During a war every Minister of Foreign Affairs must attach an important and adequately estimated significance to confidential reports.  The hermetic isolation which during the world war divided Europe into two separate worlds made this doubly urgent.  But it is inevitable in regard to confidential reports that they must be accepted, for various reasons, with a certain amount of scepticism.  Those persons who write and talk, not from any material, but from political interests, from political devotion and sympathy, are, from the nature of the case, above suspicion of reporting, for their own personal reasons, more optimistically than is justified.  But they are apt to be deceived.  Nations, too, are subject to feelings, and the feelings of the masses must not be taken as expressing the tendencies of the leading influences.  France was tired of war, but how far the leading statesmen were influenced by that condition, not to be compared to our own war-weariness, was not proved.

In persons who make this metier their profession, the wish is often present, alongside the comprehensible mistakes they make, to give pleasure and satisfaction by their reports, and not run any risk of losing a lucrative post.  I think it will be always well to estimate confidential reports, no matter from what source they proceed, as being 50 per cent. less optimistic than they appear.  The more pessimistic opinion that prevailed in Vienna, compared with Berlin, was due, first and foremost, to the reliance placed on news coming from the enemy countries.  Berlin, too, was quite certain that we were losing time, although Bethmann once thought fit in the Reichstag to assert the contrary; but the German military leaders and the politicians looked at the situation among our opponents differently from us.

When the Emperor William was at Laxenburg in the summer of 1917 he related to me some instances of the rapidly increasing food trouble in England, and was genuinely surprised when I replied that, though I was convinced that the U-boats were causing great distress, there was no question of a famine.  I told the Emperor that the great problem was whether the U-boats would actually interfere with the transport of American troops, as the German military authorities asserted, or not, but counselled him not to accept as very serious facts a few passing incidents that might have occurred.

After the beginning of the unrestricted U-boat warfare, I repeat that many grave fears were entertained in England.  It is a well-known fact.  But it was a question of fears, not actualities.  A person who knew how matters stood, and who came to me from a neutral country in the summer of 1917, said:  “If the half only of the fears entertained in England be realised, then the war will be over in the autumn”; but a wide difference existed between London’s fears and Berlin’s hopes on the one hand, and subsequent events on the other, which had not been taken into account by German opinion.