_Valentine Chirol, former foreign editor of The London Times,
published the following in that newspaper on March 26, 1918:_
The publication of Prince Lichnowsky's memorandum furnishes evidence
which even the most skeptical Englishman can hardly question of the
peculiar system of dualism practiced by the German Foreign Office in the
conduct of its diplomacy abroad. To those who had opportunities of
observing its methods at close quarters this is no new revelation. The
German Foreign Office has almost invariably conducted its diplomatic
work abroad through two or more different channels, for it was always
too tortuous and complicated to be intrusted to any single agent. There
was the public policy directed toward more or less avowable ends to be
propounded in official dispatches and conversations, and there was "the
higher policy" to be promoted by means of discreet propaganda in the
press and in society, and especially by appropriate appeals to the
prejudices or interests of political and financial and commercial
circles. Hence in the more important posts abroad it was the habit of
the Wilhelmstrasse to rely mainly upon the Councilor of Embassy both to
check the proceedings of the Ambassador and to manipulate all the
complicated threads of its diplomatic network in which, for various
reasons, it was deemed inexpedient for the Ambassador to get himself
entangled, sometimes lest inconvenient disclosures might impair his
influence with the Government to which he was accredited, and
sometimes--as in the case of Prince Lichnowsky in London, and of the
late Prince Radolin in Paris--because the Ambassador's personal sense of
honor or his belief in the superiority of honorable statesmanship
recoiled from the duplicity of "the higher policy." * * *
I gained an insight into this complex machinery when I went to Berlin as
correspondent of The Times, in the early years of the present Emperor's
reign, through Baron Holstein, who was then known as the "eminence
Grise" of the German Foreign Office from the commanding influence he
wielded without the slightest ostentation of power. Owing to accidental
circumstances, I came into much closer intimacy with him than he was
wont to allow, not merely to journalists, but even to the chief foreign
diplomatists in Berlin; and, subject to occasional intermittences when
he resented somewhat ferociously my expositions of German policy, I
maintained friendly relations with him long after I had ceased to reside
in Berlin and he had himself outlived the Emperor's favor, for which he
lacked the courtier's obsequiousness. He had been bred in the
Bismarckian tradition; he had been a member of the old Chancellor's
staff throughout the Franco-Prussian war, and had acted as his
confidential agent when he was Councilor of Embassy in Paris under Count
Harry von Arnim, whose sensational downfall he helped to bring about at
Bismarck's behest. Although in other respects a man of great integrity
and with many admirable qualities, including, besides a certain rather
cynical frankness, a thoroughly un-Prussian contempt for the gewgaws of
official life, he was so saturated with the Wilhelmstrasse tradition
that he was rather proud than otherwise of the unsavory part he had
played toward his Paris chief, and had, therefore, the less hesitation
in disclosing to me, when he thought it served his purpose, the
existence of equally peculiar relations between Count Wolf-Metternich,
then Councilor of Embassy in London, and the then Ambassador, Count
Hatzfeld.
In the face of such a confession as Prince Lichnowsky's, it would be
amusing, were it not so pitiful, to see the same British politicians who
were so egregiously duped by Germany's "secret" diplomacy before the war
still venting their chagrin in the House of Commons, not on their German
"friends," by whom they were constantly fooled, and are apparently quite
prepared to be fooled again tomorrow, but upon the British Foreign
Office, whose timely appreciation of the German menace they invariably
derided and whose endeavors to forearm the country against it they did
their utmost to defeat.