rd, and no one who
knew the situation as it was then can repudiate my assertion that the
German military leaders believed themselves then to be nearer than
ever to a victory peace; that they were persuaded they would take both
Paris and Calais and force the Entente to its knees. It is out of the
question that at such a moment and under such conditions they could
have replied to the falling away of Austria-Hungary otherwise than by
violence.

All who will not admit the argument, I would refer to a fact which it
would be difficult to evade. Six months afterwards, when there was
already clear evidence of the German collapse, when Andrassy declared
a separate peace, the _Germans, as a matter of fact, threw troops into
the Tyrol_. If they, when utterly exhausted, defeated, and ruined,
with revolution at their back, still held firmly to this decision and
endeavoured to make a battlefield on Austrian territory, how much more
would they have done that six months earlier, when they still stood
full of proud defiance and their generals dreamed of victory and
triumph? What I, secondly, also would maintain is that the immediate
consequence of a separate peace would have been the conversion of
Austria-Hungary into a theatre of war. The Tyrol, as well as Bohemia,
would have become fields of battle.

If it be maintained now that the great exhaustion from the war that
prevailed throughout the Monarchy before April, 1917, had caused the
entire population of the former Monarchy to rally round the Minister
who had concluded the separate peace, it is a conscious or unconscious
untruth. Certainly the Czechs were decidedly against Germany, and it
would not have been reasons of political alliance that would have
prevented them from agreeing. But I would like to know what the Czech
people would have said if Bohemia had been turned into a theatre of
war and exposed to all the sufferings endured by this and all other
peoples, and when to it had been added the devastation of the
fatherland, for, let there be no doubt about it, the troops advancing
with flying colours from Saxony would have made their way to Prague
and penetrated even farther. We had no military forces in Bohemia; we
should not have been able to check the advance, and quicker than
either we or the Entente could have sent troops worth mentioning to
Bohemia, the Germans, drawing troops from their wellnigh
inexhaustible reserves, would have marched either against us or
against the