Page:The ways of war - Kettle - 1917.pdf/104

 pean system," the expansion of races, the discharge of long accumulating thunder-clouds, of Hauptströmungen, of iron laws of destiny, and all the rest of the lurid, deterministic farrago of sham omniscience which forms the stock-in-trade of the German savant. You may point out that there is a sense in which all previous history is behind even the least important event in history, and that the Austrian ultimatum did but set a match to a long-laid train. Much of what you say will be true, and much will also be horrible. But nothing can alter the fact that this war originated in the attempt of a great Empire to exploit legitimate anger against crime in order to destroy the independence of a small State; that the small State, having accepted every other humiliation, offered to submit in this to the judgment of either of the recognised international tribunals, and that the great Empire refused.

The one theory, the only one, that explains the Austrian attitude, namely, that the Germanic Powers willed war, explains also the remainder of the ante-bellum interchanges. From the first no illusion was possible as to what was at stake. M. Sazonof on behalf of Russia allowed none to arise. He pointed out with that brevity and frankness which will be found in this affair to characterise the whole course of Russian diplomacy that any invasion of the sovereign rights of Serbia must disturb the equilibrium of the Balkans and with it the equilibrium of all Europe, and that if it came to war it would be impossible to localise it. M.