This is much too vague to excuse a great crime. The guilt of Belgium is said to be “apparent from many a sign,” but what these signs are the Chancellor still fails to state. He admits that they were not documentary in character. If the guilt of Belgium had been so apparent to the Chancellor on August the 4th, when he made his confession of wrong doing in the Reichstag, then it is incredible that he would have made such an admission.
As to the overt acts of France, all that the Chancellor said in his speech of December 2 was “that France’s plan of campaign was known to us and that it compelled us for reasons of self-preservation to march through Belgium.” But it is again significant that, speaking nearly five months after his first public utterance on the subject and with a full knowledge that the world had visited its destructive condemnation upon Germany for its wanton attack upon Belgium, the Chancellor can still give no specific allegation of any overt act by France which justified the invasion. All that is suggested is a supposed “plan of campaign.”
Following this unconvincing and plainly disingenuous speech, the Chancellor proceeded in an authorized newspaper interview on January 25, 1915 to state that his now famous—or infamous—remark about “the scrap of paper” had been misunderstood.
After stating that he felt a painful “surprise to learn that my phrase, ‘a scrap of paper,’ should have caused such an unfavorable impression on the United States,” he proceeds to explain that in his now historic interview with the British Ambassador,
he (von Bethmann-Hollweg) had spoken of the treaty not as a “scrap of paper” for Germany, but as an instrument which had become obsolete through Belgium’s forfeiture of its neutrality and that Great Britain had quite other reasons for entering into the war, compared with which the neutrality treaty appeared to have only the value of a scrap of paper.
Let the reader here pause to note the twofold character of this defense.
It suggests that Germany’s guaranty of Belgium’s neutrality had become for Germany “a scrap of paper” because of Belgium’s alleged forfeiture of its rights as a neutral nation, although at the time referred to the German Chancellor had not only asked the permission of Belgium to cross its territory but immediately before his interview with the British Ambassador he had publicly testified in his speech in the Reichstag to the justice of Belgium’s protest.
The other and inconsistent suggestion is that, without respect to Belgium’s rights under the treaty of 1839, the violation of its territory by Germany was not the cause of England’s intervention; but obviously this hardly explains the German Chancellor’s contemptuous reference to the long standing and oft repeated guaranty of Belgium’s neutrality as merely a “scrap of paper.”
Having thus somewhat vaguely suggested a twofold defense, the Chancellor, without impeaching the accuracy of Goschen’s report of the interview, then proceeded to state that the conversation in question took place immediately after his speech in the Reichstag, in which, as stated, he had admitted the justice of Belgium’s protest against the violation of its territory, and he adds that,
when I spoke, I already had certain indications but no absolute proof upon which to base a public accusation that Belgium long before had abandoned its neutrality in its relations with England. Nevertheless I took Germany’s responsibilities toward the neutral States so seriously that I spoke frankly of the wrong committed by Germany.