Page:The guilt of William Hohenzollern.djvu/183

 CHAPTER XV LAST EFFORTS TO PRESERVE PEACE

was the effect on the civilian Chancellor. He endeavoured to save what could still be saved. For this end, however, it was becoming urgently necessary to evolve some other attitude to Austria than that of "Nibelungen-fidelity." The latter 's stupidity and stubbornness had resulted not only in a European war threatening to break out—overnight to this they might have reconciled themselves, as the possibility had been reckoned on from the first—but this stupidity and stubbornness threatened to have the result that the Central Powers would enter the war in the most un-favourable circumstances, without Italy, perhaps against Italy, and against England, and burdened before their own people with the terrible and crippling reproach that they had wantonly provoked this dreadful catastrophe.

The strongest pressure had to be exerted on Vienna to induce her to adopt a more intelligent policy at the eleventh hour.

But this tendency was in contradiction to another, and a militarist tendency, which, once the mobilization had begun, considered war inevitable, and, simply because the number of the enemy was so great, urged Rh