Page:The guilt of William Hohenzollern.djvu/275

Rh

Count Waldersee adds:

"“General von Bertrab's audience in Potsdam did not place me, General von Moltke's representative in all matters pertaining to war, under the necessity of giving any orders. The regulation mobilization-operations were concluded on March 31st, 1914. The Army was, as ever, prepared.”"

This is surely a very interesting communication from the purely military standpoint. The political significance of these interviews is as little diminished thereby as it is by insisting on styling them “audiences” instead of “conferences with military authorities.”

It is also not quite clear why such violent efforts are being made to disavow those conferences. It would have been nothing short of the height of folly had William not held them, having once promised Francis Joseph “to back him with the German forces,” whatever the Serbian adventure might entail.

Having given this pledge, and having immediately afterwards started on his northern cruise, a conference with the chiefs of the Army and the Navy was the least to which William, as Supreme War Lord, was then bound. It was in this pledge, not in the military conferences, that William's guilt lay. The conferences were only the consequences of the pledge, which is confirmed anew by Count Waldersee's evidence.

Moreover, the statements of Herren Capelle, Bertrab and Waldersee confirm the secrecy in which the military conferences were wrapped. Both Capelle and Bertrab were received by the Kaiser in the park “personally and without witnesses.” Each spoke separately with him, face to face. This was certainly a council of war