to Germany as a menace. She believed that she was being threatened by an
aggressive combination, just as, on the other hand, she herself seemed to
the Powers of the Entente a danger to be guarded against. This apprehension
on the part of Germany, is sometimes thought to have been mere pretence,
but there is every reason to suppose it to have been genuine. The policy of
the Entente did in fact, on a number of occasions, come into collision with
that of Germany. The arming and counter-arming was continuous. And the very
fact that from the side of the Entente it seemed that Germany was always
the aggressor, should suggest to us that from the other side the opposite
impression would prevail. That, in fact, it did prevail is clear not only
from the constant assertions of German statesmen and of the German Press,
but from contemporary observations made by the representatives of a State
not itself involved in either of the opposing combinations. The dispatches
of the Belgian ambassadors at Berlin, Paris, and London during the years
1905 to 1914[2] show a constant impression that the Entente was a hostile
combination directed against Germany and engineered, in the earlier years,
for that purpose by King Edward VII. This impression of the Belgian
representatives is no proof, it is true, of the real intentions of the
Entente, but it is proof of how they did in fact appear to outsiders. And
it is irrelevant, whether or no it be true, to urge that the Belgians were
indoctrinated with the German view; since precisely the fact that they
could be so indoctrinated would show that the view was on the face of it
plausible. We see, then, in these dispatches the way in which the policy of
the Entente could appear to observers outside it. I give illustrations from
Berlin, Paris, and London.

On May 30, 1908, Baron Greindl, Belgian Ambassador at Berlin, writes as
follows:--

Call it an alliance, _entente_, or what you will, the grouping of the