Page:The guilt of William Hohenzollern.djvu/219

Rh Russian troops on August 1st, this could not really have taken place in the early afternoon, is clear from the simple fact that in the evening, at 9.45, the Chancellor placed before the Kaiser another telegram to the Tsar, in which the latter was requested to command his troops to avoid any violation of the frontier. This dispatch, as shown above, was sent off from the Foreign Office after 10 p.m. At this hour, therefore, there cannot yet have been any news of a crossing of the frontier; otherwise the telegram would have been even more superfluous than it was in any case, owing to the delivery of the declaration of war.

In reality, William received the first news of the crossing of the frontier by Russians on the morning of August 2nd, when Bethmann informed him:

""According to a report of the General Staff (at 4 a.m. to-day), there has been an attempt to destroy the railway and an advance by two squadrons of Cossacks on Johannisburg. Thereby we are actually in a state of war.""

Here at last a time and place are mentioned. And then we find that the " afternoon of August 1st," in reality, was the " morning of August 2nd." Russian hostilities began about ten hours after the delivery of the German declaration of war in St. Petersburg. This is the way " Russia began the war against us."

If, nevertheless, the German Government attributes to these warlike operations the decisive part in the outbreak of war, it only shows how little founded their declaration of war seemed to German statesmen themselves.

In the Memorandum of the German Government