tria must be left to do what she wishes to Italy, and we must have indemnities from all countries and all our ships and colonies back.'

"Of course, 'rectification of the frontier' is a polite term for annexation.”*

We have considered Germany's war aims. Let us now consider for a moment the military situation when she made her proffers in December, 1916. She had been amazingly successful up to this point on practically all fronts. She occupied practically all of Belgium, Serbia, Montenegro, a large part of Roumania, Poland, and important stretches of Russia, and the coal and iron deposits of northern France. Russia at this time was still in the war and, if reorganized and provided with munitions, the lack of which had caused her disastrous retreat, she would become again a formidable enemy. The threat of the Anglo-French successes on the Somme (1916) had become so serious that the military authorities were already considering the retreat to the Hindenburg line in France,

"My Four Years in Germany," by James W. Gerard, pp. 365–366.

and Von Bissing had expressed the fear that it might become necessary to evacuate Belgium. The situation, therefore, though it appeared outwardly very favorable, was in reality fraught with grave possibilities. The arch-enemy, England, had not yet been subdued. As the situation presented itself to the Germans it was probably in terms like this: We must either now make peace on the basis of our present very large holdings of territory, and prepare to settle the score with England later, or else start a war to the death on England and destroy her commerce and fleet.

If peace could be made on the basis of extent of occupied territory (and Germany suggested no other basis), she could not help coming out with enormously extended frontiers. She held all the trumps, and in the diplomatic game she must inevitably win. If, however, the Allies proved unwilling to make peace on such terms, Germany had long been preparing a weapon which the infallible military authorities assured her would starve England out and bring her to her knees, probably within three months, within six months at the latest. That weapon

was the submarine ruthlessly employed. The one drawback was the possibility of driving sorely tried neutrals into the arms of her enemies.

From the American attitude on the Sussex affair it was a plain inference that danger threatened from that quarter. The plan to use the submarine ruthlessly had, however, long since been decided upon. Indeed, immediately after the receipt in Berlin of our last Sussex note, Ambassador Gerard was so convinced that the rulers of Germany would at some future date take up ruthless submarine warfare, that he warned the State Department that such warfare would possibly come in the autumn or at any rate about February or March, 1917.* This may explain why President Wilson made the speeches which so startled America about the great dangers that threatened and the possibilities of the conflagration reaching us from one day to the next. When later, in September, Mr. Gerard returned to the United States, Von Jagow insistently urged him to make every effort to induce the President to take steps

* Gerard, "My Four Years in Germany," p. 345.

toward bringing about peace.* Germany had been industriously building submarines and was ready, so she thought, to give England the death-stroke.

Any peace that would be concluded would have to be a "German peace," and if peace were refused the blame would be put upon the Allies. The United States and other neutrals could, therefore, offer no objection to Germany's using the submarine, and riding roughshod over neutral rights, as she had already attempted to do at the time of the declaration of the war zone in February of 1915.

At the meeting of the Reichstag, therefore, on December 12, 1916, in a speech in which he explained the very favorable situation of the German armies, and denied there was any starvation or any disturbances in Germany, Von Bethmann-Hollweg announced that his Majesty had decided to stretch out his hand for peace at the price of Germany's "free future."

This phrase, whose meaning, like a gas, was capable of indefinite expansion, was one of the

* Gerard, "My Four Years in Germany," p. 346.

type that is to be found in every German proposal. The communication further insisted that the Central Powers had been obliged "to take up arms to defend justice and the liberty of national evolution.". How they had defined justice we had learned from their actions in Belgium and on the high seas, and what they meant by national evolution is plain from the exposition by Herr Naumann quoted above. The note made no concrete suggestions. Its two material assertions were that the Entente bore the responsibility for beginning the war and that the Central Powers were now victorious.

The Allies naturally, in the phrase of Lloyd George, refused to put their heads into a noose of which Germany held the free end, and immediately and from practically all of the Allied countries came statements to the effect that they could not deal with her on this basis.*

The joint Entente reply of December 30, 1916, was to the effect that a mere suggestion,

* Premier Lloyd George's speech in the House of Commons, December 19, 1916. Premier Briand's speech in the French Chamber of Deputies, December 13. Resolution of the Russian Duma, December 15. Baron Sonnino's speech in the Italian Chamber of Deputies, December 18.