Comment of an English Editor
Valentine Chirol, former foreign editor of The London Times, published the following in that newspaper on March 26, 1918:
The publication of Prince Lichnowsky's memorandum furnishes evidence which even the most skeptical Englishman can hardly question of the peculiar system of dualism practiced by the German Foreign Office in the conduct of its diplomacy abroad. To those who had opportunities of observing its methods at close quarters this is no new revelation. The German Foreign Office has almost invariably conducted its diplomatic work abroad through two or more different channels, for it was always too tortuous and complicated to be intrusted to any single agent. There was the public policy directed toward more or less avowable ends to be propounded in official dispatches and conversations, and there was "the higher policy" to be promoted by means of discreet propaganda in the press and in society, and especially by appropriate appeals to the prejudices or interests of political and financial and commercial circles. Hence in the more important posts abroad it was the habit of the Wilhelmstrasse to rely mainly upon the Councilor of Embassy both to check the proceedings of the Ambassador and to manipulate all the complicated threads of its diplomatic network in which, for various reasons, it was deemed inexpedient for the Ambassador to get himself entangled, sometimes lest inconvenient disclosures might impair his influence with the Government to which he was accredited, and sometimes—as in the case of Prince Lichnowsky in London, and of the late Prince Radolin in Paris—because the Ambassador's personal sense of honor or his belief in the superiority of honorable statesmanship recoiled from the duplicity of "the higher policy." * * *
I gained an insight into this complex machinery when I went to Berlin as correspondent of The Times, in the early years of the present Emperor's reign, through Baron Holstein, who was then known as the "eminence Grise" of the German Foreign Office from the commanding influence he wielded without the slightest ostentation of power. Owing to accidental circumstances, I came into much closer intimacy with him than he was wont to allow, not merely to journalists, but even to the chief foreign diplomatists in Berlin; and, subject to occasional intermittences when he resented somewhat ferociously my expositions of German policy, I maintained friendly relations with him long after I had ceased to reside in Berlin and he had himself outlived the Emperor's favor, for which he lacked the courtier's obsequiousness. He had been bred in the Bismarckian tradition; he had been a member of the old Chancellor's staff throughout the Franco-Prussian war, and had acted as his confidential agent when he was Councilor of Embassy in Paris under Count Harry von Arnim, whose sensational downfall he helped to bring about at Bismarck's behest. Although in other respects a man of great integrity and with many admirable qualities, including, besides a certain rather cynical frankness, a thoroughly un-Prussian contempt for the gewgaws of official life, he was so saturated with the Wilhelmstrasse tradition that he was rather proud than otherwise of the unsavory part he had played toward his Paris chief, and had, therefore, the less hesitation in disclosing to me, when he thought it served his purpose, the existence of equally peculiar relations between Count Wolf-Metternich, then Councilor of Embassy in London, and the then Ambassador, Count Hatzfeld.
In the face of such a confession as Prince Lichnowsky's, it would be amusing, were it not so pitiful, to see the same British politicians who were so egregiously duped by Germany's "secret" diplomacy before the war still venting their chagrin in the House of Commons, not on their German "friends," by whom they were constantly fooled, and are apparently quite prepared to be fooled again tomorrow, but upon the British Foreign Office, whose timely appreciation of the German menace they invariably derided and whose endeavors to forearm the country against it they did their utmost to defeat.