Some day, perhaps, the history of that fateful night at Potsdam will be written, for there was Armageddon born. Its full details have never leaked out. So much I believe can be here set down with certainty--it was not quite a harmonious council which finally plumped for war. At the outset, at any rate, it was divided into camps which found themselves in diametrical opposition. The "peace party," or what was left of it, is said, loath as the world is to believe it, to have been headed by the Kaiser himself. Bethmann Hollweg supported his Imperial Master’s view that war should only be resorted to as a last desperate emergency. Von Jagow, the innocuous Foreign Secretary, dancing as usual to his superiors’ whistle, "sided" with the Emperor and the Chancellor. Von Falkenhayn and von Tirpitz demanded war. Germany was ready; her adversaries were not; the issue was plain. Von Moltke was non-committal. He is a Christian Scientist, and otherwise pacific by temperament. Prince Henry of Prussia did not at least violently insist upon peace. I could never verify whether the German Crown Prince was permitted to participate in the war council or not. If he was, posterity may be sure that his influence was not exercised unduly in the direction of a bloodless solution of the crisis. Herr Kühn, the Secretary of the Treasury, submitted satisfying figures to prove that, if war must be, Germany was financially caparisoned. From Herr Ballin came word that if war should unhappily be forced upon the Fatherland by the bear, the present positions of German liners were such that few, if any, of them would fall certain prey to enemy cruisers. Those which could not reach home ports would be able to take refuge in snug neutral harbors. The next day, Thursday, July 30, I was able to telegraph my chiefs in London and New York that the fat was now almost irrevocably in the fire. The War Party’s views had prevailed. The fiction that "Russian mobilization" was an intolerable peril which Germany could no longer face in inactivity had been so assiduously maintained that any reluctance to go to war, which may have lingered in the Kaiser’s soul, was now overcome. The sword had literally been "forced" into his hand. Russia, it was decided, was to be notified that demobilization or German "counter-mobilization" within twenty-four hours was the choice she had to make. My information went considerably beyond this so-called "last German effort on behalf of peace." It was to the effect that while Germany had taken "one more final step" in the direction of an amicable solution of the crisis, _she did not really expect it to be successful, and had, indeed, resorted to it merely in order to be able to say that she had "left no stone unturned to prevent war_."