I will establish by documents that the day the Germans deliberately rendered inevitable the most frightful of wars they tried to dishonor us by the most cowardly complicity in the ambush into which they drew Europe. I will establish it in the revelation of a document which the German Chancellor, after having drawn it up, preserved carefully, and you will see why, in the most profound mystery of the most secret archives.
We have known only recently of its authenticity, and it defies any sort of attempt to disprove it. It bears the signature of Bethmann Hollweg (German Imperial Chancellor at the outbreak of the war) and the date July 31, 1914. On that day Von Schoen (German Ambassador to France) was charged by a telegram from his Chancellor to notify us of a state of danger of war with Russia and to ask us to remain neutral, giving us eighteen hours in which to reply.
What was unknown until today was that the telegram of the German Chancellor containing these instructions ended with these words:
If the French Government declares it will remain neutral your Excellency will be good enough to declare that we must, as a guarantee of its neutrality, require the handing over of the fortresses of Toul and Verdun; that we will occupy them and will restore them after the end of the war with Russia. A reply to this last question must reach here before Saturday afternoon at 4 o'clock.
That is how Germany wanted peace at the moment when she declared war! That is how sincere she was in pretending that we obliged her to take up arms for her defense! That is the price she intended to make us pay for our baseness if we had the infamy to repudiate our signature as Prussia repudiated hers by tearing up the treaty that guaranteed the neutrality of Belgium!
It was explained that the above document has not previously been published, because the code could not be deciphered: the French Foreign Office succeeded only a few days before in decodifying the document.
Moreover, Herr von Bethmann Hollweg, on March 18, 1918, acknowledged the accuracy of M. Pichon's quotation and contented himself to declare that "his instructions to Von Schoen were justified."