DIPLOMACY BEFORE THE WAR


If in this chapter I speak frequently in the first person and of my own
part in the negotiations which it records, it is not from any desire to
make prominent either my own personality or the part it fell to me to
play. The reason is that I have endeavored to write of what I myself
heard and saw, and that in consequence most of what follows is, for the
sake of accuracy, largely transcribed from my personal diaries and
records made at the time when the events to which they related took
place. So frequent an employment of the personal pronoun as has been
made in these pages would ordinarily be a blemish in taste, if not in
style also, but in this case it seemed safer not to try to avoid it.

Many things that happened in the years just before 1914, as well as the
events of the great war itself, are still too close to permit of our
studying them in their full context. But before much time has passed
the historians will have accumulated material that will overflow their
libraries, and their hands will remain occupied for generations to come.
At this moment all that safely can be attempted is that actual observers
should set down what they have themselves observed. For there has rarely
been a time when the juridical maxim that "hearsay is not evidence"
ought to be more sternly insisted on.

If I now venture to set down what follows in these pages, it is because
I had certain opportunities for forming a judgment at first hand for
myself. I am not referring to the circumstance that for a brief period I
once, long ago, lived the life of a student at a German University, or
that I was frequently in Germany in the years that followed. Nor do I