So confidently did Wangenheim expect an immediate victory that he began to discuss the terms of peace. Germany would demand of France, he said, after defeating her armies, that she completely demobilise and pay an indemnity. “France now,” said Wangenheim, “can settle for $5,000,000,000; but if she persists in continuing the war she will have to pay $20,000,000,000.” He told me that Germany would demand harbours and coaling-stations “everywhere.” At that time, judging from Wangenheim’s statements, Germany was not looking so much for new territory as for great commercial advantages. She was determined to be the great merchant nation, and for this she must have free harbours, the Bagdad railroad, and extensive rights in South America and Africa. Wangenheim said that Germany did not desire any more territory in which the populations did not speak German, for they had had all of that kind of trouble they wanted in Alsace-Lorraine, Poland, and other non-German countries. This statement certainly sounds interesting now in view of recent happenings in Russia. He did not mention England in speaking of Germany’s demand for coaling-stations and harbours; he must have had England in mind, however, for what other nation could have given them to Germany “everywhere”? All these conversations were illuminating to me as Wangenheim’s revelation of the Conference of July 5th. That episode clearly proved that Germany had consciously started the war, while these grandiose schemes, as outlined by this very able but somewhat talkative Ambassador, showed the reasons that had impelled her in this great enterprise. Wangenheim gave me a complete picture of the German Empire embarking on a great buccaneering enterprise, in which the spoils of success came to be the accumulated riches of her neighbours and the world position which their skill and industry had built up through the centuries. If England attempted to starve Germany, said Wangenheim, Germany’s response would be a simple one: she would starve France. At that time, we must remember, Germany expected to have Paris within a week, and she believed that this would ultimately give her control of the whole country. It was evidently the German plan, as understood by Wangenheim, to hold this nation as a pawn for England’s behaviour, a kind of hostage on a gigantic scale, and, should England gain any military or naval advantage, Germany would attempt to counter-attack by torturing the whole French people. At that moment German soldiers were murdering innocent Belgians in return for the alleged misbehaviour of other Belgians, and evidently Germany had planned to apply this principle to whole nations as well as to individuals. All through this and other talks, Wangenheim showed the greatest animosity to Russia. “We’ve got our foot on Russia’s corn,” he said, “and we propose to keep it there.”