e (fond hope!) the
hegemony of the Balkans. This brilliant stroke was effected in
1913--the year before the Great War. All that remained was to ruin
Serbia. For that purpose Austria had long been straining at the leash.
She had been on the point of making an attack in 1909, in 1912, in
1913. In 1914 the leash was slipped. If the rival empires chose to look
on while Serbia was destroyed, well and good: in that case the
Berlin-Bagdad project could be systematically developed and
consolidated, and the attack on the rival empires could come later. If
not, still it was well; for all was ready for the great challenge.

We have dwelt at some length upon this gigantic project, because it has
formed during all these years the heart and centre of the German
designs, and even to-day it is the dearest of German hopes. Not until
she is utterly defeated will she abandon it; because its abandonment
must involve the abandonment of every hope of a renewed attempt at
world-supremacy, after an interval for reorganisation and recovery. Not
until the German control over Austria and Turkey, more complete to-day,
after two and a half years of war, than it has ever been before, has
been destroyed by the splitting up of Austria among the nationalities
to which her territory belongs, and by the final overthrow of the
Turkish Empire, will the German dream of world-dominion be shattered.

But while this fundamentally important project was being worked out,
other events, almost equally momentous in their bearing upon the coming
conflict, were taking place elsewhere. It was the obvious policy of
Germany to keep her rivals on bad terms with one another. The tradition
of Bismarck bade her isolate each victim before it was destroyed. But
the insolence and the megalomania of modern Germany made this
difficult. German writers were busily and openly explaining the fate
marked out for all the other powers. France was to be so crushed that
she would 'never again be able to stand in our path.' The bloated and
unconsolidated empire of Britain was to be shattered. The Russian
barbarians were to be thrust back into Asia. And what the pamphleteers
and journalists wrote was expressed with almost equal clearness in the
tone of German diplomacy. In face of all this, the clumsy attempts of
the German government to isolate their rivals met with small success,
even though these rivals had many grounds of controversy among
themselves. France knew what she had to fear;