during the last days of the Tsarist régime, and another attempt was made with Milyukoff under the Provisional Government. Other negotiations were carried on in Scandinavian countries by Rizoff, the Bulgarian Minister in Berlin, though I am not sure whether the German Chancellor went as far as he. During the Russo-German armistice Germany again sounded Russia through Erzberger, also in Stockholm; and Kerensky made peace proposals through a Polish intermediary, Ledwinski, the President of the Polish Liquidation Commission.
The German Emperor is known to have favoured, in the autumn of 1917, milder terms of peace than those which had been offered in December 1916. Early in July he conferred with the Papal Nuncio, Mgr. Pacelli, and asked for vigorous peace propaganda by the Pope. During the following month, Vatican action, and the diplomatic correspondence to which it gave rise, were alike weighty, though the Vatican entirely failed to gain the ear of the Allied Governments. Besides issuing its public Peace Note, which was too vague to be taken by the leading Allied Governments as a basis for negotiations, the Vatican approached them and Germany very emphatically in secret. Through the British Government it made soundings for peace terms and, by means of Mgr. Pacelli, the Nuncio in Munich, it informed the new German Chancellor, Dr. Michaelis, that England wished to know the real intentions of Germany, particularly in regard to Belgium. The German reply was indefinite and therefore not acceptable. Bethmann-Hollweg had resigned the Imperial Chancellorship on July 18, 1917, because Hindenburg and Ludendorff opposed him on the ground that the peace resolution of the Reichstag had been a sign of weakness. But at the end of July, mutinies broke out in the German navy, and Ludendorff himself soon began to waver. The year 1917 was marked, moreover, by developments in the German Social Democratic Party which gradually split into two groups and tendencies; and at the beginning of 1918, the first political strikes took place—in Vienna on January 16 and in Berlin on January 28—while, in Germany, workmen’s councils were organized.
During this period—from the summer of 1917 to the summer of 1918—the situation at the front, and especially the German submarine campaign, disquieted the British Prime Minister, Mr. Lloyd George. He feared that England would not be able to raise enough men. Therefore he favoured vigorous action against Turkey—which was taken—and defensive tactics in France. I do not know whose idea this was but I heard
