INTRODUCTION TO THE DESPATCHES.
By The Author.
The writers of these despatches were the diplomatic representatives of Belgium accredited to Britain, France and Germany before the war. The reports are addressed to their official chief, the Belgian Minister for Foreign Affairs in Brussels. The documents were discovered in the Belgian archives by the Germans in 1915, and issued in the original French with a German translation. No
attempt has ever been made to dispute their authenticity, which has been accepted by British, French, American and Italian commentators, us well as by writers whose countries preserved neutrality in the war. Their value to the student of international affairs, to all those who realise that the perils of the moment and the menace of the future can only be conjured through a clear comprehension of the past, is immeasurable. [1]
The principal writers are Count Charles doe Lalaing, Belgian Minister in London; Baron Guillaume, Belgian Minister in Paris; Baron Beyens, Belgian Minister in Paris; and Baron Greindl, Belgian Minister in Berlin. All these men had been in the Belgian Diplomatic Service for many years, and had served their country in manyny lands. Beyens had been successively chief of the
- ↑ It will be observed that there are gaps in the Despatches. This has naturally led to the suggestion that the missing Despatches have been purposely omitted from the published collection. Were that the case it could only be attributed to the desire of suppressing criticism of German diplomacy, or adverse comments upon German policy. But the inference of deliberate, suppression would seem to be untenable, because, when the Despatches are resumed after a gap it will be observed that the general tone of the documents differs in no way from the general tone of those immediately preceding the break in continuity. We may assume, therefore, that the simple explanation is probably the correct one, viz., that the missing documents were accidentally or designedly destroyed before they fell into German hands.
