Austria-Hungary. Now the consequences of that error had to be endured. What happened was bound to happen and could under no circumstances be averted. The guilt of the German Government lay in the fact that, merely for the sake of preserving peace, it missed the favourable moment for action, got entangled in an alliance for maintaining peace in the world, and thus finally became the victim of a world coalition which opposed the urge to maintain peace in the world with a determination to bring on a world war.
A war for freedom had broken out, vaster than the world had ever yet seen.
Scarcely had the news of the outrage become known in Munich when two ideas at once entered my head ; first that war was absolutely inevitable, and secondly, that the Habsburg State would be forced to stick to its alliance ; for what I had most feared was the possi¬ bility that one day Germany herself, perhaps directly because of that alliance, would slip into a conflict of which Austria might have been the immediate cause, and that the Austrian State, for reasons of internal politics, would not develop sufficient resolution to come to the assistance of its ally. The old State had to fight, whether it wished to or not.
My own attitude towards the conflict was both simple and clear. In my eyes it was not Austria fighting to get a little satisfaction out of Serbia, but Germany fighting for her life, the German nation for its “to be or not to be55, its freedom and future. It would have to follow in Bismarck’s footsteps ; young Germany must again defend what the fathers had heroically fought for from Weissenburg to Sedan and Paris. But if the struggle was to be a victorious one, our people would by their own force take their place again among the great nations, and then the German Reich could stand as a mighty guardian of peace, without the necessity to curtail its children’s daily bread for the sake of this peace.