trying to force a decision.  England, mistress of the seas, is seeking to attain its end by land, and driving her sons by hundreds of thousands to death and mutilation.  Is this the England that was to have sat at ease upon its island till we were starved into submission, that could wait till their big brother across the Atlantic arrived on the scene with ships and million armies, standing fast in crushing superiority until the last annihilating battle?

“No, gentlemen, our enemies have no longer time to wait.  Time is on our side now.  True, the test imposed upon us by the turn of the world’s history is enormous.  What our troops are doing to help, what our young men in blue are doing, stands far above all comparison.  But they will attain their end.  For us at home, too, it is hard; not so hard by far as for them out there, yet hard enough.  Those at home must do their part as well.  If we remain true to ourselves, keeping our own house in order, maintaining internal unity, then we have won existence and the future for our Fatherland.  Everything is at stake.  The German people is called upon now, in these weeks heavy with impending decision, to show that it is worthy of continued existence.”

4

=Speech by Count Czernin to the Austrian Delegation, January 24, 1918.=

“Gentlemen, it is my duty to give you a true picture of the peace negotiations, to set forth the various phases of the results obtained up to now, and to draw therefrom such conclusions as are true, logical and justifiable.

“First of all it seems to me that those who consider the progress of the negotiations too slow cannot have even an approximate idea of the difficulties which we naturally had to encounter at every step.  I will in my remarks take the liberty of setting forth these difficulties, but would like first to point out a cardinal difference existing between the peace negotiations in Brest-Litovsk and all others which have ever taken place in the history of the world.  Never, so far as I am aware, have peace negotiations been conducted with open windows.  It would be impossible that negotiations of the depth and extent of the present could from the start proceed smoothly and without opposition.  We are faced with nothing less than the task of building up a new world, of restoring all that the most merciless of all wars has destroyed and cast down.  In all the peace negotiations we know of the various phases have been conducted more or less behind closed doors, the results being first declared to the world when the whole was completed.  All history books tell us, and indeed it is obvious enough, that the toilsome path of such peace negotiations leads constantly over hill and dale, the prospects appearing often more or less favourable day by day.  But when the separate phases themselves, the details of each day’s proceedings, are telegraphed all