But how? The Serbian Minister at Petersburg says that Sazonov told him that in view of Serbia's successes "he had confidence in our strength and believed that we would be able to deliver a blow at Austria. For that reason we should feel satisfied with what we were to receive, and consider it merely as a temporary halting-place on the road to further gains." On another occasion "Sazonov told me that we must work for the future because we would acquire a great deal of territory from Austria." The Serbian Minister at Bucharest says that his Russian and French colleagues counselled a policy of waiting "with as great a degree of preparedness as possible the important events which must make their appearance among the Great Powers." How, one may ask, was the Russian Foreign Office able to look so far and so clearly into the future? If German responsibility for the war is fundamental, a _chose jugée_, as Mr. Lloyd George said it is, this seems a strange way for the Russian Foreign Minister to be talking, as far back as 1912. But stranger still is the fact that the German Government did not jump in at this juncture instead of postponing its blow until 1914 when every one was apparently quite ready to receive it. When the historian of the future considers the theory of the Versailles treaty and considers the behaviour of the German Government in the crisis of 1908 and in the crisis of 1912, he will have to scratch his head a great deal to make them harmonize. X By the spring of 1913, the diplomatic representatives of the Allied Danube States made no secret of the relations in which their Governments stood to the Tsar's Foreign Office. The Balkan League was put through by Russian influence and Russia controlled its diplomacy. Serbia was as completely the instrument of Russia as Poland is now the instrument of France. "If the Austrian troops invade Balkan territory," wrote Baron Beyens on 4 April, 1913, "it would give cause for Russia to intervene, and might let loose a universal war." Now, if Germany had been plotting "with ruthless, cynical determination," as Mr. Lloyd George said, against the peace of Europe, what inconceivable stupidity for her not to push Austria along rather than do everything possible to hold her back! Why give Russia the benefit of eighteen months of valuable time for the feverish campaign of "preparedness" that she carried on? Those eighteen months meant a great deal. In February, 1914, the Tsar arranged to provide the Serbian army with rifles and artillery, Serbia agreeing to put half a million soldiers in the field. In the same month Russia negotiated a French loan of about $100 million for improvements on her strategic railways and frontier-roads. During the spring, she made "test" mobilizations of large bodies of troops which were never demobilized, and these "test" mobilizations continued down to the outbreak of the war; and in April Russian agents made technical