"I hope Your Excellency will pardon me for thus frankly expressing my anxieties, but I considered it my duty to let Your Excellency know my feelings."
In May, 1917, Ballin accepted an invitation received from the Supreme Army Command and paid a visit to General Headquarters, where he found a great deal of discontent prevailing with the policy of the Chancellor. He also met the Kaiser, and reports on his visit as follows:
"After sharing the Kaiser's repast--which was plain and on a war diet--I had several hours' private conversation with His Majesty. I found him full of optimism, far more so than I thought was justified. Both he and Ludendorff seem to put too much faith in the success of the submarines; but they fail to see that this weapon is procuring for us the enmity of the whole world, and that the promise held out by its advocates, viz., that Great Britain will be brought to her knees within two months, is, to put it mildly, extremely doubtful of realization, unless we can sink the ships which carry ammunition and pit-props to England."
In a letter addressed to a gentleman in the Kaiser's entourage he gave a further detailed account of his views on the optimism prevailing in high places:
"I cannot help thinking of the enthusiastic and at the same time highly optimistic letter which you had the great kindness to show me last night. My opinion is that the gentlemen who form the entourage of His Majesty ought not to view matters as that interesting epistle suggests that they do.
"You are a believer in the statistics of Mr. X. I took the liberty of telling you last night that statistics are a mathematical form of telling a lie, and that, to use the expression of a clever Frenchman, a statistical table is like a loose woman who is at the service of anyone who wants her. 'There are different ways of arranging figures,' as they say in England. I do not know Mr. X, neither do I know his statistics, but what I have been told about them seemed foolish to me. If we carry on the war, and particularly the unrestricted submarine war, on the basis of statistics such as he and other jugglers with figures have compiled, we are sure to fail in the ends we are aiming at.
"As concerns the unrestricted submarine war itself, I still maintain the view I have always held, viz., that we shall never succeed in starving out Great Britain to such an extent as to force her Government to sue for a peace of our dictation.