y 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 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 wher