"We could not agree to the English proposal of a conference of Ambassadors, for it would doubtless have led to a serious diplomatic defeat. For Italy, too, was pro-Serb and, with her Balkan interests, stood rather opposed to Austria. The 'intimacy of the Russo-Italian relations' is admitted by Prince Lichnowsky himself. The best and only feasible way of escape was a localization of the conflict and an understanding between Vienna and Petrograd. We worked toward that end with all our energy. That we 'insisted upon' the war is an unheard-of assertion which is sufficiently invalidated by the telegrams of his Majesty the Kaiser to the Czar and to King George, published in the White Books--Prince Lichnowsky only cares to tell about 'the really humble telegram of the Czar'--as well as the instruction we sent to Vienna. The worst caricature is formed by the sentence: "'When Count Berchtold finally decided to come around we answered the Russian mobilization, after Russia had vainly negotiated and waited a whole week, with the ultimatum and the declaration of war.' [In quoting Lichnowsky, Herr von Jagow omits the former's statement that Count Berchtold "hitherto had played the strong man on instructions from Berlin."] "Wrong" Conclusions "Should we, perhaps, have waited until the mobilized Russian Army was streaming over our borders? The reading of the Sukhomlinov trial has probably given even Prince Lichnowsky a feeling of 'Oh si tacuisses!' On July 5 I was absent from Berlin. The declaration that I was 'shortly thereafter in Vienna' 'in order to talk everything over with Count Berchtold' is false. I returned to Berlin on July 6 from my honeymoon trip and did not leave there until Aug. 15, on the occasion of the shifting of the Great Headquarters. As Secretary of State I was only once in Vienna before the war, in the Spring of 1913. "Prince Lichnowsky lightly passed over the matter of the confusing dispatch that he sent us on Aug. 1--at present I am not in possession of the exact wording--as a 'misunderstanding' and even seems to want to reproach us because 'in Berlin the news, without first waiting for the conversation, was made the basis of a far-reaching action.' The question of war with England was a matter of minutes, and immediately after the arrival of the dispatch it was decided to make an eleventh-hour attempt to avoid war with France and England. His Majesty sent the well-known telegram to King George. The contents of the Lichnowsky dispatch could not have been understood any other way than we understood it.