to defend Germany,
and our position in Berlin was rendered unspeakably more difficult.
We ourselves, also, were never given any assurance that we should be
allowed to retain our former possessions; but in our case the desire
for peace was so strong that we would have made territorial
concessions if we had been able thereby to secure general peace. This,
however, was not the case. Take Italy, for instance, which was
primarily at war with ourselves and not with Germany. If we had
offered Italy concessions however great, if we had offered all that
Italy has now taken possession of, even then it could not have made
peace, being bound by duty to its Allies and by circumstances not to
make peace until England and France made peace with Germany.

When, then, peace by sacrifice was the only peace attainable,
obviously, as a matter of principle, there were two ways of reaching
that end. One, a general peace, i.e. including Germany, and the other,
a separate peace. Of the overwhelming difficulties attending the
former course I will speak later; at present a few words on the
question of separate peace.

I myself would never have made a separate peace. I have never, not
even in the hour of disillusionment--I may say of despair at my
inability to lead the policy of Berlin into wiser channels--even in
such hours, I say, I have never forgotten that our alliance with the
German Empire was no ordinary alliance, no such alliance as may be
contracted by two Emperors or two Governments, and can easily be
broken, but an alliance of blood, a blood-brotherhood between the ten
million Austro-Germans and the seventy million of the Empire, which
could not be broken. And I have never forgotten that the military
party in power at that time in Germany were not the German people, and
that we had allied ourselves with the German people, and not with a
few leading men. But I will not deny that in the moments when I saw my
policy could not be realised I did ventilate the idea of suggesting to
the Emperor the appointment, in my stead, of one of those men who saw
salvation in a separation from Germany. But again and again I
relinquished this idea, being firmly convinced that separate peace was
a sheer impossibility. The Monarchy lay like a great block between
Germany and the Balkans. Germany had great masses of troops there from
which it could not be cut off, it was procuring oil and grain from the
Balkans; if we were to interpose between it and the B