peaceable place. We have loved it ever since our first sight of it" (from a November 1902 letter). In the non-fiction realm, he became involved in the debate over the British response to the rise in German naval power known as the Tirpitz Plan, to build a fleet to challenge the Royal Navy, publishing a series of articles in 1898 collected as A Fleet in Being. On a visit to the United States in 1899, Kipling and his daughter Josephine developed pneumonia, from which she eventually died. In the wake of his daughter's death, Kipling concentrated on collecting material for what became Just So Stories for Little Children, published in 1902, the year after Kim. The American art historian Janice Leoshko and the American literary scholar David Scott have argued that Kim disproves the claim by Edward Said that Kipling was a promoter of Orientalism, since Kipling – who was deeply interested in Buddhism – presented Tibetan Buddhism in a fairly sympathetic light and aspects of the novel appeared to reflect a Buddhist understanding of the universe. Kipling was offended by the German Emperor Wilhelm II's Hun speech (Hunnenrede) in 1900, urging German troops being sent to China to crush the Boxer Rebellion to behave like "Huns" and take no prisoners. In a 1902 poem, The Rowers, Kipling attacked the Kaiser as a threat to Britain and made the first use of the term "Hun" as an anti-German insult, using Wilhelm's own words and the actions of German troops in China to portray Germans as essentially barbarian. In an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro, the Francophile Kipling called Germany a menace and called for an Anglo-French alliance to stop it. In another letter at the same time, Kipling described the "unfrei peoples of Central Europe" as living in "the Middle Ages with machine guns". Speculative fiction Kipling wrote a number of speculative fiction short stories, including "The Army of a Dream", in which he sought to show a more efficient and responsible army than the hereditary bureaucracy of England at the time, and two science fiction stories: "With the Night Mail" (1905) and "As Easy As A.B.C." (1912). Both were set in the 21st century in Kipling's Aerial Board of Control universe. They read like modern hard science fiction, and introduced the literary technique known as indirect exposition, which would later become one of science fiction writer Robert