The Fall of the Dynasties: The Collapse of the Old Order: 1905-1922

by Edmond Taylor

The solemn warning from Grey on July 29 that had thrown the Wilhelmstrasse into panic, merely plunged Wilhelm II into rage and despair when he read it on the thirtieth. On the margin of the dispatch, opposite the paragraph voicing Grey’s fear that if war broke out it would be “the greatest catastrophe the world has ever seen,” the Kaiser scrawled, “That means they are going to attack us” Both Wilhelm and his Chancellor had based their truculent support, or incitement, of Austria on the childish assumption — stemming from the former’s mythological concept of the solidarity of monarchs, and fed by a recent, unguarded luncheon-table remark made by Britain’s George V to the Kaiser’s brother, Prince Henry of Prussia — that in case of a Continental war England would stand aside. Wilhelm’s fury broke out in the long footnote he penned at the bottom of his Ambassador’s report: “England shows her hand at the moment when she thinks we are cornered, and in a manner of speaking, done for. The low-down shop-keeping knaves have been trying to take us in with banquets and speeches. The grossest deception is the King’s message to me by Henry ... England alone bears the responsibility for peace or war, not we now.”