GERMANY REVIEW OF GERMANY'S POSITION1 Since our last parliamentary session great things have happened. The French, scorning death and spilling their blood like water, have endeavored to break through our western front, but all their gallant attempts have suffered shipwreck, so wonderful was the dogged resistance of our brave troops. Italy, our new foe, thought that she could easily conquer the coveted land of her neighbor, but so far her attacks have been splendidly repulsed despite her numerical superiority, and although she did not spare human lives, but sacrificed them to the fullest, yet all was in vain. Unshaken and impregnable stands also the Turkish host at the Dardanelles front. Wherever we ourselves took the offensive we defeated and repelled the enemy. Shoulder to shoulder with our faithful allies we cleared nearly the whole of Galicia, Poland, Lithuania and Courland from the Russians. The fortresses of Ivangorod, Warsaw and Kovno have fallen. Our lines have everywhere advanced far into hostile territory where they stand firm like a wall. We can now release powerful armies for fresh blows elsewhere. Fearless and proud, with full confidence in our glorious troops, we can calmly view the future. Our opponents are guilty of rivers of blood because they attempt to deceive their respective nations with regard to the actual state of affairs. Wherever they do not deny their defeats our victories stand them in good stead for piling up additional slander against us, their argument being that if we have been victorious in the first year of the war it was because we had prepared it long and treacherously, while they, innocent pacifists that they are, had not been ready. Formerly a very different tune was heard. You remember the warlike articles which the Russian minister of war diffused 1 Official translation of a speech delivered by Theobald von BethmannHollweg, Imperial Chancellor of the German Empire, in the Reichstag on August 19, 1915. A few unimportant paragraphs and quotations from diplomatic correspondence readily available have been omitted. throughout the press in the spring of 1914 praising the Russian army because, as he said, it was fully prepared for war. And you recollect the proud and often provocative language which France has used in later years. As often as she satisfied the Russian need of money she always stipulated that the greater part of the loan was to be used for military armaments. And England! On August 3, 1914, Sir Edward Grey said in the House of Commons: For us, with a powerful fleet, which we believe able to protect our commerce and to protect our shores and to protect our interests, if we are engaged in war, we shall suffer but little more than we shall suffer even if we stand aside. A man who speaks with such an uncanny, businesslike tone on the eve of declaring war and who directs the policy of his own country and that of its friends accordingly can only do so in the knowledge that he and his allies are ready. Of course we can all understand that our opponents are trying over and over again to wash their hands of the guilt of causing this war. When the hostilities broke out and again in December, 1914, I explained the whole causal nexus to this house. All further information that has become known since then merely corroborates my statements. The fiction that she was participating in the war only because of Belgium England herself has since given up as untenable. Do the smaller nations still believe that England and her allies are waging this war in order to protect the smaller nationalities, national liberty and civilization? England is throttling neutral trade on the ocean to the best of her ability. Goods that are consigned to Germany may no longer be shipped even on neutral vessels which have to take English crews on board on the open sea and have to obey their orders. England occupies Greek islands simply because such high-handed action fits in with her military operations. And in order to drag Bulgaria over to her side England, together with her allies, is now trying to compel neutral Greece to cede parts of her territory. And Russia, who, together with her allies, poses as a champion of the freedom of nations, is devastating the whole of Poland prior to the retreat of her armies. Villages are ablaze, cornfields are trampled down, and the population of towns and villages, both Jewish and gentile, are sent into exile to uninhabited parts. They perish in the mire of the Russian roads |