Page:Diplomacy and the War (Andrassy 1921).djvu/181

 us, the Entente, and especially England, was convinced by what Kitchener said in Egypt in the course of a private conversation as follows: "The battles will perhaps be won by the Central Powers, but the war will certainly be won by the Entente, because she is able to endure longest." How could the idea of a peace by agreement be carried out successfully in view of such an attitude held by the Entente? Was it ever possible? Czernin and Ludendorff assert that such a possibility never existed. They point out that concrete and acceptable conditions were never submitted to us. This may be true, but it does not prove that if we had approached the matter differently the Entente would not have accepted such conditions. The question is not only whether we allowed actual opportunities to slip past, but also whether a better policy would not have been capable of creating advantageous opportunities for peace.

At any rate, the conditio sine qua non of bringing about a peace by agreement was: first of all, unified action, the display of power and self-consciousness in order to shake the consciousness of victory in the Entente. I considered it to be the greatest crime to use the will to make peace as a tool for internal politics. At any rate in our midst, the agitation of the pacifists brought about the certainty of the prolongation of the war. Among the Entente the result was that the conviction grew that we were already conquered and that a compromise was no longer necessary. The pacificist propaganda in Austria and Hungary was