Just as Wangenheim personified Germany, so did his colleague, Pallavicini, personify Austria. Wangenheim’s essential quality was a brutal egotism, while Pallavicini was a quiet, kind-hearted, delightfully-mannered gentleman. Wangenheim was always looking to the future, Pallavicini to the past. Wangenheim represented that mixture of commercialism and medieval lust for conquest that constitute Prussian _weltpolitik_; Pallavicini was a diplomat left over from the days of Metternich. “Germany wants this!” Wangenheim would insist, when an important point had to be decided. “I shall consult my Foreign Office,” the cautious Pallavicini would say, on a similar occasion. The Austrian, with little upturned grey moustaches, with a rather stiff, even slightly strutting walk, looked like the old-fashioned Marquis that was once a stock figure on the stage. I might compare Wangenheim with the representative of a great business firm which was lavish in its expenditure and which obtained its trade by generous entertaining, while his Austrian colleague represented a house that prided itself on its past achievements and was entirely content with its position. The same delight that Wangenheim took in Pan-German plans, Pallavicini found in all the niceties and obscurities of diplomatic technique. The Austrian had represented his country in Turkey many years, and was the dean of the corps, a dignity of which he was extremely proud. He found his delight in upholding all the honours of his position; he was expert in arranging the order of precedence at ceremonial dinners, and there was not a single detail of etiquette that he did not have at his fingers’ ends. When it came to affairs of State, however, he was merely a tool of Wangenheim. From the first, indeed, he seemed to accept his position as that of a diplomat who was more or less subject to the will of his more powerful ally. In this way Pallavicini played to his German colleague precisely the same part that his Empire was playing to that of the Kaiser. In the early months of the war the bearing of these two men completely mirrored the respective successes and failures of their countries. As the Germans boasted of victory after victory Wangenheim’s already huge and erect figure seemed to become larger and more upstanding, while Pallavicini, as the Austrians lost battle after battle to the Russians, seemed to become smaller and more shrinking.