Page:Diplomacy and the War (Andrassy 1921).djvu/50

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OUR WAR MOTIVES
43

that, at any rate at that time, no group of states desired a war and that the wish of preserving peace predominated in every cabinet.

Nevertheless, both these crises materially assisted in bringing about the European War. The Entente only remembered the German attitude in the Moroccan crisis, and thought that they saw in it the impossibility of tolerating German Imperialism. After the Balkan War, they only spoke of the ultimatum that we had delivered to Montenegro and Serbia. They forgot that Germany gave way completely in the Moroccan question, in spite of her advantageous military position which she occupied while Russia was still weak. They forgot that the Monarchy permitted the South Slavonic States to gain in strength and to realize in some degree their aggressive aims which they did not even attempt to hide. No one seemed to be aware that we had suffered territorial losses by our own creation of Albania, and that Novibazar, which had hitherto linked us to Albania, passed from our friends the Turks into the hands of our South Slavonic enemy; they forgot, further, that we proved up to the hill the fact that there was not a vestige of truth in the popular Salonika theory, because we allowed ourselves to be cut off from the Balkans by a South Slavonic ring.

We, on the other hand, only remembered that the Entente had wished for nothing except teaching Germany a severe lesson in Morocco and dictating international policv without Germany, so much so that Caillaux, the most peace-loving President of the French