Another curious German characteristic is the idea that, however truculent and menacing a writer's expressions may be, other people do him and his country a wicked injustice if they take him at his word. A good instance of this occurs in "Ein starkes Volk--Ein starkes Heer," by Kurd v. Strantz, published in 1914, shortly before the war. This writer quotes (or rather misquotes) with enthusiasm from Goethe:-- Du musst steigen und gewinnen, Du musst siegend triumphieren Oder deinend unterliegen, Amboss oder Hammer sein.[5] Next he proceeds to quote from Felix Dahn:-- Seitdem ist's freudig Germanenrecht Mit dem Hammer Land zu erwerben. Wir sind von des Hammergottes Geschlecht, Und wollen sein Weltreich erben.[6] Then, on the same page, only four lines lower down, he remarks plaintively:--"Foreign, and especially French, diplomacy is now industriously spreading the calumny that the German Government and the German people are given to rattling the sabre, and that we want to use for aggressive ends the increased armament which has been forced upon us." Is it mere hostile prejudice to hold that his own poetical selections give a certain colour to the "calumny"? Most of the German attacks on England will be found, in the last analysis, to rest on this quaint habit of mind--the habit of assuming that, no matter how hostile and threatening Germany's words and deeds might be, we had no right to do her the injustice of supposing that she meant anything by them. We ought to have known that she was merely "dissembling her love."