cialists on the side of the Government); that Russia and Servia had
planned the dismemberment of Austria; that, consequently, Teutons (and
Turks) must fight desperately for national existence in a conflict
forced upon them by Russia, Servia, and France, England perfidiously
appearing as a renegade to her race and creed.
[Footnote 562: British White Paper, Nos. 114, 122, 123, 125; Belgian
Grey Book, No. 19.]
By these falsehoods, dinned into a singularly well-drilled and docile
people, the Germans were worked up to a state of frenzy for an
enterprise for which their rulers had been preparing during more than a
decade. The colossal stores of war material, amassed especially in
1913-14 (some of them certain soon to deteriorate), the exquisitely
careful preparations at all points of the national life, including the
colonies, refute the fiction that war was forced upon Germany. The
course of the negotiations preceding the war, the assiduous efforts of
Germany to foment Labour troubles in Russia before the crisis, the
unpreparedness of the Allies for the fierce and sustained energy of the
Teutonic assault,--all these symptoms prove the guilt of Germany[563].
The crowning proof is that up to the present (August 1915) she has not
issued a complete set of diplomatic documents, and not one despatch
which bears out the Chancellor's statement that he used his influence at
Vienna for peace. The twenty-nine despatches published in her White Book
are a mere fragment of her immense diplomatic correspondence which she
has found it desirable to keep secret, and, as we have seen, her
officials suppressed the Tsar's second telegram of July 29 urging that
the Austro-Serb dispute be referred to the Hague Tribunal.
[Footnote 563: See the damning indictment by a German in _J'accuse_,
Section III., also the thorough and judicial examination by J.W.
Headlam, _The History of Twelve Days_.]
The sets of despatches published by the Allies show conclusively that
each of them worked for peace and was surprised by the war. Their
unpreparedness and the absolute preparedness of Germany have appeared so
clearly during the course of hostilities as to give the lie to the
German pamphleteers who have striven to prove that in the last resort
the war was "a preventive war," that is, designed to avert a future
conflict at a time unfavourable to Germany. There is not a sign that any
one of the Powers of the Entente was making more than strictly defensive
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