Her "friendly representations" at Belgrade having proved abortive, Austria now prepared for more forceful measures. On July 21 Berlin learned that Count Berchtold, the Viennese foreign minister, had proceeded to Ischl to submit to the Emperor Francis Joseph the note he had drawn up for presentation to Serbia. As the world was about to learn, this was the fateful ultimatum which poured oil on the European embers and set them aglare, to splutter, burn and devastate in a long-enduring and all-engulfing conflagration. Simultaneously--though this, too, was not known till months later--the Austrian minister at Belgrade sent off a dispatch to his Government, declaring that a "reckoning" with Serbia could not be "permanently avoided," that "half measures were useless," and that the time had come to put forward "far-reaching requirements joined to effective control." That, as events were soon to develop, was an example of the diplomatic rhetoric which masters of statecraft employ for concealment of thought. It meant that nothing less than the abject surrender of Serbian sovereignty would appease Vienna’s desire for vengeance for Serajevo. During all these hours, so pregnant with the fate of Europe, the German Foreign Office was stormed by foreign newspaper correspondents in quest of light on Germany’s attitude. Was she counseling moderation in Vienna, or fishing in troubled waters? Was she reminding her ally that while Serajevo was primarily an Austrian question, it was in its broad aspects essentially a European issue? Was the Kaiser really playing his vaunted rôle as the bulwark of _European_ peace, or was Herr von Tschirschky, his Ambassador in Vienna, adjuring the Ballplatz that it was Austria’s duty to "stand firm" in the presence of the crowning Slav infamy, and that William of Hohenzollern was ready once again to don "shining armor" for the defense of "Germanic honor"? These are the questions we representatives of British and American newspapers persistently launched at the veracious Berlin Press Bureau. What did Hammann and his minions tell us? That Germany regarded the Austrian-Serbian controversy a purely private affair between those two countries; that Germany had at no stage of the imbroglio been consulted by her Austrian ally, and that the last thing in the world which occurred to the tactful Wilhelmstrasse was to proffer unasked-for counsel to Count Berchtold, Emperor Francis Joseph’s Foreign Minister, at so delicate and critical a moment. Vienna would properly resent such unwarranted interference with her sovereign prerogatives as a Great Power--we were assured. Germany’s attitude was that of an innocent bystander and interested witness, and nothing more. That was the version of the Fatherland’s attitude sedulously peddled out for both home and foreign consumption.