The Assault: Germany Before the Outbreak and England in War-TimeWile, Frederic William
History
The Assault: Germany Before the Outbreak and England in War-Time
Wile, Frederic William
World War, 1914-1918
It was this news--reiterating by the printed word what the Chancellor
had unblushingly announced in the Reichstag: that military necessities
had taken precedence of "all other considerations," including
honor--which aroused the ferocity of the mob and incited it, amid mad
maledictions on "perfidious Albion," to vent its fury by attempting to
wreck the English Embassy. This German "official report," moreover,
besides distorting the facts so as to place the onus for the outbreak of
hostilities exclusively upon England, deliberately misstated the object
of Sir Edward Goschen’s visit to the Foreign Office. As we know from
his famous dispatch on the last phase, he did not "appear" there "to
declare war." England’s declaration of war, as a matter of historical
record, was not made until eleven P.M., or midnight Berlin time. The
assault on the Embassy by _Kultur’s_ knife-throwing, stone-hurling and
window-breaking cohorts was in full progress by nine o’clock. It began
almost immediately after Sir Edward Goschen’s return from his celebrated
farewell interview with the Imperial Chancellor--the torrid quarter of
an hour in which von Bethmann Hollweg, incapable of concealing Germany’s
rage over the wrecking of her war scheme, blackened the Teutonic
escutcheon for all time by branding the Belgian treaty of neutrality as
a "scrap of paper." Of all egregious words which have fallen from the
lips of German "diplomats," von Bethmann Hollweg’s immortal
indiscretions of that day will live longest, to his own and his
country’s ineffaceable shame.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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