According to the report of the debate published by the Neues Wiener Journal, Herr von Payer himself acknowledged that prior to the war German diplomacy had made some bad blunders, and that reform was urgently needed. Herr Müller (Progressive) sharply criticised Herr von Flotow, who was German Ambassador in Rome at the beginning of the war, and charged him with having declared to the Marquis di San Giuliano, then Italian Foreign Minister, that there existed for Italy no casus foederis. Prince Bülow also came in for severe criticism.
The Former Foreign Minister's Reply
The former Foreign Minister of Germany, Herr von Jagow, published a reply to Prince Lichnowsky in the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, in which he virtually confirmed the Prince's main assertions. He applied such phrases as "an unheard-of assertion," "a mass of inaccuracies and perversions," to Lichnowsky's memorandum, but he did not meet the former Ambassador's charges with any new evidence, merely referring his readers to former publications of the German Government.
Von Jagow's reply bears out the assertion that in 1913 England was prepared to enter into friendly agreements with Germany. She was "ready to meet us." A Bagdad railway agreement was almost completed when Germany drew the sword. Negotiations about the future of the African colonies of Portugal in certain contingencies had been resumed, and the German Foreign Secretary looked forward to further agreements in the Far East and elsewhere.
The former Foreign Minister refuses to adopt the Pan-German view that "England laid all the mines which caused the war." On the contrary, he bears witness with former Ambassador Lichnowsky to Sir Edward Grey's "love of peace and his serious wish to reach an agreement with us." He says that it is true that Sir Edward could have prevented war, but he is careful not to indicate how. Presumably he means he could have done it by following Germany's example and treating England's engagements as "scraps of paper."
He agrees that the war was not popular with the British people, and that Belgium had to serve as a battlecry. Germany, on the other hand, had to maintain her prestige. It had been damaged by her political defeat in Morocco. A fresh diminution of it would have been, he remarks, "intolerable for our position in Europe and in the world."
In one point of fact he corrects Prince Lichnowsky. He denies that he himself visited Vienna at any time between the Spring of 1913 and the outbreak of the war. He confirms, as far as he remembers, all the expressions attributed to him by Lichnowsky.
His only reference to the Potsdam Council of July 5, 1914, (when, it is asserted, the Teuton leaders made the final decision for war,) is not a denial that the meeting took place, but a single sentence: "On July 5 I was absent from Berlin."
In regard to Lichnowsky's main charges, Herr von Jagow talks of "unheard-of" assertions and "inaccuracies and perversions," but he does not bring forward any fresh arguments to meet the charges, and merely refers to the publications of the German Government concerning the conversations which took place in June, 1914, between the Kaiser and Archduke Francis Ferdinand. Herr von Jagow says: