New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 480 pages of information about New York Times Current History.

New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 480 pages of information about New York Times Current History.
and declares that it was England who in 1911 was ready to land 160,000 men at Antwerp to help the French against the Germans.
As to who will ultimately win in the war, the pamphlet asks whether it will be the striving nation, the young strength, or the old peoples, France and England, with their flagging civilization in alliance with Muscovite retrogression.

* * * * *

HOW THE WAR CAME ABOUT.

Who is responsible for the war?—­Not Germany!  England’s policy!  Her shifting of responsibility and promoting the struggle while alone possessing power to avert it.

It is an old and common experience that after the outbreak of a war the very parties and persons that wanted the war, either at once or later, assert that the enemy wanted and began it.  The German Empire especially always had to suffer from such untruthful assertions, and the very first days of the present terrible European war confirm again this old experience.  Again Russian, French, and British accounts represent the German Empire as having wanted the war.

Only a few months ago influential men and newspapers of Great Britain as well as of Paris could be heard to express the opinion that nobody in Europe wanted war and that especially the German Emperor and his Government had sincerely and effectively been working for peace.  Especially the English Government, in the course of the last two years, asserted frequently and publicly, and was supported by The Westminster Gazette and a number of influential English newspapers in the assertion, that Great Britain and the German Empire during the Balkan crisis of the last few years had always met on the same platform for the preservation of peace.  The late Secretary of State, von Kiderlen-Waechter, his successor, Mr. von Jagow, and the Imperial Chancellor, von Bethmann-Hollweg, likewise declared repeatedly in the Reichstag, how great their satisfaction was that a close and confidential diplomatic co-operation with Great Britain, especially in questions concerning the Near East, had become a fact.  And it has to be acknowledged today that at that time the German and British interests in the Near East were identical or at any rate ran in parallel lines.

The collapse of European Turkey in the war against the Balkan Alliance created an entirely new situation.  At first Bulgaria was victorious and great, then it was beaten and humiliated by the others with the intellectual help of Russia.  There could be no doubt about Russia’s intentions:  she was preparing for the total subjection of weakened Turkey and for taking possession of the Dardanelles and Constantinople in order to rule from this powerful position Turkey and the other Balkan States.  Great Britain and the German Empire, which only had economic interests in Turkey, were bound to wish to strengthen Turkey besides trying to prevent the Muscovite rule on the whole Balkan peninsula.

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New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.