That military thinking could do nothing to avert the disaster from Central and Eastern Europe, could have been concealed from none but militarist minds. The cause of the German people's disaster was, that people would not recognise that the disaster could not be averted. They would not face the fact, that in those quarters, which had the deciding of affairs, there was no sense of the big, historic necessities. Anyone, who knew anything of these historic necessities, also knew, that the English-speaking races had persons amongst them, who were able to read the forces at work amongst the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe, and that these persons were convinced, that there was something working up in Central and Eastern Europe which must find vent in tremendous social convulsions,--convulsions of a sort for which they believed there to be no necessity nor occasion in the English-speaking regions. They framed their own policy on these conclusions. In Central and Eastern Europe nothing was seen of all this, and the people there shaped their policy on lines which brought the whole thing "like a house of cards" about their ears. The only policy, which could have had a solid foundation, would have been one which recognised, that people in the English-speaking countries were handling the forces of world-history on large lines, and of course, naturally, from the English point of view. But to agitate in favour of such a policy would have been regarded as highly superfluous,--especially by the "diplomatists."