And, Herr Rolland, it is not exactly fitting that you should adopt a tone implying that the people of your land, the French, are coming out to meet us with palm branches, when in reality they are plentifully equipped with cannon, with cartridges, yes, even with dumdum bullets.  It is apparent that you have grown pretty fearful of our brave troops!  That is to the glory of a power which is invincible through the justice of its cause.  The German soldier has nothing whatsoever in common with the loathsome and puerile were-wolf tales which your lying French press so zealously publishes abroad, that press which the French and the Belgian people have to thank for their misfortune.

Let the idle Englishmen call us Huns; you may, for all I care, characterize the warriors of our splendid Landwehr as sons of Attila; it is enough for us if this Landwehr can shatter into a thousand pieces the ring of our merciless enemies.  Far better that you should call us sons of Attila, cross yourselves in fear and remain outside our borders, than that you should indict tender inscriptions upon the tomb of our German name, calling us the beloved descendants of Goethe.  The epithet Huns is coined by people who, themselves Huns, are experiencing disappointment in their criminal attacks on the life of a sound and valorous race, because it knows the trick of parrying a fearful blow with still more fearful force.  In their impotence, they take refuge in curses.

I say nothing against the Belgian people.  The peaceful passage of German troops, a question of life for Germany, was refused by Belgium because the Government had made itself a tool of England and France.  This same Government then organized an unparalleled guerrilla warfare in order to support a lost cause, and by that act—­Herr Rolland, you are a musician!—­struck the horrible keynote of conflict.  If you are at all in a position to break your way through the giant’s wall of anti-German lies, read the message to America, by our Imperial Chancellor, of Sept. 7; read further the telegram which on Sept. 8 the Kaiser himself addressed to President Wilson.  You will then discover things which it is necessary to know in order to understand the calamity of Louvain.

Another Reply to Rolland

By Karl Wolfskehl.

To you, Rolland, belonging as a chosen one to the more important Frenchmen who can rise above their race, the German nature has often been revealed.  To you, now, we shall make answer, offer frank testimony concerning the spirit of the time, concerning that fate, that very fate in which you, the Frenchman, do not believe.  You do not believe in it; what to us is fate, mysterious necessity, to you is fatalite, an unavoidable Alp which threatens the individual in his individual freedom.  This fatalite, we, too, do not believe in it, but we do believe in the forces which bring forth the eternal in human will, that these both are one, will and forces, one with