In the winter of 1917, when I met the Emperor again in my capacity as Minister for Foreign Affairs, I thought he had aged, but was still full of his former vivacity.  In spite of marked demonstrations of the certainty of victory, I believe that William II. even then had begun to doubt the result of the war and that his earnest wish was to bring it to an honourable end.  When in the course of one of our first conversations I urged him to spare no sacrifice to bring it to an end, he interrupted me, exclaiming:  “What would you have me do?  Nobody longs for peace more intensely than I do.  But every day we are told that the others will not hear a word about peace until Germany has been crushed.”  It was a true answer, for all statements made by England culminated in the one sentence Germanium esse delendam.  I endeavoured, nevertheless, to induce the Emperor to consent to the sacrifice of Alsace-Lorraine, persuaded that if France had obtained all that she looked upon in the light of a national idea she would not be inclined to continue the war.  I think that, had the Emperor been positively certain that it would have ended the war, and had he not been afraid that so distressing an offer would have been considered unbearable by Germany, he would personally have agreed to it.  But he was dominated by the fear that a peace involving such a loss, and after the sacrifices already made, would have driven the German people to despair.  Whether he was justified in this fear or not cannot now be confirmed.  In 1917, and 1918 as well, the belief in a victorious end was still so strong in Germany that it is at least doubtful whether the German people would have consented to give up Alsace-Lorraine.  All the parties in the Reichstag were opposed to it, including the Social Democrats.

A German official of high standing said to me in the spring of 1918:  “I had two sons; one of them fell on the field of battle, but I would rather part with the other one too than give up Alsace-Lorraine,” and many were of the same opinion.

In the course of the year and a half when I had frequent opportunities of meeting the Emperor, his frame of mind had naturally gone through many different phases.  Following on any great military success, and after the collapse of Russia and Roumania, his generals were always able to enrol him on their programme of victory, and it is quite a mistake to imagine that William II. unceasingly clung to the idea of “Peace above all.”  He wavered, was sometimes pessimistic, sometimes optimistic, and his peace aims changed in like manner.  Humanly speaking, it is very comprehensible that the varying situation in the theatre of war must have influenced the individual mind, and everyone in Europe experienced such fluctuations.