left for the front, crying "Paris, Paris is our goal!" Since the
Battle of the Aisne, in September, he has written "Der Lamm": "_Lamb of
God, I have seen thy look of suffering. Give us peace and rest; lead us
back to the heaven of love, and give us back our dead_." Rudolf
Leonhard sang of war at the beginning, and is still fighting; on
re-reading his poems shortly afterwards, he wrote on the front page:
"_These were written during the madness of the first weeks. That madness
has spent itself, and only our strength is left. We shall again win
control over ourselves and love one another._" Poets, hitherto unknown,
are revealed by the cry of compassion wrung from their anguished hearts.
To Andrea Fram, who has remained at home, it is a grief that he does not
suffer, whilst thousands of others suffer and die. "_All thy love, and
all thy agony, in spite of thy ardent desire, avail not to soothe the
last hour of a single man who is dying yonder._" Upon Ludwig Marck each
minute weighs like a nightmare:--

Menschen in Not....
Brueder dir tot....
Krieg ist im Land....

The poet who writes under the pseudonym of Dr. Owlglass proposed a new
ideal for Germany, on the seventieth anniversary of the birth of
Nietzsche (October 15th): not the superman, but at least--man. And Franz
Werfel realizes this ideal in poems thrilling with a mournful humanity,
which takes part in the sacrament of misery and death:

"_We are bound together not only by our common words and deeds, but
still more by the dying glance, the last hours, the mortal anguish of
the breaking heart. And whether you bow down before the tyrant, or gaze
trembling into the beloved's countenance, or mark down your enemy with
pitiless glance, think of the eye that will grow dim, of the failing
breath, the parched lips and clenched hands, the final solitude, and the
brow that grows moist in the last agony.... Be kind.... Tenderness is
wisdom, kindness is reason[31].... We are strangers all upon this
earth, and die but to be reunited._"[32]

But the one German poet who has written the serenest and loftiest words,
and preserved in the midst of this demoniacal war an attitude worthy of
Goethe, is Hermann Hesse. He continues to live at Berne, and, sheltered
there from the moral contagion, he has deliberately kept aloof from the
combat. All will remember his noble article in the _Neue Zuercher
Zeitung_ of November 3rd, "_O Freunde, nicht diese Toene!_" in which he
impl