necessity, with actuality, with creative, moral power, of which all great ideas are the children, the idea of freedom, the idea of the beautiful, the idea of tragic fidelity, and that these, reaching far above being and passing away, are nevertheless real, life entire, fact entire.  All that which is as dear to you as to us, great works and great feelings, resignation and self-restraint, all that is necessity, is fate, that became will—­all that a unity out of choice and compulsion.  All that is for us eternal, not according to the measure of time, but according to the beginning and the power of its working forces, in so far as it is necessary.

Thus has it become fate, destiny, not fatalite, rather like that fate which in Beethoven’s own words in the first movement of his “Eroica” “is the knocking at the gate.”

Such a fate is this war.  No one wanted it in our Germany, for it was forced upon us with terrible arbitrariness, contrary to all right.  Do you not know of the net that has been spun around us and drawn tight for the last half of a generation, to choke us?  Do you not know how often this most peaceful of peoples has drawn back, how often the strange powers in the East and in the West have with contemptuous snarls said, “Wilhelm will not make war”?  That you ought to know, Rolland, for it is known to the whole world.

The War “Came from God."

But I will betray something to you that you cannot know, because you are a stranger; and this will probably show you where we see fate.  I will betray to you the fact that there is still another Germany behind the exterior in which great politics and great finance meet with the literary champions of Europe.  That Germany tells you in this heavy hour of Europe: 

This undesired war that has been forced upon us is nevertheless a necessity; it had to come to pass for the sake of Germany and the world of European humanity, for the sake of the world.  We did not want it, but it came from God.  Our poet knew of it.  He saw this war and its necessity and its virtues, and heralded it, long before an ugly suspicion of it flew through the year—­before the leaves began to turn.  The “Stern des Bundes” ["Star of the Federation”] is this book of prophecy, this book of necessity and of triumph.

The present need and the present triumph are quite human and quite inexorable.  They have a part in all that has taken place, and they are unprecedented and new.  None of us—­do you hear, Rolland?—­none of us Germans today would hesitate to help destroy every monument of our holy German past, if necessity made it a matter of the last ditch, for that from which alone all monuments of all times draw their right of existence and their worth unless they are empty husks, skeletons, and framework; even so, we alone may ask what shall come to pass, not what shall cease.  Which ruins are ravings, and which are the pains of childbirth, we do not presume to decide; but you, too, who are so pained by ruins, even as we are pained by them, you, too, do not know it.