The desire to break up the coalition at any cost is so intense among the Germans, that we must anticipate that, at the psychological moment, they will even go so far as to offer to restore Alsace-Lorraine to France. As for the sincerity of such an offer, these words of Maximilian Harden, written early in 1916, enable us to estimate it:—
‘If people think in France that the reëstablishment of peace is possible only through the restitution of Alsace-Lorraine, and if necessity compels us to sign such a peace, the seventy millions of Germans will soon tear it up.’
Moreover, nothing would be less difficult for Germany, thanks to the effective forces of Central Pan-Germany, than to seize Alsace-Lorraine again, very shortly, having given it up momentarily as a tactical manœuvre.
2. A separate peace between Turkey, Bulgaria, or Austria-Hungary, and the Entente
A particularly astute manœuvre on the part of Berlin consists in favoring, under the rose, not perhaps a formally executed separate peace, but, at least (as has already taken place), semi-official negotiations for a separate peace between her own allies named above and the Entente.
The particular profit of this sort of manœuvre in relation to the definitive consummation of the Hamburg-Persian Gulf scheme, is readily seen if we imagine the Allies signing a treaty of peace with Turkey, for instance. In such a hypothesis the Allies could treat only with the liegemen of Berlin at Constantinople, for all the other Turkish parties having any political importance whatsoever have been suppressed. Now, if the Allies should treat with the Ottoman government, reeking with the blood of a million Armenians, Greeks, and Arabs, massacred en masse as anti-Germans and friends of the Entente, the following results would follow from this negotiation: the Entente, agreeing not to punish the unheard-of crimes committed in Turkey, would renounce its moral platform: it could no longer claim to be fighting in the name of civilization. The Turkish government, which is notoriously composed of assassins, would be officially recognized; and thus the self-same group of men who sold the Ottoman Empire to Germany would be confirmed in power—the group whose leader, Talaat Pasha, declared in the Ottoman Chamber in February, 1917, ‘We are allied to the Central Powers for life and death!’ The control by Germany of the Dardanelles, a strategic position of vast and world-wide importance, guarded by her accomplices, would be confirmed; the numerous conventions signed at Berlin in January, 1917, which effectively establish the most unrestricted German protectorate over the whole of Turkey, would accomplish their full effect during a Pan-German peace.
The Bulgarian intrigues for a so-called separate peace with the Allies have been at least as numerous as those of the Turks of the same nature. In reality, the Bulgarian agents who were sent to Switzerland to inveigle certain semi-official agents of the Entente into negotiations, were there by arrangement with Berlin for the purpose of sounding the Allies, in order to determine to what degree they were weary of the war. The Bulgarians have never been really disposed to conclude peace with the Entente based on compromise upon equitable conditions. They desire a peace which will assure them immense acquisitions of territory at the expense of the Greeks, the Roumanians, and, especially, the Serbians, for at Sofia they crave, above all things, direct geographical contact with Hungary. Thus the great Allied Powers could treat with the Bulgarians only by being guilty of the monstrous infamy of sacrificing their small Balkan allies, and of assenting to a territorial arrangement which would permit Bulgaria to continue to be the Pangermanist bridge between Hungary and Turkey over the dead body of Serbia—an indispensable element in the functioning of the Hamburg-Persian Gulf scheme, and hence of Central Pan-Germany.
Now, this is precisely the one substantial result of the war to which Bulgaria clings above all else. So it is that a peace by negotiation—in reality a peace of lassitude—between the Allies and Bulgaria, would simply give sanction to this state of affairs.
In the same way, such a peace with Austria-Hungary could but give definitive shape to the Hamburg-Persian Gulf scheme. From the financial and military standpoint, the monarchy of the Hapsburgs, considered as a state, is to-day absolutely subservient to Germany. The reigning Hapsburg, whatever his private sentiments, can no longer do anything without the consent of the Hohenzollern. Any treaty of peace signed by Vienna would be, practically, only a treaty of which the conditions were authorized by Berlin. There must be no illusion. Nothing less than the decisive victory of the Allies will avail to make Germany loosen her grip upon Austria-Hungary, for that grip is to Germany the substantial result of the war. In truth it is that grip which, by its geographic, military, and economic consequences, assures Berlin the domination of the Balkans, and of the East, hence of Central Pan-Germany, hence of Hamburg-Persian Gulf, and the vast consequences which derive therefrom.
Let us make up our minds, therefore, that all the feelers toward a separate peace with Turkey, Bulgaria, and Austria-Hungary, which have been put forth and which will hereafter be put forth, have been and will be simply manœuvres aimed at a so-called peace by negotiation, which would cloak, not simply a German, but a Pan-German peace.