On
that day Von Schoen (German Ambassador to France) was
charged by a telegram from his Chancellor to notify us of a
state of danger of war with Russia and to ask us to remain
neutral, giving us eighteen hours in which to reply.
What was unknown until today was that the telegram of the
German Chancellor containing these instructions ended with
these words:
_If the French Government declares it will remain neutral
your Excellency will be good enough to declare that we must,
as a guarantee of its neutrality, require the handing over
of the fortresses of Toul and Verdun; that we will occupy
them and will restore them after the end of the war with
Russia. A reply to this last question must reach here before
Saturday afternoon at 4 o'clock._
That is how Germany wanted peace at the moment when she declared war!
That is how sincere she was in pretending that we obliged her to take
up arms for her defense! That is the price she intended to make us pay
for our baseness if we had the infamy to repudiate our signature as
Prussia repudiated hers by tearing up the treaty that guaranteed the
neutrality of Belgium!
It was explained that the above document has not previously been
published, because the code could not be deciphered: the French
Foreign Office succeeded only a few days before in decodifying the
document.
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