The Admiral speaks feelingly of the “armed battue” against Germany. He lays his hand on his heart and declares that in 1914 the German Empire was “the least preoccupied of all the Great Powers with possibilities of war.” Yet in spite of “our suicidal love of peace” the world would persist in laying the guilt of all that had happened on Germany. “It is really extraordinary how unpopular we are,” cries the Admiral naïvely in one of his letters. But he sticks to his point. The historical guilt of England is irrefutably clear. The “old pirate state” has once again torn Europe to pieces. Thanks to the most brutal methods she has secured a victory, and liberty and independence have perished. But the Admiral is not only concerned to abuse England. He deals faithfully with his own countrymen. If on the one hand English readers obtain a fresh insight through German eyes into their own villainies, they obtain information possibly less fantastic as to the discord which raged inside the German war-machine. If in the interests of truth we are compelled to say that the Germans overrated our powers of conducting a war with supreme efficiency, it is clear that we were no less at fault in attributing super qualities to our enemies. When these various memoirs are read side by side and compared, they reveal strife, division, and hesitation of a remarkable kind in the higher direction of the war. Tirpitz, as head of the war party, writes with extraordinary bitterness of Bethmann-Hollweg the Chancellor. No words are bad enough for the man who had struggled sincerely enough, according to his lights, for the preservation of peace between England and Germany. His hesitations, vacillations, errors of policy are dealt with in a ferocious spirit. But the Army and even the Navy do not escape severe criticism. “The end of July 1914 found us in a state of chaos,” writes the Admiral. The generals made “frightful mistakes,” the war was one of “missed opportunities,” the Navy in particular was never allowed to do its work. The troops were heroic, but “the hereditary faults of the German people and the destructive elements among them” led to the downfall of the whole nation.