Land & Water 
May 23, 19 1 8 
29th, opened the last great phase of his Flanders Battle, 
which was at once to turn the line of hills and to cut off the 
troops in the Yprcs salient. It was the most desperately 
fought of all these actions, and it resulted in the most ex- 
pensive and the most complete defeat the enemy had yet 
received. By the night of that Monday, April 29th, an effort 
upon double the scale of Bernhardi's ten days before had 
been even more thoroughly crushed, and the second phase 
of the Great German offensive was at an end, Wc await the 
third. 
The Emperor Charles' Letter 
THE abortive negotiations which took place last year 
between France and Austria are now of only historical 
interest. Even if they were not dead and done for 
in themselves, the Battle of Caporetto, the now 
decided disintegration of what was once the Russian Empire, 
and the scale of the great Western offensive which opened on 
March 2rst, would have destroyed all their practical effect 
upon the war. 
Nevertheless, though these negotiations are now no more 
than objects of study for the curious, they have this dangerous 
feature about them : that they may be used by malevolent 
or foolish jieople as a subject of recrimination. They may 
be thus used by the enemy to impair the solidity of the 
Alliance, and, what is perhaps most dangerous of all, they 
may lead well-meaning and terribly ignorant enthusiasts to 
believe that some sort of negotiation can even now take the 
place of military action. 
It is important, therefore, to grasp the real nature of the 
event, and this is, happily, a simple matter. If we exclude 
the elements of personal intrigue which are the curse of all 
Parliaments, in France as much as in England ; if we elimin- 
ate the private motives of those who use any national peril 
as a mere instrument for the support or ruin of some petty 
Parliamentarian ; if we confine ourselves to the plain facts- 
there is nothing either very mysterious or very valuable in the 
affair. 
There are three things quite clear. The first is that the 
attempted Austrian negotiation with France last year was 
not some marvellously cunning piece of duplicity engineered 
by Prussia. It came from an easily recognisable motive of 
a singularly obvious sort. The second is allied to the first : 
it is the fact that these proposals were entirely and naively 
to the advantage of the Emperor Charles, and not at all to 
that of the Emperor William. The third and most impor- 
tant is that the one nation to which they would have been 
disastrous if (to suppose the impossible) they had been 
accepted is our own. 
The young Emperor of Austria -had nothing to gain by 
continuing the war. He saw before him the increasing 
power of an ally who was rather worse than a rival, and 
possibly, at the end of the whole business, the House of 
Hapsburg no more than a German feudatory of Berlin. His 
people were suffering terrible privation. 
The Russian Empire, the menace of which was the only 
thing Austria considered on entering the field, had dis- 
appeared, and a strong personal feeling in favour of the 
. West natural to any family of good breeding and civilised 
traditions, further inclined' the Emperor Charles and his 
wife to the action they took. 
It was a personal action confided to a near and youthful 
relative, who was quite above any suspicion of duplicity 
and whose sympathy was heartily with the Allies : Prince 
Sixtus was actually fighting in one of the Allied armies. 
Some may be puzzled by the Emperor of Austria thus 
acting secretly, separately from his ally, and without the 
knowledge of his ally. They will say; "How on earth 
could he carry out anything he promised without Germany 
being a party to that promise?" 
The reply to such an objection wotild seem to be that the 
Emperor hoped (if anything should come of his action) to 
approach his ally and to see what accommodation could be 
made. It is possible that Beriin during some bad. squeeze 
in 1916- or 191 7 had already given a hint at Vienna that 
Prussia would sacrifice the advantage of past crimes in order 
to avoid punishment for the crimes of the present war. 
Things were not going too well for Prussia even as late as 
June 1917. The position of Russia was not yet absolutely 
certain, and no unexpected successes upon the West had 
come to raise her spirits. She had always been ready since 
the Marne to make very large concessions to France in the 
hope of separating that country from ourselves. 
But whether such hints had been dt-opped just before the 
young Emperor tried to open negotiations or whether the 
action was entirely spontaneous and only envisaged con- 
sulting Germany after France had been sounded, we cannot 
tell. What is clear is that this approach to the French 
Government by the head of the .'Vustro-Hungarian State 
was as direct and sincere as it was personal. The Emperor 
expressed very mildly his views about the German annexa- 
tion of Alsace-Lorraine, and he was there saying undoubtedly 
what he felt. It is what everybody upon the Continent 
feels with the exception of the Germans. The seizure of 
.\lsace-Lorraine after the war of 1870 was a perfectly novel 
baseness of a peculiarly cynical and disgusting sort, which 
profoundly shocked the conscience of Europe, and which 
has never been forgiven its authors, 
The next thing to note about these Austrian negotiations 
is that such proposals as they contained (and they were 
vague enough, Heaven knows!) left Austria- Hungary upon 
the balance a great deal stronger than it was before the war. 
This capital point has been curiously missed, especially 
in our Press. 
Take the extreme case, and suppose Austria-Hungary to 
have secured peace upon the lines suggested in the famous 
letter, and then compare her situation with what it was in 
1913. The position before and after would have been some- 
thing l.ke this : 
In 1913 Austria-Hungary representing the Catholic, as 
against the Orthodox, Slavs, was in perpetual jeopardy from 
the enormous military power of the Russian Empire, the 
leader and protector of the Orthodox Slavs. An agitation 
was perpetually going on just over the borders of the Austrian 
and Hungarian kingdoms; its centre was in Serbia. It 
worked upon the national sympathies of the Serbian race on 
both sides of the frontier. Catholic as well as Orthodox. 
It was a perpetual source of the gravest anxiety and even 
weakness to the ruling house at Vienna. The Orthodox 
elements in Galicia and certain racial elements (such as the 
Serbian population from over the Hungarian border, the 
much larger Rumanian population in Transylvania) were all 
of them elements of weakness which imperilled or darkened 
the future of the Dual Monarchy. The way to the East 
was blocked ; the relations between the Balkan States were 
uncertain and required the exercise of the most careful 
Austrian diplomacy. 
Faced by such an Eastern situation, Austria-Hungary was 
dependent upon the support of Prussia ; though the whole 
tradition of the House of Hapsburg and the whole culture, 
even German, of the varied people whom it ruled, was anti- 
Prussian to the core. 
Compare such a precarious state of affairs — which had 
endured for a generation, marked by cf)ntinual threats of 
war and by ceaseless vigilance — with the situation that 
would have existed had peace been established upon the 
lines that Austria suggested to France last year ! 
The Hapsburgs would have found themselves completely 
secure, and apparently secure for ever, upon the Eastern 
side. There was no longer any mihtary relationship, nor 
even union among the Orthodox Slavs. Russia had gone. 
Austria-Hungary here could draw what frontier it chose and 
rule completely at ease. The Balkan tangle was at an end. 
Bulgaria alone remained, and with Bulgaria there was no 
quarrel. The mortal irritant of Serbia was gone. The com- 
plete control of the Dalmatian Coast gave Austria the Adriatic, 
.^nd all this aggrandisement was purchased at the price of 
a few square miles in the Alps (which never did Austria any 
good, and which had always been a source of weakness), 
and, for the rest, at the expense of Prussia. Such a peace, 
by the retrocession of Alsace-Lorraine, left the Prussian 
rival relatively weaker, and restored something of the old 
balance between South and North Germany aiid something 
of the old position of the Hapsburgs. 
AU this, of course, is purely academic. Peace could never 
have been concluded upon lines so ideally consonant with 
Austrian interests and satisfying to no one else. But still 
the comparison at least makes it clear that Austria, acting 
thus, acted in the most natural fashion possible. For she 
was simply following her own interests entirely and neglecting 
everybody else's. 
But there is a third point to be considered in all this which 
is not academic at all, but severely practical and of vital 
importance for the people of this country. Not only is it 
important, but it is or ought to be self-evident. 
It is this : That negotiations of such a kind, peace pro- 
