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I;

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THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF

MARTHA VON TILLING

BY

BERTHA VON SUTTNER

AUTHORISED TRANSLATION BY

T. HOLMES

REVISED BY THE AUTHORESS
SECOND EDITION

NEW IMPRESSION

LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.

91 AND 93 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK
LONDON AND BOMBAY

1908

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE TO THE FIRST
EDITION.

WHEN I was requested by the Committee of the Inter-
national Arbitration and Peace Association, of which I
have the honour to be a Member, to undertake the
translation of the novel entitled Die Waffen Nieder, I
considered it my duty to consent ; and I have found the
labour truly a delight. Baroness Suttner's striking tale
has had so great a success on the Continent of Europe
that it seems singular that no complete translation
into English should yet have appeared. An incomplete
version was published some time since in the United
States, without the sanction of the authoress; but it
gives no just idea of the work.

Apart from its value as a work of fiction great as
that is the book has a transcendent interest for the
Society with which I am connected from its bearing on
the question of war in general and of the present state
of Europe in particular. We English-speaking people,
whether in England, in the Colonies, or in the United
States, being ourselves in no immediate danger of seeing
our homes invaded, and our cities laid under contri-
bution by hostile armies, are apt to forget how terribly
the remembrance of such calamities, and the constant
threat of their recurrence, haunt the lives of our
Continental brethren. Madame Suttner's vivid pages
will enable those of us who have not seen anything of

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the ravages of war, or felt the griefs and anxieties of
non-combatants, to realise the state in which people
live on the Continent of Europe, -under the grim
" shadow of the sword," with constantly increasing
demands on the treasure accumulated by their labour,
and on their still dearer treasure their children drawn
into the ravenous maw of the Conscription, to meet
the ever-increasing demands of war, which seems daily
drawing nearer and nearer, in spite of the protestations
made by every Government of its anxiety for peace.

What can we expect to change this terrible condition
except the formation of a healthy public opinion ? And
what can more powerfully contribute to its formation
than a clear conception both of the horrors and suffer-
ings that have attended the great wars waged in our
times, and also of the inadequacy of the reasons, at
least the ostensible reasons, for their commencement,
and the ease with which they might have been avoided,
if their reasons had been indeed their causes ? This work
appears to me of especial value, as setting this forth
more plainly than a formal treatise could do, and it is
towards the formation of such a public opinion that we
hope it may contribute. The dawn of a better day in
respect of war is plain enough in our country. We
have advanced far indeed from the state of things that
existed a century ago, when Coleridge could indignantly
say of England :

'Mid thy herds and thy cornfields secure thou hast stood
And joined the wild yelling of famine and blood 1

England since then has given and is giving many
gratifying proofs of her sincere desire for peace, and
her readiness to submit her claims to peaceful arbitra-

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tion. Is it too much to hope that we may see our
country joining in some well-considered scheme for
general treaties of Arbitration and for the institution
of an International Court ? And may we not hope that
our influence, as that of a nation not implicated in the
mad race of armaments, and yet not removed from the
area of European war, may avail to bring the question
of disarmament before an International Conference
and thus introduce the twentieth century into a world
in which there will be some brighter prospect than
that

War shall endless war still breed ?

Let us trust that this may not be found quite an idle
dream, and that we may without self-delusion look
forward to a more happy era, and join the cry of
Baroness Suttner's Rudolf " Es lebe die Z'lkunft".

HAIL TO THE FUTURB!

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.

THE rapid sale of the first edition of this translation has
encouraged the Association at whose request it was
made to endeavour to make it more widely known to
the various English-speaking populations, by printing a
larger edition at a lower price. It is hoped, also, that the
enlarged circulation of a work so graphic, and written
by one who has so thoroughly studied the real aspects
of war, as seen by those on the spot, may lead not so
much to sentimental emotions and vague protests, as to
a business-like discussion of the means by which the
resort to war may be at any rate rendered more and
more infrequent. The English Government has lately
given repeated and practical proofs of its sincere desire
to substitute the peaceful and rational method of arbi-
tration for the rough, cruel, and uncertain decision of
force; and the conspicuous success of that method
hitherto though tried under circumstances not al-
together favourable must have prepared thinking men
for the question : " Why cannot some scheme for the
formation of an International Tribunal of Arbitration be
formed and debated among the Powers who, by taking
part in the Congress at Paris after the Crimean War,
formally admitted the principle, and who have already
seen it successfully applied in practice " ? To this
question, which has been frequently asked, no satisfactory

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answer has yet been given, nor to the further question
why our Government should not introduce the subject to
the great Powers, after showing so unmistakably its ad-
herence to the principle. People differ, and, probably,
will always differ, as to the light in which they regard
war. A very small and rapidly diminishing minority
regard it as a good thing in itself most as an evil
which in our present stage of civilisation cannot always
be avoided ; some as a crime formally prohibited by the
moral law and the Christian religion. All of the two
latter classes ought to join in any practical steps for
diminishing the occasions of war; and of these the one
which is most within the scope of politicians is the pro-
motion of International Arbitration. The Association
to which I belong has published this work in the confi-
dent hope that its circulation will aid in hastening this
much-needed reform.

THE TRANSLATOR.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.

PAGH

Girlish days. My first marriage and birth of my first child My

husband summoned to the Italian war of 1859 . . I

CHAPTER II.
Period of war. A wife's anxieties. Terrible news . . if

CHAPTER III.
Years of widowhood. Re-entry into society. Introduction to Baron

Tilling. Manner of my husband's death . . . . 40

CHAPTER IV.
Progress of my friendship for Tilling. His mother's death. Growth

of love 59

CHAPTER V.
Doubts and fears. Engagement to Tilling . .... 8-4

CHAPTER VI.
Marriage and garrison life. Outbreak of the Schleswig-Holstein

war. History of its causes ....... 116

CHAPTER VII.
My husband ordered off to the war. Premature confinement and

deadly peril. Letters from the seat of war . . . . 141

CHAPTER VIII.
Re-union. Financial ruin . 164

CHAPTER IX.
Approach of the Austro- Prussian war. The preliminaries to It

War declared 187

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CHAPTER X.
Early period of the war .... . . . 115

CHAPTER XI.
War-sketches by a soldier who abhors war . . . . 3J

CHAPTER XII.
After K6niggratz. My experiences in a journey over the Bohemian

battlefields in search of my husband 245

CHAPTER XIII.
Prussian advance on Vienna. Life at Grumitz . . . .283

CHAPTER XIV.
Festivities at Grumitz, followed by an outbreak of cholera which

sweeps off nearly the whole family 303

CHAPTER XV.
Period of mourning. Discussion with a military chaplain. Death

of Aunt Mary .... 327

CHAPTER XVI.

Threat of war between France and Prussia. Arbitration. Life in
Paris during the exhibition of 1868 and afterwards in 1870.
Birth of a daughter 356

CHAPTER XVII.
Approach of war between France and Prussia. We linger in Paris.

War breaks out 380

CHAPTER XVIII.
The Franco-German war. Departure from Paris prevented by

illness. Siege of Paris. My husband shot by the Communards 396

CHAPTER XIX.
The end. " Hail to the future 1 " 4*

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CHAPTER L

Girlish days and girlish fancies. Youtkfttl enthusiasm for
war. Education. " Coming out." An important visit
to Maricnbad. Love at first sight. Marriage. A first
child. The baby-soldier. Threatenings of war. Decla-
ration of war with Sardinia. My husband is to see active
service.

AT seventeen I was a thoroughly overwrought creature. This
perhaps I should no longer be aware of to-day, if it were
not that my diaries have been preserved. But in them the
enthusiasms long since fled, the thoughts which have never
been thought again, the feelings never again felt have im-
mortalised themselves, and thus I can judge at this present
time what exalted notions had stuck in my silly, pretty head.
Even this prettiness, of which my glass has now little left to
say, is revealed to me by the portraits of long ago. I can figure
to myself what an envied person the Countess Martha Althaus
youthful, thought beautiful, and surrounded by all kinds of
luxury must have been. These remarkable diaries, however,
bound in their red covers, point more to melancholy than to joy
in life. The question I now ask myself is, Was I really so silly
as not to recognise the advantages of my position or was I
only so enthusiastic as to believe that only melancholy feelings

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were elevated and worthy of being expressed in poetical form
and as such enrolled in the red volumes ? My lot seems not
to have contented me for thus is it written :

" O Joan of Arc ! heroic virgin favoured of heaven ! could
I be like to thee to wave the oriflamme, to crown my king,
and then die for the fatherland, the beloved ! "

No opportunity offered itself to me of realising these modest
views of life. Again, to Be torn to pieces in the circus by a lion
as a Christian martyr, another vocation for which I longed
see entry of September 19, 1853 was not to be compassed by
me, and so I had plainly to suffer under the consciousness
that the great deeds after which my soul thirsted must remain
ever unaccomplished, that my life, considered fundamentally,
was a failure. Ah ! why had I not come into the world as a
boy? (another fruitless reproach against destiny which often
found expression in the red volumes); in that case I would
have been able to strive after and to achieve " the exalted ".
Of female heroism history affords but few examples. How
seldom do we succeed in having the Gracchi for our sons, or
in carrying our husbands out to the Weinsberg Gates, or in
being saluted by sabre-brandishing Magyars with the shout,
" Hurrah for Maria Theresa our king". But when one is a
man, then one need only gird on the sword and start off to
win fame and laurels win for oneself a throne like Cromwell,
or the empire of the world, like Bonaparte. I recollect that the
highest conception of human greatness seemed to me to be
embodied in warlike heroism. For scholars, poets, explorers,
I had indeed a sort of respect, but only the winners of battles
inspired me with real admiration. These were indeed the chief
pillars of history, the rulers of the fate of countries ; these
were in importance and in elevation near to the Divinity,
as elevated above all other folk as the peaks of the
Alps and Himalayas nbove the turf and flowers of the
valley.

From all which I need not conclude that I possessed a
heroic nature. The fact was simply that I was capable of

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enthusiasm and impassioned, and so I was of course passion-
ately enthusiastic for that which was most highly accounted of
by my school-books and my entourage.

My father was a general in the Austrian army, and had
fought at Custozza under " Father Radetzky," whom he vene-
rated to superstition. What eternal campaigning stories had I to
listen to ! Dear papa was so proud of his warlike experiences,
and spoke with such satisfaction of the campaigns in which he
had fought, that I felt an involuntary pity for every man who
possessed no such reminiscences. But what a drawback for
the female sex to be excluded from this most magnificent
display of the manly feeling of honour and duty ! If anything
came to my ears about the efforts of women after equality
and of this in my youth but little was heard, and then usually
in a tone of contempt and condemnation I conceived the
wish for emancipation only in one direction, viz., that women
also should have the right to carry arms and take the
field. Ah, how beautiful was it to read in history about a
Semiramis or a Catherine II. "She carried on war with
this or that neighbouring state she conquered this or that
country ! "

Speaking generally it is history which, as our youth are
instructed, is the chief source of the admiration of war. From
thence it is stamped on the childish mind that the Lord of
armies is constantly decreeing battles, that these are, as it were,
the vehicle upon which the destiny of nations is carried on
through the ages ; that they are the fulfilment of an inevitable
law of nature and must always occur from time to time like
storms at sea or earthquakes ; that terror and woe are indeed
connected with them ; but the latter is fully counterpoised, for
the commonwealth by the importance of the results, for indi-
viduals by the blaze of glory which may be won in them, or
even by the consciousness of the fulfilment of the most elevated
duty. Can there be a more glorious death than that on the
field of honour, a nobler immortality than that of the hero?
All this comes out clear and unanimous in all school-books 01

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"readings for the use of schools," where, besides the formal
history, which is only represented as a concatenation of military
events, even the separate tales and poems always manage to tell
only of heroic deeds of arms. This is a part of the patriotic
system of education. Since out of every scholar a defender of
his country has to be formed, therefore the enthusiasm even of
the child must be aroused for this its first duty as a citizen; his
spirit must be hardened against the natural horror which the
terrors of war might awaken, by passing over as quickly as
possible the story of the most fearful massacres and butcheries
as of something quite common and necessary, and laying mean-
while all possible stress on the ideal side of this ancient national
custom ; and it is in this way they have succeeded in forming
a race eager for battle and delighting in war.

The girls who indeed are not to take the field are edu-
cated out of the same books as are prepared for the military
training of the boys, and so in the female youth arises the same
conception which exhausts itself in envy that they have nothing
to do with war and in admiration for the military class. What
pictures of horror out of all the battles on earth, from the Biblical
and Macedonian and Punic Wars down to the Thirty Years' War
and the wars of Napoleon, were brought before us tender maidens,
who in all other things were formed to be gentle and mild ; how
we saw there cities burnt and the inhabitants put to the sword
and the conquered trodden down and all this was a real enjoy-
ment ; and of course through this heaping up and repetition of the
horrors the perception that they were horrors becomes blunted,
everything which belongs to the category of war conies no longer
to be regarded from the point of view of humanity, and receives
a perfectly peculiar mystico-historico-political consecration. War
must be it is the source of the highest dignities and honours
that the girls see very well, and they have had also to learn
by heart the poems and tirades in which war is magnified.
And thus originate the Spartan mothers, and the "mothers ol
the colours," and the frequent invitations to the cotillon which
are given to a corps of officers when it is the turn of the ladies

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to choose partners. 1 I was not like so many of my companions
in rank educated in a convent, but under the direction of
governesses and masters in my father's house. My mother I
lost early. Our aunt, an old canoness, filled the place of a
mother to us children for there were three younger children.
We spent the winter months in Vienna, the summer on a family
estate in Lower Austria.

I can remember that I gave my governesses and masters much
satisfaction, for I was an industrious and ambitious scholar,
gifted with an accurate memory. When I could not, as I have
remarked, satisfy my ambition by winning battles like a heroine,
I contented myself with passing judgments on them in my
lessons, and extorting admiration by my zeal for learning. In
the French and English languages I was nearly perfect. In
geology and astronomy I made as much progress as was ordin-
arily accessible in the programme of the education of a girl, but
in the subject of history I learned more than was required of
me. Out of the library of my father I fetched the ponderous
works of history, in which I studied in my leisure hours. I
always thought myself a little bit cleverer when I could enrich
my memory with an event, a name, or a date out of past times.
Against pianoforte-playing which was put down in the plan of
education I made a resolute resistance. I possessed neither
talent nor desire for music, and felt that in it, for me, no satisfac-
tion of my ambition would be found. I begged so long and
so pressingly that my precious time, which I might spend on
my other studies, should not be shortened by this meaningless
strumming, that my good father let me off this musical servitude,

1 About the " Damenwahl " Bishop Ch. Wordsworth in his Annals of
my Early Life, p. 141, thus speaks, describing a ball at Greifswald:
"As I was standing among others looking on at a party of dancers, a
fair Greifswaldese, who had been one of them, came up to me and offered
me her hand. Not knowing who she was or what she said (for she spoke
in German), I could only make to her a low bow and look abashed. It
was explained to me afterwards that the cotillon, which was the dance
going on, allows any lady to offer herself as a partner to any gentleman
whom she chooses, and that I had declined a very pretty compliment."

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to the great grief of my aunt, whose opinion was that without
pianoforte-playing there could be no proper education.

On March 10, 1857, I celebrated my seventeenth birthday.
" Seventeen already ! " runs the entry of that date in my diary.
This " already " is in itself a poem. There is no commentary
added, but probably I meant by it " and as yet nothing done
for immortality ". These red volumes do me excellent service
now, when I want to recall the recollections of a life. They
render it possible for me to depict even down to their minutest
details the feelings of the past, which would have remained in
my memory only as faded outlines, and to reproduce whole
trains of thought long forgotten, and long-silent speeches.

In the following carnival I was to be " brought out ". This
prospect delighted me, but not to such an extraordinary degree
as is usually the case with young girls. My spirit yearned for
something higher than the triumphs of the ballroom. What
was it I yearned for ? A question that I could have hardly
answered to myself. Probably for love, though I was not
aware of it. All those glowing dreams of aspiration and am-
bition which swell the hearts of young men and women, and
which long to work themselves out all sorts of ways as thirst
for knowledge, love of travel or adventure are in reality for
the most part only the unrecognised activity of the growing
instinct of love.

This summer my aunt was ordered a course of the waters at
Marienbad. She was pleased to take me with her. Though
my official introduction into the so-called " world " was not to
take place till the following winter, I was yet allowed to take
part in some little dances at the Kurhaus, with an idea also of
exercising me in dancing and conversation, so that I might not
be altogether too shy and awkward in entering on my first
carnival season.

But what happened at the first party which I visited ? A
serious, vital love affair. It was of course a lieutenant of hussars.
The civilians in the hall appeared to me like cockchafers to
butterflies compared to the soldiers. And of the wearers of

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uniforms present the hussars were every way the most splendid ;
and, finally, of all the hussars Count Arno Dotzky was the
most dazzling. Over six feet high, with black curly hair,
twisted moustaches, glittering white teeth, dark eyes, with such
a penetrating and tender expression in fine, at his question,
" Have you the cotillon free, countess?" I felt that there might
be other triumphs as exciting as the banner-waving of the Maid
of Orleans, or the sceptre-waving of the great Catherine. And
he at the age of twenty-two felt something very similar as he
(lew round the room in the waltz with the prettiest girl in the
hall (for one may say so thirty years afterwards) at any rate he
was probably thinking, " To possess thee, thou sweet creature,
would outweigh a field-marshal's baton ".

"Why, Martha, Martha," remonstrated my aunt, as I sank
breathless on the seat at her side, covering her head-dress with
the floating muslins of my robe. .

" Oh, I beg your pardon, auntie," said I, and sat more
upright. " I could not help it."

" I was not finding fault with you for that. My blame was
for your behaviour with that hussar. You ought not to cling
so in dancing, and who would ever look so close into a gentle-
man's eyes? "

I blushed deep. Had I committed some unmaidenly
offence, and might the Incomparable have conceived a bad
idea of me ?

I was relieved of this anxious doubt before the ball was over,
for in the course of the supper waltz the Incomparable whis-
pered to me : " Listen to me. I cannot help it you must
know it even to-day I love you."

This sounded a little more sweet than Joan's famous
"voices". However, while the dance was going on I could
not give him any reply. He must have seen this, for he came
to a stop. We were standing in an empty corner of the room,
and could continue the conversation without being overheard

" Speak, countess ; what have I to hope ? "

" I do not understand you," was my insincere reply.

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" Perhaps you do not believe in love at first sight ? I myself
held it a fable till now, but to-day I have experienced the truth
of it"

How my heart beat ! but I was silent.

" I have leapt head over heels into my fate," he continued.
" You or no one ! Decide then for my bliss or my death, for
without you I neither can nor will live. Will you be mine?"

To so direct a question I was obliged to give some reply. I
sought for some extremely diplomatic phrase which without
cutting off all hope would sacrifice nothing of my dignity, but
I got out nothing more than a tremulous whispered " yes ".

" Then may I to-morrow propose for your hand to your aunt,
and write to Count Althaus ? "

" Yes " again, this time a little firmer.

" Oh, what happiness ! So at first sight you love me too ? "

This time I only answered with my eyes, but they, I fancy,
spoke the plainest " yes ".

On my eighteenth birthday I was married, after having been
first introduced into society, and presented to the empress on
my engagement. After our wedding we went for a tour in
Italy. For this purpose Arno had got a long leave of absence ;
of retirement from the military service nothing was ev?r said.
It is true we both possessed a tolerable property, but my hus-
band loved his profession, and I agreed with him. I was proud
of my handsome hussar officer, and looked forward with satis
faction to the time when he would rise to the rank of major,
colonel, even general. Who knows? Perhaps he might even
be called to a higher fortune ; perhaps he might shine in the
glorious history of his country as a great military commander !

That the red volumes exhibit a break just during the happy
wedding time and the honeymoon is now to me a great grief.
The joys of those days would indeed have been evaporated, dis-
persed, scattered to the winds, even if I had entered them there,
but at any rate a reflection of them would have been kept bound
tight between the leaves. But no ! for my grief and my pain I
could not find complaints enough enough dashes and notes of

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exclamation. All grievous things had to be cried over carefully
before the world, present and to come, but the happy hours I
enjoyed in silence. I was not proud of my happiness, and so
gave no one, not even myself, in my diary, any information about
it, but sufferings and longings I looked on as a kind of merit,
and so made much of them. But how true a mirror these red
volumes present of my sad experiences, while in the happy
times the leaves are quite blank ! It is too silly ! It is as if
during a walk a man were to make a collection to bring home
with him, and to collect of all the things he found by the way
only those that were ugly, as if he filled his botanic case with
nothing but thorns, thistles, worms and toads, and left the
flowers and butterflies behind.

Still I recollect that it was a grand time, a kind of fairy dream.
I had indeed everything that the heart of a young woman could
wish : love, wealth, rank, fortune, and most of it so new, so
surprising, so incredible ! We loved each other my Arno and
I devotedly, with all the fire of our youth, abounding as it was
in life and scenes of beauty. And it so happened that my dar-
ling hussar was besides a worthy, good-hearted, noble-minded
young gentleman, with the education of a man of the world and
a cheerful temper it happened so ; for he might as well, for
anything that the ball at Marienbad could testify to the contrary,
have been a vicious, rough man and as it happened also I was
a moderately sensible, good-hearted creature; for he might
just as well at the said ball have fallen in love with a pretty
capricious, little goose. And so it came about that we were
completely happy, and that as a consequence the red-bound
book of lamentation remained empty for a long while.

Stop; here I do find a joyous entry Raptures over the new
dignity of motherhood. On the ist of January, 1859 (was not
that a new-year's gift ?), a little son was born to us. Of course
this event awakened in us as much astonishment and pride as
if we were the first pair to which anything of the kind had hap
pened ; and this accounts also for the resumption of the diary
Of this wonder, and of this dignity of mine, the world of the

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future had to be informed. Besides, the theme "youthful
motherhood " is so extremely well adapted fot art and literature.
It belongs to the class of the best sung and most carefully
painted subjects; besides, it may be treated mystically and
sacreclty,touchingly and pathetically, simply and affectionately
in short, immensely poetically. To nurse this disposition all
possible collections of poems, illustrated journals, picture gal-
leries, and current phrases of rapture, such as "mother's love,"
" mother's happiness," " mother's pride," contribute their power,
just as the school-books do to nurse the admiration for war.
The highest pitch of deification which has been reached next
to the adoration of heroes (see Carlyle's Hero Worship} is
reached by the multitude in " baby worship " ; and of course in
this also I was not left behind. My little charming Ruru was
to me the mightiest wonder of the world. Ah, my son ! my
grown-up, stately Rudolf, whjit I feel for you is such that
against it that childish baby-wonder loses colour, against it
that blind, apish, devouring love of the young mother is as
insignificant as the child himself in swaddling clothes is
insignificant by the side of the grown man.

The young father was not less proud of his successor, and
built on him the fairest schemes for the future. " What will he
be ? " This question, not as yet a very pressing one, was never-
theless often discussed over Ruru's cradle and always decided
unanimously a soldier. Sometimes it awoke a weak protest
on the mother's part. " But suppose he should meet with any
accident in a war?" "Ah, bah!" was the answer to this
objection, "every one must die when and where it is appointed
him." Ruru was also not to remain the only son ; of the fol-
lowing sons one might, please God, be brought up as a diploma
tist, another as a country gentleman, a third as a priest; but
the eldest, he must choose his father's and grandfather's pro
fession the noblest profession of all. He must be a soldier.

And so it was settled. Ruru, as soon as he was two months
old, was promoted by us to be lance-corporal. 1 Well, as all
1 " Gefreite" a soldier exempted from sentinel duty.

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crown princes immediately they are born are named "pro-
prietors" of some regiment, why should not we also decorate our
little one with an imaginary rank ? It was only a regular joke
this playing at soldiers with our baby.

On April i, as the third monthly recurrence of his birthday
(for to keep only the anniversaries would have given too few
opportunities for festivity), Ruru was promoted from lance-
corporal to corporal. But on the same day there happened
also something more mournful something that made my
heart heavy, and obliged me to relieve it into the red
volumes.

There had been now for a long time a certain black point
visible on the political horizon, about the possible increase of
which the liveliest commentaries were made in all journals and
at all private parties. I had up to that time thought nothing
about it. My husband and my father and their military
friends might have often said in my hearing, " There will soon
be something to settle with Italy," but it glanced off my under-
standing. I had little time or inclination to trouble myself
about politics. So that however eagerly people about me might
debate about the relations between Sardinia and Austria, or the
behaviour of Napoleon III., of whose help Cavour had assured
himself by taking part in the Crimean War, or however con-
stantly they might talk about the tension which this alliance
had called forth between us and our Italian neighbours, I took
no notice of it.

But on April i my husband said to me very seriously :

"Do you know, dear, that it will soon break out? '*

" What will break out, darling ? "

" The war with Sardinia."

I was terrified. " My God ! that would be terrible ! And will
you have to go ? "

"I hope so."

" How can you say such a thing ? Hope to leave your wife
and child! "

II If duty calls."

If LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS.

M One might reconcile oneself to it ; but to hope which
means wish that such a bitter duty should arise ! "

" Bitter I A rattling jolly war like that must be something
glorious ! You are a soldier's wife ; don't forget that."

I fell on his neck. "O my dear husband, be content I
also can be brave ! How often have I sympathised with the
heroes and heroines of history ! What an elevating feeling it
must be to go into battle ! If I only might fight, fall, or
conquer at your side ! "

" Bravely spoken, little wife, but nonsense ! Your place is
here, by the cradle of the little one, who also is to become a
defender of his country when he is grown up. Your place is at
our household hearth. It is to protect this, and guard it from
any hostile attack, to preserve peace for our homes and our
wives, that we men have to go to battle."

I don't know why, but these words, which, or something of the
same sort, I had often before heard and read with assent, this
time seemed to me to be in a sense mere " phrases ". There was
certainly no hearth menaced, no horde of barbarians at the
gate, merely a political tension between two cabinets. So, if
my husband was all on fire to rush into the war, it was not so
much from the pressing need of defending his wife, child, and
country, but much rather his delight in the march out, which
promised change and adventure his seeking for distinction
and promotion. " Oh, yes," was my conclusion from this train
of thought, "it is ambition a noble, honourable ambition
delight in the brave discharge of duty."

It was good of him that he was rejoicing in the chanre of
being obliged to take the field for as yet there was assuredly
no certainty. Perhaps the war might not break out at all, and
even in case they came to blows, who knows whether it would
be Arno's fate to be sent off? the whole army does not always
see the enemy. No, this splendid, perfect happiness which
fate had just built as a snug house for me, it was impossible
that the same fate should roughly shatter it to pieces ! " O
Arno, my dearly-loved husband 1 it would be horrible to know

LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS. 13

that you are in danger ! " These and similar outpourings fill
the leaves of the diary which were written in those days.

From this period the red volumes are full for some time
of political stuff. Louis Napoleon is an intriguer; Austria
cannot long be only a spectator. It is coming to war. Sar-
dinia will be frightened at our superior power, and give in.
Peace is going to be maintained. My wishes, despite of all
theoretical admiration of the battles of the past, were, of course,
secretly directed to the preservation of peace, but the wish of
my spouse called openly for the other alternative. He did not
say anything out plainly, but he always communicated any
news about the increase of "the black spot" with sparkling
eyes ; while, on the contrary, he always took note of such
peaceful prospects as occurred now and then (but, alas ! they
became always rarer) with a kind of dejection.

My father, also, was all on fire for the war. To conquer the
Piedmontese would be only child's play; and, in support of
this assertion, the Radetzk-y anecdotes were poured out again.
I heard the impending campaign talked about always from the
strategic point of view /.<?., a balancing of the chances on the
two sides ; how and where the enemy would be routed, and
the advantages which would thereby accrue to "us". The
humane point of view, viz., that whether lost or won every
battle demands innumerable sacrifices of blood and tears, was
quite left out of sight. The interests which were here in
question were represented as raised to such a height above any
private destiny, that I felt ashamed of the meanness of my way
of thinking, if at times the thought occurred to me: "Ah !
what joy do the poor slain men, the poor cripples, the poor
widows, get out of the victory ? " , However, very soon the old
school book dithyrambs came in again for an answer to all
these despairing questionings : " Glory offers recompense for
all ". Still suppose the enemy wins ? This question I pro-
pounded in the circle of my military friends, but was igno-
miniously hissed down. The mere mention of the possibility
of a shadow of a doubt is io itself unpatriotic. To be certain

14 LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS.

beforehand of one's invincibility is a part of a soldier's duties ,
and, therefore, in her degree, of those of a loyal wife of a
lieutenant.

My husband's regiment was quartered in Vienna. From our
he use there was a view over the Prater, and from the window
there was such a lovely promise of summer over everything.
It was a wonderful spring. The air was warm and redolent
of violets, and the fresh foliage sprouted out more early than
in other years. I was amusing myself without any anxiety
over the great processions in the Prater which were planned
for the following month. We had, for this purpose, procured
a tasty little equipage a brake with a four-in-hand team of
Hungarian horses. Even already, in this splendid April
weather, we kept driving almost daily in the alleys of the
Prater but that was only a foretaste of the pleasure peculiar
to May. Ah ! if the war had not broken in on all
that !

" Now, thank God, at last this uncertainty is at an end,"
cried my husband one morning April 19 on coming home
from parade. " The ultimatum has been sent."

I shrieked out : " Eh, what ? What does that mean ? "

" It means that the last word of the diplomatic formalities,
the one which precedes the declaration of war, has been spoken.
Our ultimatum to Sardinia calls on Sardinia to disarm. She,
of course, will take no notice of it, and we march across the
frontier."

" Good God ! But perhaps they may disarm ? "

" Well, then, the quarrel would be at an end, and peace
would continue."

I fell on my knees. I could not help it. Silently, but
still as earnestly as if with a cry, there rose the prayer from my
soul to heaven for " Peace ! peace ! "

Arno raised me up.

" My silly child, what are you doing ? "

I threw my arms round his neck and began to weep. It was
no burst of pain, for the misfortune was certainly as yet not

LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS. 15

decided on ; but the news had so shaken me that my nerves
quivered, and that caused this flood of tears.

" Martha, Martha, you will make me angry," said Arno,
reproachfully. " Is this being my brave little soldier's wife ?
Do you forget that you are a general's daughter, wife of a
first lieutenant, and," he concluded with a smile, " mother
of a corporal?"

" No, no, Arno. I do not comprehend myself. It was only
a kind of seizure. I am really myself ardent for military glory.
But I do not know how it is a little while ago everything was
hanging on a single word, which must by this time have been
spoken' yes ' or ' no ' in answer to this ultimatum as it is
called, and this 'yes' or 'no' is to decide whether thousands
must bleed and die die in these sunny happy days of spring
and so it came over me that the word of peace must come,
and I could not help falling on my knees in prayer."

" To inform the Almighty of the position of affairs, you dear
little goose ! "

The house bell rang. I dried my eyes at once. Who
could it be so early ?

It was my father. He rushed in all in a hurry.

" Now, children," he cried, all out of breath, throwing him-
self into an arm-chair. " Have you heard the great news ? The
ultimatum "

" I have just told my wife."

" Tell me, dear papa, what you think," I asked anxiously.
" Will that prevent the war ? "

" I am not aware that an ultimatum ever prevented a war.
It would indeed be only prudent of this wretched rabble of
Italians to give in and not expose themselves to a second
Novara. Ah ! if good Father Radetzky had not died last year
I believe he would, in spite of his ninety years, have put
himself again at the head of his army, and, by God ! I would
have marched along with him. We two have, I think, shown
already how to manage these foreign scum. But it seems they
have not yet had enough of it, the puppies ! They want a

* LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS.

second lesson. All right. Our Lombardo- Venetian kingdom
will get a handsome addition in the Piedmontese territory, and
I already look forward to the entry of our troops into Turin."

"But, papa, you speak just as if war were already declared,
and you were glad of it ! But how if Arno has to go too ? "
And the tears were already in my eyes again.

"That he will too the enviable young fellow !"

" But my terror ! The danger "

" Eh ! what ? Danger ! ' A man may fight and not be
slain,' as *tie saying goes. I have gone through more than
one campaign, thank God, and been wounded mere than once
and yet I am all alive, just because it was ordained that I
should live through it."

The old fatalist way of talking ! the same as prevailed to
settle Ruru's choice of a profession and which even now
appeared to me again as quite philosophical.

" Even if it should chance that my regiment is not ordered
out " Arno began.

"Ah, yes!" I joyfully broke in, "there is still that
hope."

11 In that case I would get exchanged, if possible."

"Oh, it will be quite possible," my father assured him.
"Hess is to receive the command-in-chief and he is a good
friend of mine." My heart trembled, and yet I could not help
admiring both the men. With what a joyful equanimity they
spoke of a coming campaign, as if it were only a question of
some pleasure trip that had been arranged. My brave Aino
was desirous, even if his duty did not summon him, to go and
meet the foe, and my magnanimous father thought that quite
simple and natural. I collected myself. Away with childish,
womanish fear ! Now was the time to show myself worthy of
this my love, to raise my heart above all egotistic fears and
find room for nothing but the noble reflection " my husband
is a hero ".

I sprang up and stretched out both my hands to him :
" Arno, I am proud of you ! "

LAV DOWN YOUR ARMS. I?

He put my hands to his lips, then turned to papa and said,

with a face radiant with joy :
" You have brought the girl up well, father-in-law ! "
Rejected ! The ultimatum rejected ! This took place at

Turin, April 26. The die is castl War has broken out

CHAPTER n.

Last hours with the beloved one. Public feeling in the

ojf war. The parting. Employments of the women at
home. Anxieties over the news from the seat of war.
III -success of Austria. Friends in trouble. The Patriotic
Aid Association. Visit to a friend. Dreadful news.

FOR a week I had been prepared for the catastrophe, and yet
its occurrence gave me a bitter blow. I threw myself sobbing
on the sofa, and hid my face in the cushion when Arno brought
me the news.

He sat down by me, and began gently to comfort me.

" My darling ! Courage ! Compose yourself! It is not so
bad after all. In a short time we shall return as conquerors.
Then we two shall be doubly happy. Do not weep so it
breaks my heart. I am almost sorry that I have engaged to go
in any case. But, no ; just think, if my comrades are forced to
go, with what right could I remain at home ? You yourself
would feel ashamed of me. No. I must experience the bap-
tism of fire some time, and till that has happened I do not
feel myself truly a man or a soldier. Only think how delightful
if I come back with a third star on my collar perhaps with the
cross on my breast."

I rested my head on his shoulder, and kept on weeping the
more. But I reflected how small such things were. Stars and
crosses seemed to be at that moment only empty spangles. Not
ten grand crosses on that dear breast could offer me any recom-
pense for the terrible possibility that a ball might shatter it.

Arno kissed me on the forehead, put me softly aside, and
stood up.

LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS. 1 9

" I must go out now, my dear, to my colonel. Have your
cry out . When 1 come back I hope to find you firm and
cheerful. That is what I have need of, and not to be shaken
with sad anticipations. At such a decisive moment as this my
own dear little wife surely will do nothing to take the heart out
of me or damp my ardour for exploits ? Good-bye, my treasure."
And he departed.

I collected myself. His last words were still ringing in my
ears. Yes, plainly my duty now was not merely not to damp,
but as far as possible to increase, his spirit and his ardour for
exploits. That is the only way in which we women can exer-
cise our patriotism, in which we can take any share in the glory
our husbands bring from the battlefields. "Battlefields" it
is surprising how this word suddenly presented itself to my
mind in two radically different meanings. Partly in the accus-
tomed historical signification, so pathetic, and so calculated to
awake the highest admiration ; partly in the loathsomeness of
the bloody, brutal syllable " fight ". Yes, those poor men who
were being hurried out had to lie stricken down on the field, with
their gaping, bleeding wounds, and among them perhaps and a
loud shriek escaped me as the thought passed through my mind.

My maid Betty came running in all in a fright. "For
God's sake, my lady, what has happened ? " she asked trembling.

I looked at the girl. Her eyes also were red with weeping.
I guessed ; she knew the tidings already, and her lover was a
soldier. I felt as if I could press my sister in misfortune to my
heart.

" It is nothing, my child," I said softly. " Those who go
away will surely return."

" Ah, my gracious lady, not all/' she replied, breaking out
anew into tears.

My aunt now came in, and Betty withdrew.

" I am come, Martha, to speak comfort to you," said the old
lady as she embraced me, " and to preach to you resignation in
this trial."

" So you know it ? "

*6 LAV DOWN YOUfc ARMS.

" The whole city knows it, and great joy prevails, for this
war is very popular."

" Joy, Aunt Mary ? "

" Oh, yes, among those who see no beloved member of their
families ordered out. I could easily understand that you must
be sad, and so I hastened here. Your papa will also come
directly, but not to comfort, only to congratulate. He is quite
beside himself with joy that it is to go on, and looks on it as a
noble chance for Arno to take part in it. And he is right in
the main. For a soldier there is nothing better than a war.
And that is the way you must look at it, my dear child. To
fulfil the duty of your calling is before everything. What must
be "

" Yes, you are right, aunt ; what must be, what is in-
evitable "

"What is the will of God " put in Aunt Mary in

corroboration.

u Must be borne with composure and resignation."

" Bravo, Martha. It is certain that everything happens as
is before determined by a wise and all-merciful Providence in
His immutable counsels. Every one's death -hour is fixed and
written down at the hour of his birth. And for our dear
warriors we will pray so much and so earnestly ! "

I did not stop to debate more closely the contradiction that
lay between the two assumptions that a fatal event was at the
same time ordained and also could be turned aside by prayer.
I was myself not clear on the point, and had from my whole
education a vague impression that in such sacred matters one
ought not to embark on reasonings. And, indeed, if I had
given voice to such scruples before my aunt it would have
grievously shocked her. Nothing could hurt her more than for
people to express rational doubt on certain points. " Not to
argue about it " is the conventional commandment in matters
mysterious. As etiquette forbids to address questions to a
king, so it is a kind of impious breach of etiquette to want to
make inquiries or criticise about a dogma. " Not to argue

LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS. 21

about it " is also a commandment easily obeyed, and on this
occasion I followed it very willingly ; and so I did not entei
into any contention with my aunt, but on the contrary clung to
the consolation that lay in the resort to prayer. Yes, during
the whole time my lord was absent, I determined to beg
so earnestly for the protection of Heaven, that it should turn
aside every bullet in the volley from Arno. Turn them aside !
Whither? To the breast of another, for whom, nevertheless,
prayers were also being made? . . . And, besides, what had
been demonstrated to me in my course of physics about the
accurately computable and infallible effects of matter and its
motion ? . . . What, another doubt ? Away with it.

"Yes, aunt," I said aloud, in order to break short these con-
tradictions that kept crossing each other in my mind. " Yes,
we will pray continually and God will hear us. Arno will keep
unhurt."

" You see you see, dear child, how in heavy times the soul
still flies to religion. . . . Perhaps the Almighty sends you
this trial in order that you may lay aside your former luke-
warmness."

This again did not strike me as correct. That the whole
misunderstanding between Austria and Sardinia, dating even
from the Crimean War, all the negotiations, the despatch of the
ultimatum and its rejection, could have been ordained by God,
in order to warm up my lukewarm spirit !

But to express this doubt would also have been a breach of
propriety. As soon as any one introduces the name of the
Almighty, the claims connected with that name give him a
kind of spiritual immunity. But with regard to the charge of
lukewarmness, it had some foundation. My aunt's religious
feeling came from the depths of her heart, while my piety was
more external. My father was in this respect quite indifferent,
and so was my husband ; and so I had had no stimulus from
either the one or the other to any particular zeal of belief. I
had never had any means either of plunging deeply into
ecclesiastical learning, since I had always been able to leave

22 LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS.

such things unattacked on the " not-argue-about-them "principle
True, I went every week to mass and every year to confession,
.and attended these services with much reverence and devotion ;
but the whole thing was still more or less an observance of the
etiquette becoming to my position : I fulfilled my religious
duties with the same correctness as I went through the figures
of the Lancers at the state ball and made the state courtesy
when the empress came into the room. Our chaplain at the
chiteau in Lower Austria and the nuntio in Vienna could have
nothing to say against me yet the charge which my aunt
brought against me was perfectly justified.

" Yes, my child," she went on, " in prosperity and happiness
people easily forget their home above ; but if sickness or fear
of death breaks in on us or, still more, on those we love if we
are stricken down or in sorrow

She would have gone on in this style for a long time, but the
door burst open, and my father rushed in.

" Hurrah, it's begun now," was his joyful greeting to us.
" They wanted a whipping, these puppies, did they ? And a
whipping they shall have that they shall ! "

It was a time of excitement. The war " has broken out ".
People forget that it is really two masses of men who are rush-
ing to fight each other, and conceive of the event as if it was
some exalted overruling third power, whose outbreak compels
these two masses into the fight. The whole responsibility falls
on this power, lying beyond the wills of individuals, and which
on its side merely produces the fulfilment of the destined fate
of the nations. Such is the dark and awful conception which
the majority of mankind have of war, and which was mine too.
There was no question of my feeling any revolt against making
war in general. What I suffered from was only that my
beloved husband had to go out into the danger and I to stay
behind in anxiety and solitude. I rummaged up all my old
impressions from the days of my historical studies, in order to
strengthen and inspire me with the conviction that it was the

LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS. 3

highest of human duties which called my dear one away, and
that thereby the possibility was offered to him of covering him-
self with glory and honour. Now at any rate I was living in
the midst of an epoch of history, and this again was a peculiarly
elevating thought Since from Herodotus and Tacitus, down
to the historians of modern times, wars have always been repre-
sented as the events of most importance and of weightiest
consequence, I concluded that at the present time also a war
of this sort would pass with future historians as an event to
serve for the title of a chapter.

This elevated tone, overpowering in its impressiveness, was
that wh ; ch prevailed everywhere else. Nothing else was spoken
of in rooms or streets, nothing else read in the newspapers,
nothing else prayed about in the churches. Wherever one went
one found everywhere the same excited faces, the same eager
talk about the possibilities of the war. Everything else which
engaged the people's interest at other times the theatre, busi-
ness, art was now looked on as perfectly insignificant It
seemed to one as if it were not right to think of anything else
whilst the opening scene in this great drama of the destiny of
the world was being played out. And the different orders to
the army with the well-known phrases of the certainty of vic-
tory and promise of glory ; and the troops marching out with
clanging music and waving banners ; and the leading articles
and public speeches conceived in the most glowing tone of
loyalty and patriotism ; the eternal appeal to virtue, honour,
duty, courage, self-sacrifice ; the assurances made on both sides
that their nation was known to be the most invincible, most
courageous, most certainly destined to a higher extension of
power, the best and the noblest all this spread around an
atmosphere of heroism, which filled the whole population with
pride and called out in each individual the belief that he was a
great citizen in a great state.

Such bad qualities, however, as these lust of conquest, love
of fighting, hatred, cruelty, guile, were also certainly to be
found, and were admitted to be shown in war, but always by

24 LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS.

"the enemy". To him, his being in the wrong was quite
clear. Quite apart from the political necessity of the campaign
just commenced, apart also from the patriotic advantages which
undoubtedly grew out of it, the conquest over one's adversary
was a moral work, a discipline carried out by the genius of cul-
ture. These Italians ! what a foul, false, sensual, light-minded,
conceited people ! And this Louis Napoleon ! what a mixture of
ambition and the spirit of intrigue 1 When his proclamation of
war, published on April 29, appeared with its motto, "Italy free to
the Adriatic Sea," it called out amongst us a storm of indignation.
I did allow myself a feeble remark that this was at least an un-
selfish and noble idea, which must have an inspiriting influence
on Italian patriots, but I was soon put to silence. The dogma
that " Louis Napoleon is a scoundrel " was not to be shaken
as long as he was " the enemy ". Everything proceeding
from him was ab initio " scoundrelly ".

Another slight doubt arose in me. In all the battle-stories
of history I had found that the sympathy and admiration
of the relaters were always expressed for the party who
wanted to free themselves from a foreign yoke and who fought
for freedom. It is true that I was not capable of giving any
distinct idea of the meaning of the word " yoke," or of that
of "freedom," though so abundantly sung about; but one thing
seemed to me perfectly clear, viz., that "the shaking off of the
yoke" and "the struggle for freedom" lay this time on the
side, not of Austria, but of Italy. But even for these scruples,
timidly conceived as they were, and still more timidly ex-
pressed, I was thundered down. For, here I was so unlucky
as again to trench on a sacred principle namely, that our
government i.e., the government under which one happened
to have been born could never result in a yoke, but only in a
blessing ; that any who wished to tear themselves loose from
"us" could not be warriors of freedom but only simple rebels ;
and that generally and in all circumstances "we" were always
and everywhere wholly in the right.

In the early days of May they were luckily cold and rainy

LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS. 25

days sunny spring weather would have made too painful a
contrast the regiment into which Arno had exchanged
marched. At seven in the morning

Ah, the preceding night ! what a terrible night it was ! If
the dear one had only been going on a journey of business, free
from any danger, the parting would have made me unspeakably
sorrowful parting is indeed so sad ! but to the war ! to meet
the fiery shower of the enemy's bullets ! Why could I no
longer on that night apprehend at all in that word "war"
its elevated historical signification, but only its terror and
threatening of death ?

Arno had fallen asleep. He lay there breathing quietly,
with a cheerful expression on his features. I had lighted a
fresh candle and put it behind a screen ; I could not be in the
dark that night. Of sleep there was no question whatever for
me in that, the last, night. I felt that I must spend the whole
time in gazing at least into the beloved face. I lay on our
bed wrapped in a dressing-gown, and, with my elbow on the
pillow, and my chin resting on the palm of my hand, looked
down on the sleeper and wept silently. "How I love you,
how I love you, my own one and you are going away from
me ! Why is fate so cruel ? How shall I live without you ?
O that you may soon come back to me ! O God ! my good
God ! my merciful Father above ! let him come back soon
him and all. Let there soon be peace ! Why then cannot
there be peace always? We were so happy perhaps too
happy for there cannot be any perfect happiness on earth.
Oh, rapture ! if he comes home unhurt, and then lies at my side
as he is doing now, and no parting threatened for the morrow !
How quietly you are sleeping, O my dear, brave husband!
But how shall you sleep there ? There there is no soft bed
for you hung with silk and lace ; there you must lie on the
hard wet earth perhaps in some ditch helpless wounded ! "
And with this thought I could not help picturing a gaping
sabre-cut on his forehead with the blood trickling from it, or a
bullet-wound in his breast and a hot pang of compassion

26 LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS.

seized me. How I should have liked to throw my arms round
him and kiss him but I dared not wake him, he wanted this
invigorating sleep. Not six o'clock yet ! tick-tack, tick-tack,
unpityingly swift and sure time marches on to every mark.
This indifferent tick-tack distressed me. The light, too,
burned just as indifferently behind its screen as this clock
ticked with its silly, motionless Cupid. . . . Can it be that all
these things have no perception that it is our last night ? My
tearful lids fell together, my consciousness gradually went away,
and letting my head sink on the pillow, I fell asleep at last
myself. But only for a short time. Hardly had I lost my
sense in the fog of some formless dream, when my heart
suddenly contracted painfully, and I awoke with a violent
palpitation, and the same feeling of fear as when one is
awakened by a cry for help or an alarm of fire. " Parting,
parting ! " was the alarm cry. When I had started so out of
sleep for the tenth or twelfth time it was day, and the candle
was flickering out. A knock came at the door.

"Six o'clock, lieutenant," said the orderly, who had been
ordered to wake him in good time.

Arno rose up. So now the hour was come now was to be
spoken this sad, sad word " Farewell ".

It had been settled that I was not to go to the railway with
him. The one quarter of an hour more or less together that
was not worth much. And the pain of tearing ourselves
asunder at last ! That I did not wish to show to strangers. I
wanted to be alone in my room when we exchanged the parting
kiss, that I might be able to throw myself on the floor and
shriek shriek out loud.

Arno put on his clothes quickly. As he was doing so he
made me all kinds of comforting speeches.

" Courage, Martha ! In two months at the most the affair
will be over, and I shall be back again at cuckoo-time ; only
one in a thousand bullets hits, and that one must not hit me.
Others before me have come back from the wars- look at your
papa. It must happen sometime or other. You did not marry

LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS. Vj

an officer of hussars with the notion that his business was to
grow hyacinths. I will write to you as often as possible, and
tell you how pleasantly and livelily the whole campaign is going
on. If anything bad were destined for me I could not feel so
cheerful. I am going only to win an order, nothing else. Take
great care here of yourself and our Ruru ; and if I get promo-
tion he shall have another step too. Kiss him for me ; I will
not repeat the parting of last night. The time will come when
it will be a treat for him to have his father tell him how in the
year '59 he was present at the great victory over Italy."

I listened to him greedily. This confident chatter did me
good. He was going away all pleased and in good spirits, and
so my suffering must be egotistic and therefore wrong; this
thought ought to give me strength to conquer it.

Another knock at the door.

" Time now, lieutenant."

" I am quite ready ; coming directly." He spread out his
arms. " Now then, Martha my wife my love."

I lay at once on his breast. I could not speak a word. The
word " farewell " would not pass my lips. I felt that in saying
that word I should give way, and I did not dare to poison the
peace, the cheerfulness of his departure. I reserved the out-
break of my pain as a kind of reward for my solitude.

But now he spoke the heartbreaking word.

" Good-bye, my all, good-bye," and pressed his lips closely
to mine.

We could not tear ourselves out of this embrace as though
it were our last. Then on a sudden I felt how his lips were
trembling, how convulsively his bosom heaved, and then releas
ing me, he covered his face and sobbed aloud.

That was too much for me. I thought I was going out of
my mind.

"Arno, Arno!" I cried out, throwing my arms round him,
" stay, stay ! " I knew I was asking what was impossible ; still
I cried out persistently : '* Stay, stay ! "

" Lieutenant/' we heard from outside, "it is now quite time."

28 LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS.

One more kiss the last of all and he rushed out

To tear charpie, to read the news in the papers, to stick pins
with flags into our maps in order to follow the movements of the
two armies, and try to solve the chess problems that followed
from them in the sense that " Austria attacks and gives mate at
the fourth move " ; to pray continually in the churches for the
protection of our loved ones and the victory of our country's
arms ; to talk of nothing except the news that came in from the
theatre of war ; such was what rilled up my existence now and
that of my relatives and acquaintance. Life with all its other
interests appeared suspended as it were during the term of the
campaign. Everything except the question " How and when
will this war end ? " was bereft of importance nay, almost of
reality. One ate, drank, read, saw after one's affairs, but all
this had no real concern for us ; one thing only concerned us
thoroughly the telegrams from Italy.

My chief gleams of light were, of course, the news that I
received from Arno himself. They were in a curt style letter-
writing had never been his strong point but they brought
me the most cheering testimony that he was still alive and
unwounded. These letters and despatches could not indeed
arrive with much regularity, for the communications were often
interrupted, or when an action was impending the field-post
was suspended.

If a few days had passed thus, without my hearing from Arno,
and a list of killed and wounded was published, with what
terror did I not read over the names ! It is as great a strain as
for the holder of a lottery ticket to look through the winning
numbers in the list of a drawing but in the opposite sense ;
what one seeks in this case, well knowing, thank God, that the
chance is against one, is the chief prize in misery.

The first time that I read the names of the slain and I had
been four days without news and saw that the name of Arno
Dotzky was not among them, I folded my hands and cried
aloud : " My God, I thank Thee 1 " But the words were hardly

LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS. 2Q

out of my mouth when it seemed to me like a shrill discord.
I took the paper in my hand again and looked at the list of names
once more. So I thank God because Adolf Schmidt and Carl
Miiller and many others were slain, but not Arno Dotzky.
Then the same thanksgiving would have been appropriate if it
had risen to heaven from the hearts of those who trembled for
Schmidt and Miiller, if they had read " Dotzky " instead of
those names. And why should my thanks in particular be
more pleasing to Heaven than theirs? Yes, this was the shrill
discord of my ejaculation, the presumption and the self-seeking
which lay in it, in believing that Arno had been spared in love
for me, and thanking God that not I but Schmidt's mother
ind Muller's affianced and fifty others had to burst out in tears
over that list.

On the same day I received from Arno another letter :
"Yesterday we had another stout fight. Unfortunately
unfortunately a defeat. But comfort yourself, my beloved
Martha, the next battle will bring us victory. It was my first
great affair. I was standing in the midst of a heavy storm
of bullets a peculiar feeling. I will tell you by word of
mouth but it is frightful. The poor fellows whom one sees
falling around one, and must leave there in spite of their sad
cries test la guerre I Hope to see you soon again, my dear.
If we can once dictate terms of peace at Turin, you shall
travel after to meet me. Aunt Mary will be kind enough to
take care of our little corporal."

But if the receipt of letters like these constituted the sunshine
of my life, its darkest shadows were my nights. If I woke out
of some dream of blessed forgetfulness, and the horrible reality
with its horrible possibilities came before my consciousness, I
was seized with an almost intolerable pain, and could not sleep
again for hours. I could not get rid of the idea that Arno
was perhaps at that moment lying in a ditch groaning and
dying thirsting after a drop of water, and calling longingly
for me. The only way that I could gradually compose myself
was by bringing, with all my force, the scene of his return

3O LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS.

before my imagination. This was, at any rate, as probable-
nay, perhaps more probable than his lonely death ; and so 1
pictured him to myself as bursting into the room, and how I
should fling myself on his bosom, and how I should then lead
him to Ruru's cradle, and how happy and how joyful we might
then once more be.

My father was much cast down. One bad news came upon
another. First Montebello, then Magenta. And not he
alone, but all Vienna was cast down. We had at the begin-
ning so confidently hoped that uninterrupted messages of
victory would give occasion for mounting flags on our houses
and singing Te Deums, but instead of this the flags were
waving and the priests singing at Turin. There the word now
was : " Lord God, we praise Thee that Thou hast helped us
to strike down the wicked 'Tedeschi ' ".

" Do not you think, papa," I began, " that if another defeat
was to happen to us, peace would then be made ? In that
case I should wish that "

" Are you not ashamed to say anything of the kind ? I
had rather it should be a seven years' aye, a thirty years'
war, so that our arms should conquer at last, and we dictate
the terms of peace ! What do men go to war for ? I suppose
not to get out of it again as quickly as possible ; if so, they
might as well remain at home ! "

"And that would be by far the best," sighed I.

" What a cowardly lot you women folk are ! Even you
you, who have been so well grounded in the principles of love
of country and feelings of honour, are yet quite out of heart
already, and prize your personal quiet more than the welfare
and fame of your country."

" Ah ! if I did not love my Arno so dearly."

"Love of your husband, love of your family all that is very
good ; but it ought only to occupy the second place."

" Ought it ? "

The list of killed had already brought the names of several

LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS. 3 1

officers whom I had known personally. Among others, that
of the son her only one of an old lady for whom I had
conceived a great feeling of respect.

That day I determined to visit the poor lady. It was,
for me, a painful, heavy journey. I could certainly give hei
no consolation could only weep with her. But it was the
duty of affection, and so I set out.

When I got to Frau v. Ullmann's dwelling, I long hesitated
before pulling the bell. The last time I had been there was
to a cheerful little dance. The dear old mistress of the house
was herself then full of joy. "Martha," she said to me in the
course of the evening, " we are the two most enviable women in
Vienna. You have the handsomest of husbands, and I the
most excellent of sons." And to-day ? I still, indeed, had
my husband. But who knows? The shells and grape-shot
were flying there still without ceasing. The minute just past
might have made me a widow : and I began to weep before
the door. That was the proper temper for so mournful a visit.
I rang. No one came. I rang a second time. Again no
answer. Then some one put his head out of the door of
one of the other floors.

" It is no good ringing, miss. The dwelling is empty."

" What ! Has Frau v. Ullmann gone ? "

" She was taken to a lunatic asylum three days since." And
the head disappeared again as the door shut.

I remained for a minute or two motionless, rooted to the
spot, and the scenes which must have been going on here
passed before my eyes. To what a height must the poor
lady's sufferings have risen before her agony broke out in
madness !

" And there is my father wishing that the war might last
thirty years for the welfare of the country ! How many more
such mothers in the country would have been driven to
desperation ! "

I went down the stairs shaken to my inmost depth. I
determined that I would pay another visit to a young lady, a

3* LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS.

friend of mine, whose husband, like mine, was at the theatre of
war.

My way led me through the Herrengasse, past the building
called the Landhaus, where the "Patriotic Aid Association"
had established its offices. At that time there was not as yet
any " Convention of Geneva," any " Red Cross," and this aid
association had been formed as a forerunner of these humane
institutions, its task being to receive alms of all kinds, in
money, linen, charpie, bandages, etc., for the poor wounded,
and forward them to the seat of war, The gifts came flowing
in abundantly from all sides ; it was necessary to have whole
shops to receive them, and scarcely were the different articles
packed up and sent off when new ones were piled up again in
their place.

I went in. I was in distress till I could hand over to the
committee all that I had in my purse. Perhaps that might
bring health and deliverance to some suffering soldier, and save
his mother from madness.

I knew the president. " Is Prince C here ? " 1 asked

the porter.

" Not just now. But the vice-president, Baron S , is

upstairs." He showed me the way to the room where the alms
in money were paid. I had to pass through several halls,
where on long tables were the packets lying in rows. Parcels
of linen, cigars, tobacco, and especially mountains of charpie.
It made me shudder. How many wounds must be bleeding
there, to be covered with all this torn linen ? " And there was
my father," I thought again, " wishing that for the country's
good the war might last another thirty years ! How many of
the country's sons must in that case sink under their wounds ! ):

Baron S received my contribution with thanks, and gave

me the most ready information about the working of the associa-
tion in reply to my numerous questions. It was joyful and
comforting to hear how much good was thus done. Just at
the time came the postman with some letters that had newly
arrived, and announced that two barrows of offerings had to be

LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS. 33

delivered from the country. I placed myself on a sofa which
was in the lower part of the room to watch the reception of the
packets. They were, however, delivered in another room. A
very old gentleman now came in, who by his bearing was
evidently an old soldier.

11 Permit me, baron," he said, as he drew out his purse and
sat down on a stool by the table, " permit me to add my little
mite too to your noble work." And he gave him a note for a
hundred florins. " I look on all this organisation of yours as
eally angelic ; you see I am an old soldier myself," and he

gave his name as General , " and I can judge what an

enormous blessing it is to the poor fellows who are fighting
out there. I served in the campaigns of the years '9 and '13
at that time there was no ' Patriotic Aid Association ' at that
time no one sent chests of bandages and charpie after the
wounded. How many must then have bled to death in
misery when the resources of the army surgeons were ex-
hausted, who might have been saved by sending such things
as I see here ! Ah 1 yours is a blessed work. You good
noble men, you do not know no, you do not know how
much good you are doing there." And two great tears fell
on the old man's white moustache.

A noise of steps and voices arose outside. Both leaves
of the entrance door were thrown open and a guardsman
announced " Her Majesty the Empress ".

The vice-president hurried out to the gate to receive his
exalted visitor, as beseemed, at the foot of the stairs, but she
had already got into the ante-room.

I, from my concealed position, looked with admiration on
the young sovereign who in common walking dress appeared
to me almost lovelier than in her state robes at the court
ball.

" I am come," she said to Baron S , " because I received a

letter to-day from the emperor from the seat of war, in which
he writes to tell me how useful and acceptable the gifts of the
Patriotic Aid Association have proved, and so I wished to look

3

34 LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS.

into the matter myself, and put the committee in receipt of the
emperor's acknowledgment"

On this she made them give her information about all the
details of the working of the association, and examined as she
went along the various objects from their stores. " Just look,
countess," she said to the mistress of the robes, who was with
her, taking an article of underclothing in her hand, "how good
this linen is, and how beautifully sewn." Then she begged
the vice-president to conduct her into another of the rooms,
and left the hall by his side. She spoke to him with visible
contentment, and I heard her say besides : " It is a fine
patriotic undertaking, and to the poor soldiers

I could not catch any more. " Poor soldiers," the word kept
coming back to me for a long time, she had pronounced it with
so much pity. Yes, " poor " indeed, and the more one could
do to send them help and comfort the better. But it ran
through my head: "If they had not sent these poor people
into this misery at all, would not that have been much better?"

I tried to scare away the thought. It must be so ! It must
be so ! There is no other excuse for the cruelty of making war
except what is contained in the little word " must ".

Now I went on my way again. The friend whom I was
going to visit lived quite close to the Landhaus on the Kohl-
markt. As I walked along I went into a book and print shop to
buy myself a new map of Upper Italy ours had become quite
riddled with sticking in the little flags on pins. Besides me
there were many other customers in the place. All were asking
for maps, diagrams, and so forth. Now came my turn.

II Do you want the theatre of war, too, please ? " asked the
bookseller.

" You have guessed it"

"No difficulty in that There is hardly anything else
bought"

He went to get what I wanted, and while he wrapped up the
roll in paper for me, he said to a gentleman standing next to
me : " You see, professor, just now things go badly for those

LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS. 35

who write or publish books on belles lettres or science. No one
asks for such things. As long as the war lasts no interest is
taken by any one in intellectual matters. It is a bad time for
writers and booksellers."

"And a bad time for the nation," replied the professor,
"since a loss of interest in such things is naturally followed by
its decline in the intellectual scale."

" And there is my father wishing," thought I for the third
time, " that for the good of the country a thirty years' war "

I now took part audibly in the conversation.

" So your business is doing badly ? "

"Mine only? No, almost all, your ladyship," answered the
bookseller. " Except the providers for the army there are no
tradesmen to whom the war has not brought untold loss.
Everything is at a standstill ; work in the factories ; work in the
fields; men without number are without places and without
bread. Our paper is falling ; the exchange rising ; all desire
for enterprise is decaying ; many firms must go bankrupt in
short, it is a misery ! a misery 1 "

"And there is my father wishing " I repeated in silence

as I left the shop.

<

My friend was at home.

Countess Lori Griesbach was in more than one respect the
sharer of my lot. A general's daughter, like me married for
only a short time to an officer, like me and, like me, a "grass
widow". In one thing she went beyond me: she had not
only a husband, but two brothers also at the war. But Lori
was not of an apprehensive nature; she was fully persuaded that
her dear ones were under the peculiar protection of a saint
whom she highly venerated, and she counted confidently on
their return.

She received me with open arms.

" Ah ! God bless you, Martha ; it is indeed good of you to
come and see me. But how pale and worn you are looking;
you have not had any bad news from the seat of war ? "

36 LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS.

" No, thank God ! But the whole thing is so sad."

" Ah, yes ! You mean the defeat. But you must not think
too much of that, the next news may announce a victory."

"Whether we conquer or are conquered, war is in itself
dreadful altogether. Would it not be better if there could be
nothing of the kind ? "

" Then what would be the good of soldiers ? "

"What, indeed!" I assented; "then there would be
none "

"What nonsense you are talking. That would be a nice
state of things ; nothing but civilians ! It makes me shudder.
Happily that is impossible."

" Impossible ? Yes, you must be right I will believe so,
or else I could not conceive that it would not long since have
happened."

"What happened?"

" The abolition of war. But, no ; I might as well talk of
the abolition of earthquakes."

" I don't know what you mean. As far as I am concerned
I am glad this war has broken out, because I hope that my
Louis will distinguish himself. And for my brothers, too, it is
a good thing. Promotion has been going on so slowly ; now
they have at least a chance."

" Have you had any news lately?" I interrupted. "Are your
relatives all well ? "

" No, not for a pretty long time now. But, you know, the
postal service is often interrupted, and when people are tired
out with a hot march or a battle, they have not much taste for
writing. I am quite easy. Both Louis and my brothers wear
blessed amulets. Mamma hung them on herself."

"What would you expect to happen, Lori, in a war in which
every man in both armies wore an amulet ? If the bullets were
flying on both sides, would they retire back into the clouds
and do no harm ? "

" I do not understand you. You are so lukewarm in faith
Your Aunt Mary often laments about it to me."

LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS. 37

" Why do you not answer my question ? n

" Because it involves a sneer at a thing which to me is sacred."

" Sneer ; oh, no ! only a reasonable reflection."

" But you must know that it is a sin to entrust your own j
reason with the power of judging in things which are above us."

" Well, I have done, Lori. You may be right. Reflection
and research are of no use. For sometime all kinds of doubts
have risen within me about my most ancient convictions, and
I find only pain from them. If I were to lose the conviction
that it was a necessity and a good thing to begin this war, I
should never be able to forgive him who "

" You mean Louis Napoleon. What an intriguer he is ! *

"Whether he or another, I should like to remain in the
undisturbed belief that there are no men at all who have
caused the war, but that it ' broke out ' of itself broke out,
like a nervous fever, like the eruption of Vesuvius."

"How excited you get, my love. But let us speak
reasonably ; so listen to me. In a short time the war will be
over and our husbands will come back captains. I will then
try to get mine to obtain four or six weeks' leave, and take a trip
with me to a watering-place. It will do him good after all the
fatigues he will have undergone ; and me also, after the heat,
and the ennui, and the anxiety I have undergone. For you
must not think that I have no fear at all. It may be God's
will after all that one of my dear ones should meet with a
soldier's death and even though it is a noble, enviable death,
on the field of honour, for emperor and fatherland "

11 Why, you are speaking just like one of the proclamations
to the army ! "

"Yet it would be frightful poor mamma ! if anything was to
ftappen to Gustave or Karl. Don't let us talk about it ! And
so, to refresh us after all our terror, it would be good to have
a gay season at a watering-place. I should prefer Carlsbad,
and I went there when I was a girl, and amused myself
amazingly."

"I too went to Marienbad. It was there I made Arno's

38 LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS.

acquaintance. But why are we sitting here idle like this?
Have you no linen at hand that we could tear into charpie ?
I was at the Patriotic Aid Association to-day, and there came
in, who do you think ? *

Here I was interrupted. A footman brought in a letter.

" From Gustave," cried Lori joyfully, as she broke the seal.

When she had read two lines she gave a shriek, the paper
fell out of her hand and she threw herself on my neck.

"Lori, my poor dear, what is it?" I cried, deeply moved;
" your husband ? "

" O God, O God ! " she groaned. " Read for yourself."

I took the letter from the floor and began to read. I can
reproduce the phraseology exactly, because afterwards I begged
the letter from Lori to copy it into my diary.

"Read out loud," she said; "I was not able to read it
through."

I did as she wished.

" Dear Sister, Yesterday we had a hot combat ; there must
be a long list of casualties. In order that you, and in order
that our poor mother may not hear in that way of the mis-
fortune, that you may be able to prepare her for it gradually
(tell her he is severely wounded), I write at once, my dear,
to tell you that our brave brother Karl is of the number of the
warriors who have died for their country."

I interrupted my reading to embrace my friend.

" I had got so far," she said gently.

With tearful voice I read on.

" Your husband 's untouched, and so am I. Would that
the enemy's bullet had hit me instead ! I envy Karl his
hero's death. He fell at the beginning of the battle, and did
not know that this one again was lost. It is really too bitter.
I saw him fall, for we were riding near each other. I jumped
down at once to pick him up. Only one look and he was
dead. The bullet must have passed through his lungs or
heart. It was a quick painless death. How many others
had to suffer for hours, and to lie helpless on the field in

LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS. 39

the heat of the battle, till death released them ! It was a
murderous day more than a thousand corpses, friend and
enemy, covered the battlefield. I recognised among the
dead the faces of so many dear friends ; and, amongst others,
there is poor" here I had to turn the page "poor Arno
Dotzky."
I fell unconscious uu ac ouca.

TIT

First years of widowhood. Solitude, study, enlarged views.
I return into society. Renewed enjoyment of life. Thoughts
of second marriage. / chaperon my younger sisters. / am
introduced to Baron Tilling. He brings me an account of
the manner of Arntfs death.

" Now, Martha, it is all over. Solferino was decisive we are
beaten."

My father came hastily one morning on to the terrace, with
these words, where I was sitting under the shadow of a clump
of lime trees.

I had gone back home, to the house of my girlhood, with
my little Ruru. A week after the great battle, which had
struck me down, my family moved to Grumitz, our country
house in Lower Austria, and I with them. I should have
been in despair alone. Now all were again around me, just
as before my marriage papa, Aunt Mary, my little brother,
and my two growing sisters. All of them did what they possibly
could to mitigate my grief, and treated me with a certain con-
sideration which did me good. Evidently they found in my sad
fate a sort of consecration, a something which raised me above
those around me, even a kind of merit. Next to the blood
which soldiers pour out on the altar of their country, the tears
which the bereaved mothers, wives, and sweethearts of the
soldiers pour on the same altar become a libation hardly less
sacred. And thus it was a slight feeling of pride, a conscious-
ness that to have lost a beloved husband on the field of
honour conferred a kind of military merit, which helped me

(40)

LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS. 4!

most to bear my pain ; and I was far from being the only one.
How many, ah ! how many women in the whole of the country
were then mourning over their loved ones sleeping in Italian
earth 1

At that time no further particulars were known to me of
Arno's end. He had been found dead, recognised, and
buried. That was all I knew. His last thought doubtless
had flown towards me and our little darling, and his consola-
tion in the last moment must have been : " I have done my
duty, and more than my duty ".

" We are beaten," repeated my father gloomily, as he sat
down by me on the garden seat.

" So those who have been sacrificed were sacrificed in vain."
T sighed.

" Those who have been sacrificed are to be envied, for they
know nothing of the shame which has befallen us. But we
will soon pick up again for all that, even if at present peace,
as they say, must be concluded."

" Ah, God grant it," I interrupted. " Too late, indeed, for
my poor Arno, but still thousands of others will be spared."

"You are always thinking of yourself and of individuals.
But in this matter it is Austria which is in question."

" Well, but does not she consist entirely of individuals ? "

" My dear, a kingdom, a state, lives a longer and more
important life than individuals do. They disappear, generation
after generation, while the state expands still farther, grows
into glory, greatness and power, or sinks and crumples up and
disappears, if it allows itself to be overcome by other kingdoms.
Therefore the most important and the highest aim for which
any individual has to struggle, and for which he ought to be
glad to die, is the existence, the greatness and the well-being of
the kingdom."

I impressed these words on my mind in order to put them
down the same day in the red volume. They seemed to me
to express so clearly and strongly the feeling which I had
derived in my student days from the books of history, a feeling

4* LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS.

which in these last times, after Arno's departure, had been
driven out of my mind by fear and pity. I wanted to cleave to
it again as close as possible, in order to find consolation and
support in the idea that my darling had fallen in a great cause,
and that my misfortune itself was only one element in this
great cause.

Aunt Mary had, on the other hand, a different source of
consolation ready.

" Do not weep, dear child," she used to say, when I was sunk
in profound grief. " Do not be so selfish as to bewail him who
is now so happy. He is among the blessed, and is looking
down on you with blessing. After a few quickly passing years
on earth you will find him again in the fulness of his glory.
For those who have fallen on the field of battle Heaven reserves
its fairest dwellings. Happy those who were called away just
at the moment when they were fulfilling a holy duty. The
dying soldier stands next in merit to the dying martyr."

" Then I am to be glad that Arno -

" No, not to be glad, that would be asking too much, but to
bear your lot with humble resignation. It is a probation that
Heaven sends you, and from which you should emerge purified
and strengthened in faith."

" So, in order that I might be tried and purified, Arno had
to "

" No, not on that account. But who dare seek to sound the
hidden ways of Providence? Not I at least."

Although such objections always would rise in me against
Aunt Mary's consolations, yet in the depths of my heart I readily
fell in with the mystical assumption that my glorified one was
now enjoying in Heaven the reward of his death of sacrifice,
and that his memory on earth was adorned with the eternal
glory of sainthood.

How exalting, though painful at the same time, was the
effect on me of the great mourning celebration at which I was
present in the cathedral of St. Stephen's on tke day of our
departure ! It was the De Piofundis for our warriors who had

ULY DOWN YOUR ARMS. 43

fallen on foreign soil and were buried there. In the centre of
the church a high catafalque had been erected, surrounded by
a hundred lighted candles and decorated with military emblems,
flags and arms. From the choir came down the moving strains
of the requiem, and those present, chiefly women in mourning,
were almost all weeping aloud. And each one was weeping
not only for him whom she had lost, but for the rest who had
met with the same death, for all of them together, all the poor
brave brothers-in-arms, who had given their young lives for us all
that is, for the country, the honour of the nation. And the
living soldiers who attended this ceremony all the generals
and officers who had remained behind in Vienna were there,
and several companies of soldiers filled the background all
were waiting and ready to follow their fallen comrades without
delay, without murmur, without fear. Yes, with the clouds of
incense, with the pealing bells, and the voice of the organ, with
the tears poured out in a common woe, there must surely
have risen a well-pleasing sacrifice to Heaven, nnd the Lord of
armies must shower His blessing down on those to whom
this catafalque was erected.

So I thought at that time. At least these were the words
with which the red book describes this mourning ceremony.

About fourteen days later than the news of the defeat of
Solferino came the news of the signing of the preliminaries of
peace at Villafranca. My father took all the pains possible to
explain to me that for political reasons it was a matter of press
ing necessity to conclude this peace, on which I assured him
that it seemed to me joyful news anyhow that this fighting and
dying should come to an end. But my good papa would not
be hindered from setting forth at length all his exculpatory
statements.

" You must not think that we are afraid. Even if it has
a look as if we had made concessions, et we forego nothing of
our dignity, and know perfectly what we are about. If it con-
cerned ourselves only we should never have given up the game
on account of this little check at Solferino. Oh, no ! far from

44 LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS.

it. We should only have had to send down another corps
(Tarmee, and the enemy would have been obliged to evacuate
Milan again in quick time. But you know, Martha, that other
things are concerned general interests and principles. We
renounced the further prosecution of the war for this reason :
in order to secure the other principalities in Italy which are
menaced those that the captain of the Sardinian robbers, with
his French hangman-ally, would be glad to fall upon also.
They want to advance against Modena, Tuscany where, as you
know, dynasties are in power related to our own imperial family
nay, even against Rome, against the Pope, the Vandals. If
we do provisionally give up Lombardy, yet we keep Venetia all
the time, and are able, to assure the south Italian states and the
Holy See of our support. So you perceive that it is merely for
political reasons, and in the interest of the balance of power in
Europe "

"Oh, yes, father," I broke in; "I perceive it. But oh
that these reasons had prevailed before Magenta!" I continued,
sighing bitterly. Then, to change the subject, I pointed to
a parcel of books that had come in that day from Vienna.

" See here ! the bookseller has sent us several things on ap-
proval. Amongst them there is the work of an English natural
philosopher one Darwin The Origin of Species, and he calls
our attention to it as being of special interest, and likely to be
of epoch-making importance."

" My worthy friend must excuse me. Who, in such a
momentous time as this, could take an interest in these tom-
fooleries ? What can a book about the kinds of beasts and
plants contain of epoch-making importance for us men ? The
confederation of the Italian states, the hegemony of Austria in
the German Bund these are matters of far-stretching influence;
these will long keep their place in history, when no living man
shall any longer know anything about that English book there
Mark my words."

I did mark them.

LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS. 45

Four years later, my two sisters, now seventeen and
eighteen years old, were to be presented at court. On this
occasion I determined that I would also again "go into
society ".

The time which had elapsed had done its work, and
gradually mitigated my pain. Despair changed into mourning,
mourning into sorrow, sorrow into indifference, and even this
at last into renewed pleasure in life. I woke one fine morning
to the conviction that I really was in an enviable condition,
and one that promised happiness. Twenty-three years old,
beautiful, rich, high-born, free, the mother of a darling child, a
member of an affectionate family was not .all this enough to
make my life pleasant ?

The short year of my married life lay behind me like a
dream. No doubt 1 had been desperately in love with my
handsome hussar no doubt my loving husband had made me
very happy no doubt the parting had caused me grievous pain
and his loss wild agony ! but that was all over over ! My love
had assuredly never grown so closely into the whole existence
of my soul that I could never have survived its uprooting,
never have lost the pain of it ; our life together had been too
short for that We had adored each other like a pair of ardent
lovers; but to have entered into each other, heart to heart,
soul to soul, to be fast bound to each other in mutual rever-
ence and friendship, to have shared for long years our joys
and our sorrows this, which is the lot of some married people,
had not been given to us two. Even I was assuredly not his
highest object, not something indispensable, otherwise he could
not so cheerfully and with no compulsion of duty (for his own
regiment was never ordered out) have left me. Besides, in
these four years I had gradually become another creature, my
spiritual horizon had enlarged in many respects, I had come
into possession of acquirements and views of which I had no
notion when I married, and of which Arno also as I could now
perceive had no idea either, and so if he could have risen
again he would have stood in the position of a stranger

46 LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS.

towards many parts of my present spiritual life. How had this
change come about with me? This is how it happened.

One year of my widowhood had passed. The first phase-
despair had given place to mourning. But it was very deep
mourning, and my heart was bleeding. Of any renewal of the
intercourse of society I would not hear. I thought that from
this time my life must be occupied only with the education of
my son Rudolf. I called the child no longer Ruru, or
corporal. -The baby-jokes of the pair of married lovers were
over. The little one turned into " my son Rudolf " the sacred
centre of all my effort, hope, and love. In order to be one day
a good teacher for him, or rather in order to follow his studies,
and be able to become his intellectual companion, I wanted to
acquire myself all the knowledge that I could, and with this view
reading was the only amusement I allowed myself; and so I
plunged anew into the treasures of the library of our chateau.
I was especially impelled to take up again the study which was
my peculiar favourite history. Latterly, when the war had
demanded such heavy sacrifices from my contemporaries and
myself, my former enthusiasm had become much cooled, and I
now wished to light it up again by appropriate reading. And,
in fact, it brought me sometimes a kind of consolation, if I had
been reading a few pages of accounts of battles with the praises
of the heroes which are the natural continuation of those
accounts, to think that the death of my poor husband and my
own widowed grief were comprised as items in a similar grand
historical process. I say "sometimes" not always. I could
not get myself back entirely and absolutely into the feelings
of my girlhood, when I wanted to rival the Maid of Orleans.
Much, very much, in the over-wrought tirades of glory, which
accompanied the accounts of the battles, sounded to me false
and hollow, if at the same time I set before me the terrors of
the fight as false and hollow as a sham coin paid as the price
for a genuine pearl. The pearl, life can it be fairly paid for
with the tinsel phrases of historical glory ?

I had soon exhausted the provision of historical works to be

LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS. 47

found in our library. I begged our bookseller to send me some
new historical work to look at. He sent Thomas Buckle's
History of Civilisation in England. " The work is not
finished," wrote the bookseller, "but the accompanying two
volumes, which form the introduction, compose by themselves
a complete whole, and their appearance has excited, not only
in England, but in the rest of the educated world, the greatest
attention. The author, it is said, has in this work laid the
foundation for a new conception of history."

Yes, indeed, quite a new one. When I had read these two
volumes, and then read them again, I felt like a man who had
dwelt all his life in the bottom of a narrow valley, and then, for
the first time, had been taken up to one of the mountain tops
around, from which a long stretch of country was to be seen,
covered with buildings and gardens and ending in the boundless
ocean. I will not assert that I only twenty years old and who
had received only the well-known superficial "young lady's"
education understood the book in all the extent of its bearings,
or, to keep to the former metaphor, that I appreciated the
loftiness of the monumental buildings and the immensity of
the ocean which lay before my astonished gaze ; but I was
dazzled, overcome ; I saw that beyond the narrow valley in
which I was born there lay a wide, wide world, of which, up to
this time, I had never heard. It is not till now that, after
fifteen or twenty years I have read the book again and have
studied other works conceived in the same spirit, I may,
perhaps, take it on myself to say that I understand it. One N
thing, however, was clear to me even then : that the history of
mankind was not decided by, as the old theory taught, kings
and statesmen, nor by the wars and treaties that were created
by the greed of the former or the cunning of the latter, but by
the gradual development of the intellect. The chronicles of
courts and battles which are strung together in the history
books represent isolated phenomena of the condition of culture
at those epochs, not the causes which produce those conditions.
Of the old-fashioned admiration with which other historical

48 LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS.

writers are accustomed to relate the lives of mighty conquerors
and devastators of countries I could find absolutely nothing in
Buckle. On the contrary, he brings proof that the estimation
in which the warrior class is held is in inverse ratio to the height
of culture which the nation has reached ; the lower you go in
the barbaric past, the more frequent are the wars of the time,
the narrower the limits of peace, province against province,
city against city, family against family. He lays stress on the
fact that, as society progresses, not only war itself, but the love \
of war will be found to diminish. That word spoke to my
innermost heart. Even in my short spiritual experience this
diminution had been going on, and though I had often repressed
this movement as something cowardly or unworthy, believing
that I alone was the cause of such a fault within me, now, on
the contrary, I perceived that this feeling in me was only the
faint echo of the spirit of the age, that learned men and thinkers,
like this English historian, and innumerable men along with
him, had lost the olti idolatry for war, which, just as it had been
a phase of my childhood, was represented in this book as being
also a phase of the childhood of society.

And so in Buckle's History of Civilisation I had found just
the opposite of what I sought. And yet I counted what I found
as all pure gain. I felt myself elevated by it, enlightened,
pacified. Once I tried to talk with my father about this
point of view that I had just attained, but in vain. He woulc
not follow me up the mountain, i.e., he would not read the
book, and so it was to no purpose to talk with him of things
which one could only see from the top of it.

Now followed the year my second phase in which mourn-
ing turned into melancholy. I now read and studied with
even greater assiduity. This first work of Buckle had given
me an appetite for reflection, and given me an inkling of an
enlarged view of the world. I wanted now to enjoy this yet
more and more ; and therefore I followed this book up with
a great many more conceived in the same spirit. And the
interest, the enjoyment, which I found in these studies helped

LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS. 49

me to pass into the third phase, f.e. t to cause the disappearance oi
my melancholy. But when the last change was wrought in me,
/'.?., when my joy in life awoke again, then all at once books
contented me no longer, then I saw all at once that ethno-
graphy and anthropology, comparative mythology, and all the
other 'ologies and 'graphics were insufficient to set my longings
at rest, that for a young woman in my position, life had other
flowers of bliss all ready, and for which I had only to stretch
my hand out. And so it came about that in the winter of 1863
I offered myself to introduce my younger sisters into the world
and opened my saloons to Vienna society.

"Martha, Countess Dotzky, a rich young widow." It was
under this promising title that I had to play my part in the
comedy of the " great world ". And I must say that the cha
racter suited me. It is no slight pleasure to get greetings from
all sides, to be feted, spoiled, on all hands, and overwhelmed
with distinctions. It is no slight enjoyment, after nearly four
years' separation from the world, to come all at once into a
whirlpool of all sorts of pleasures, to make the acquaintance
of interesting and influential persons, to be present at some
splendid entertainment almost every day, and when there to
feel yourself the centre of universal attention.

We three sisters had got the nickname of the "three goddesses
of Mount Ida"; and the "Apples of Discord," which the several
young Parises distributed amongst us, were innumerable. I, of
course, in the dignity of my description in the list of dramatis
persona as " rich young widow," was the one generally pre-
ferred. Besides it was taken as a settled thing in our family,
and even ever so little in my own inward consciousness, that I
was to marry again. Aunt Mary was no longer in the habit in
her homilies of dwelling on the blessed one who " was waiting
for me above," for if I, in my few short years on earth that
separated me from the grave, united myself to a second hus-
band, an event desired by Aunt Mary herself, the pleasantness

4

5O LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS.

of the meeting again in Heaven would be a good deal spoiled
thereby.

Every one around me seemed to have forgotten Amo's exist-
ence. I was the only one who did not. Though time had relieved
my pain about him, his image had not been extinguished. One
may cease to mourn for one's dead; mourning does not
depend quite on the will, but one ought not to forget them.
I looked on this dead silence about the dead, which was pre-
served by my entourage, as a second and additional slaughter,
and shrank from killing the poor fellow in my thoughts. I had
made it my duty to speak every day to little Rudolf of his
father, and the child had always to say in his prayers at night :
" God make me good and brave as my dear father Arno
would have me ! "

My sisters and I "amused" ourselves extremely, and
certainly I not less than they. It was, so to speak, my debut
also in society. The first time I was introduced as an engaged
girl, and a newly-married woman ; and so all admirers had of
course held aloof from me ; and what is a higher enjoyment
in society than the admirers? But, strange to say, however
much I was pleased to be surrounded by a crowd of wor-
shippers, none of them made any deep impression on me.
There was a bar between them and me which was quite
impassable. And this bar was what I had been erecting during
my three years of lonely study and thought. All these bril-
liant young gentlemen, whose interests in life culminated in
sport, the ballet, the chatter of the court, or (with those who
soared highest) in professional ambition (for most were soldiers),
had not the faintest idea of the things which I had looked at
from afar in my books, and on which my soul's life depended.
That language, of which I grant I had only as yet learned the
elements but as to which I was assured that it was in it that
men of science would debate and ultimately decide the highest
questions that language was to them not Greek merely, but
Patagonian.

From this category of young folks I was not going to select

LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS. 51

a husband ; that was quite settled. Besides, I was in no hurry
to give up once more my freedom, which was very pleasant to
me. I managed to keep my would-be suitors sufficiently at a
distance to prevent any from making an offer, and at the same
time to prevent anybody in society from putting about con-
cerning me the compromising rumour that I was laying myself
out for lovers. My son Rudolf should hereafter be able to
feel proud of his mother, no breath of suspicion should sully
the pure mirror of her reputation. But if the case should
occur that my heart should glow once more with love and
that could only be for one worthy of it then I was fully
disposed to realise the claim which my youth still had to
happiness in this world, and enter into a second marriage.

Meanwhile, apart from love or happiness, I thoroughly
enjoyed myself. The dance, the theatre, dress I found the
liveliest pleasure in all of them. But I did not for them
neglect either my little Rudolf or my own education. It was
not that I plunged into special studies, but I always kept au
courant with the movement of the intellectual world, by pro-
curing all the most prominent new productions in the literature
of the age, and regularly reading attentively all the articles,
even the most scientific, in the Revue des deux Mondes and
similar magazines. These occupations had indeed the result
that the bar I have just spoken of, which cut off my inward life
from the surrounding world of young men of fashion, became
constantly higher but it was right that it should be so. I
would gladly have drawn into my saloons a few persons from
the world of literature and scholarship, but that could hardly
be done in the society in which I moved. Bourgeois elements
could not be mixed with what was called "the circles" of
Vienna. Especially at that period since then this exclusive
spirit has somewhat changed, and it has become the fashion
to open one's saloons to individual representatives of art and
science. At the time of which I speak this was not the case
yet ; any one not " Hof-fahig," i.e., who could not count sixteen
ancestors, was excluded thence. Our ordinary society would

53 LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS.

have been most unpleasantly surprised to have met at my house
people not ennobled, and could not have hit on the right tone
to converse with them. And these persons themselves would
certainly have found my drawing-room, full of countesses and
sportsmen, old generals and old canonesses, intolerably dull.
What part could men of intellect and science, writers and artists,
take in the eternally same conversation who had given a dance
yesterday and who would give one to-morrow whether Schwar-
zenberg, or Pallavicini, or the Court what love affairs Baroness
Pacher was causing which party Countess Palffy was opposing
how many estates Prince Croy possessed what right the young
Lady Almasy possessed to the title of a lady of rank, whether
as a Festetics or a Wentheim, and if a Wentheim whether by
that Wentheim whose mother became a KhevenhtSller, etc. ?
That was indeed the matter of most of the conversations that
went on around me. Even the intellectual and educated
people, some of whom were really to be found in our circle,
statesmen and so forth, thought themselves bound when they
associated with us, the young folks who danced, to adopt the
same frivolous and meaningless tone. How gladly would I
often have gone to some dinner in a quiet corner at which one
or two of our travelled diplomatists or eloquent parliamen-
tarians, or other men of mark might express their opinions on
weighty questions ! but that was not feasible. I had to keep
along with the other young ladies, and talk of the toilettes
that we were getting ready for the next great ball. And even
if I had squeezed into such a company the conversations that
might have been just begun about the economy of nations,
about Byron's poetry, about the theories of Strauss and Renan,
would have been hushed, and the talk would have been: "Ah,
Countess Dotzky, how charming you looked yesterday at the
ladies' pic-nic ; and are you going to-morrow to the reception
at the Russian embassy?"

"Allow me, dear Martha," said my cousin Conrad Althaus,
" to introduce to you Lieutenant-Colonel Baron Tilling."

I bowed. The introducer went away, and the one intro-

LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS. 53

duced did not speak. I took this for an invitation to dance,
and rose from my seat with my left arm raised and bent, ready
to lay it on Baron Tilling's shoulder.

" Forgive me, countess," he said, with a slight smile, which
showed his dazzlingly white teeth, " I do not dance."

" Indeed ! so much the better," I answered, sitting down
again. " I had just retreated here to get a little repose."

" And I had requested the honour of being introduced to
you, countess, as I had a communication to make to you."

I looked up in amazement. The baron put on a very
serious face. He was altogether a man who looked very
serious, no longer young, somewhere about forty, with a few
streaks of grey on the temples on the whole, a prepossessing
sympathetic look. I had accustomed myself to look sharply
on each new introduction with the question : " Are you a
suitor? and should I take you?" Both questions I answered
in this case with a prompt negative. The person before me
had not that expression of intimate adoration which all those
are in the habit of assuming who approach ladies with " views,"
as the saying is, and the other question was resolved in the
negative at once by his uniform. I would give my hand to no
soldier a second time, that I had absolutely fixed with myself,
not alone because I would not be again exposed to the
horrible pain of seeing my husband depart to the campaign,
but because since that time I had arrived at views about war
in which it would be impossible for me to agree with a
soldier*

Lieutenant-Colonel v. Tilling did not avail himself of my
invitation to sit beside me.

11 1 will not intrude on you long, countess. What I have to
communicate to you is not suited for a ballroom. I only
wanted to ask you for permission to present myself in your
house ; could you be so very kind as to fix a day and hour in
which I may speak to you ? "

" I receive on Saturdays between two and four."

" Then your house between two and four on Saturday most

54 LAY DOWN YOU* ARMJ.

likely resembles a bee-hive, where the honey bees are flying in
and out."

" And I sit in the middle as queen you would say, a very
pretty compliment."

" I never make compliments, no more than I make honey,
so the hour of swarming on Saturday does not suit me at all.
I must speak to you alone."

"You awaken my curiosity. Let us say then to-morrow,
Tuesday, at the same hour. I will be at home to you and no
one else."

He thanked me, bowed, and went away. A little later my
cousin Conrad came by. I called him to me, got him to sit
by my side, and asked for information about Baron Tilling.

"Does he please you? Has he made a deep impres-
sion on you that you ask after him so eagerly? He is to
be had, /.*., he is not yet married. Still he may not be free
for all that. It is whispered that a very great lady (Althaus
named a princess of the royal family) holds him to herself by
tender bonds, and therefore he does not marry. His regiment
has only recently been moved hither, and so he has not been
much seen in society as yet; and he is also it seems an enemy ot
balls and things of that sort. I made his acquaintance in the
Nobles' Club, where he passes an hour or two every day, but
generally over the papers in the reading-room, or absorbed in a
game of chess with some of our best players. I was astonished
to meet him here ; however, as the lady of the house is his
cousin, that explains his short appearance at the ball ; he is off
again already. As soon as he had taken leave of you, I saw
him go out."

" Have you introduced him to many other ladies besides ? "

" No, only to you. But you must not imagine from that that
you have brought him down at a long shot, and that therefore
he is anxious to know you. He asked me : * Could you tell me
whether a certain Countess Dotzky, nU Althaus, probably a
relation of yours, is here at present ? I want to speak to her.'
' Yes,' I answered, pointing to you, ' sitting in that corner on

LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS. 55

the sofa, in a blue dress.' * Oh, that is she ! Will you be so
kind as to introduce me ? ' That I did with much pleasure,
without any idea that I might be ruining your peace of mind
thereby."

" Don't talk such nonsense, Conrad. My peace is not so
easily disturbed. Tilling ? Of what family is he ? I have
never heard the name before."

" Aha 1 you will not confess ! Perhaps he is the favoured
one ! I have tried by the exercise of all my power of witchery
to penetrate into your heart for the last three months, but in
vain 1 And now this cold lieutenant-colonel for, let me tell
you, he is cold and without feeling came, saw, and conquered.
Of what family is Tilling, do you say? I believe of Hanoverian
origin. But his father before him was in the Austrian service.
His mother is a Prussian. You must surely have noticed his
North German accent."

"Yes, he speaks most beautiful German."

" Of course. Everything about him is most beautiful."
Althaus got up. " Well, I have had quite enough now. Per-
mit me to leave you to your dreams. I will try to entertain
myself with ladies who "

" May appear most beautiful in your eyes. There are plenty-
such."

I left the ball early. My sisters could remain behind under
Aunt Mary's guard, and there was nothing to detain me. The
desire for dancing had left me. I felt tired, and longed for
solitude. Why ? Surely not to have the opportunity for
thinking about Tilling without interruption ? Still it seemed
so. For it was about midnight that I enriched the red book by
transferring into it the conversation above set down, and added
the following observations : " An interesting man this Tilling.
The great lady who is in love with him is thinking probably
about him now, or perhaps at this moment he is kneeling at
her feet, and she is not so lonely so lonely as I am. Ah,
to love any one so entirely and inwardly ! Not Tilling, of
course I do not know him even. I envy the princess, not on

5O LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS.

account of Tilling, but on account of her being beloved. And
the more passionately, the more warmly she is attached to him,
so much the more I envy her."

My first thought on waking was once more Tilling. And
naturally, for he had made an appointment with me for to-day,
on account of some important communication. Not for a long
time had I felt so excited as I was about this visit.

At the appointed hour I gave orders that no one should be
admitted except the gentleman expected. My sisters were not
at home. Aunt Mary, that indefatigable chaperon, had gone
with them to the skating rink.

I placed myself in my little drawing-room, in a pretty house
dress of violet velvet (violet, it is allowed, suits blonde com-
plexions), took a book in my hand and waited. I had not
to wait long. At ten minutes past two Freiherr v. Tilling
entered.

" You see, countess, I have punctually availed myself of your
permission," he said, kissing my hand. 1

"Luckily so," I answered laughingly, as I showed him a
i ha;r, ' otherwise 1 should have died of impatience; for really
you have thrown me into a state of great suspense."

" Then I will say what I have got to say at once, without
any long introduction. The reason I did not do so yesterday
was in order not to disturb your serenity."

"You frighten me."

II In one word, I was present at the battle of Magenta."
" And you saw Arno die ? " I shrieked.

" Yes. I am in a position to give you information about
his last moments."

" Speak," I said shuddering.

" Do not tremble, countess. If those last moments had
been as horrible as those of so many other of my comrades,
I would assuredly have said nothing about it to you ; for there

1 This an Austrian fashion, and docs not imply any extraordinary
attachment or freedom.

LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS. 57

is nothing sadder than to hear of a dear one dead that he died
in agony : but that is not the case here."

"You take a weight off my heart Go on with your
ative."

I will not repeat to you the empty phrase with which the
survivors of soldiers are usually comforted, * He died like
a hero,' for I do not quite know what that means. But I
can offer you the substantial consolation that he died without
thinking about death. He was convinced -from the beginning
that nothing would happen to him. We were much together,
and he often told me of his domestic happiness, showed me
the picture of his beautiful young wife, and of his child ; he
invited me, ' as soon as ever the campaign was over,' to visit
him in his home. In the massacre of Magenta I found myself,
by accident, at his side. I spare you the sketch of the scenes
that were going on one cannot relate such things. Men, who
have the warrior spirit, are seized in the midst of the powder-
fog and bullet-rain with such an intoxication that they do not
know exactly what is going on. Dotzky was a man of this kind.
His eyes sparkled. He laid about him with a firm hand.
He was in the full intoxication of war. I who was sober could
see it. Then came a shell, and fell a few steps from where we
were. When the monster burst ten men were blown to pieces,
Dotzky among them. There rose a shriek of anguish from
the injured men, but Dotzky gave no cry he was dead I
and a few comrades stooped down to see to the wounded, and
give them aid if possible. But it was not possible. They
were all writhing in death, terribly torn and dismembered
the prey of horrible tortures. But Dotzky, at whose side I
first knelt on the ground, breathed no more; his heart had
stopped beating, and out of his torn side the blood was flowing
in such a stream that if even his state was only faintness and
not death, there was no fear that he would come to again."

" Fear ? " said I weeping.

" Yes, for we had to leave him lying there helpless. Before
us the murderous ' Hurrah ! ' burst out again, and behind us

58 LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS.

mounted squadrons were coming on, who must charge ovei
these dying men. Lucky those who had lost consciousness !
His face had a perfectly placid, painless look, and when after
the battle was over we picked up our dead and wounded, I
found him on the same spot, in the same position, and with the
same peaceful look. That is what I had to say to you, coun-
tess. I might indeed have done so years since, or, even if
I had not met you, have written it to you, but the idea
only came into my head yesterday when my cousin said she
was expecting among her guests the beautiful widow of Arno
Dotzky. Forgive me if I have recalled painful memories. I
think, however, I have discharged a duty and freed you from
torturing doubts."

He stood up. I gave him my hand.

" I thank you, Baron Tilling," I said, drying my tears.
" You have indeed conferred a precious gift on me the tran
quillity of knowing that the end of my dear husband was free
from pain or torment. But stay a little, I beg you. I should
like to hear you speak more. You struck a note in your way
of expressing yourself before which made a certain chord
vibrate in my feelings. Without beating about the bush, you
abhor war ? "

Tilling's visage clouded.

" Forgive me, countess," he said, " if I cannot stop to talk
with you on this subject. I am sorry, too, that I cannot
prolong our interview. I am expected elsewhere."

It was now my countenance which assumed a cold expres
sion. The princess, I suppose, was expecting him, and the
thought was unpleasant to me.

' Then I will not detain you, colonel," I said coldly.

Without any request to be allowed to come again, he bowed
and left the room.

CHAPTER IV,

Progress of my friendship for Tilling. The toy soldiers. A
dinner at my father's. The brave Hupfauf. Darwin.
A charming tete-a-tete, ending in a misunderstanding.
Growing attachment. A call on Countess Griesbach.
Jealousy dispelled. Absence of the loved one. A touching
letter from Tilling on his mothers death.

THE carnival was over. Rosa and Lilly, my sisters, had
"amused themselves immensely". Each had a list of half-a-dozen
conquests. Still there was no desirable partie among them,
and " the right person " had not shown himself for either. So
much the better. They would gladly enjoy a few years more
of maidenhood before taking on themselves the married yoke.

And as to me ? I noted my impression of the carnival in
the red volume as follows : " I am glad that this dancing is
over. It has already begun to be monotonous. Always the
same rounds, and the same conversation, and the same dancers,

for whether it happens to be X , lieutenant of hussars, or

Y , brevet-captain of dragoons, or Z , captain of uhlans,

there are always the same bows, the same remarks, the same
sighs and glances. Not an interesting man amongst them not
one. And the only one who in any case we will say nothing
about him. He belongs, I know, to his princess. She is a
beautiful woman truly, I admit it, but I think her very disagree-
able."

Though the carnival with its great balls was over, yet
the enjoyment of society had not stopped. Soirees, dinners,
concerts the whirl went on. There was also a great amateur

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60 LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS.

theatrical performance projected, but not till after Easter.
During the fasting season a certain moderation in our pleasure*
was enjoined on us. In Aunt Mary's opinion we were fai
from being as moderate as we ought. She could not quite for
give me for not going regularly to the Lenten sermons, and
indemnified herself for my lukewarmness by dragging Rosa and
Lilly to hear all the preacners at the Cnapel Royal. The girls
submitted to this easily. Occasionally they found their whole
coterie assembled at church. Father Klinkowstrom was as
much the fashion at the Jesuits' Church as Mdlle. Murska
at the opera, and so they were tolerably gay in a mild way.
Not only from the sermons, however, but from the soirees
too, I held myself a good deal aloof during this season. I had
all at once lost my taste for society parties, and delighted in
staying at home to play with my son, and when the little fellow
was taken to bed, to sit by the fire with a good book and read.
Sometimes my father visited me at these times, and chatted
away for an hour or two with me. Of course the campaigning
reminiscences came to the front then continually. I had com-
municated to him Tilling's account of Arno's death, but he
received the story rather coolly. Whether a man's death was
painful or painless seemed to him a secondary consideration.
To be "left on the field" as death in battle is called -
appeared to him an end so glorious, bestowed by such an
elevated destiny, that the details of the bodily suffering which
might possibly have occurred were not worth taking into
account. In his mouth to be "left on the field" always
sounded like the grudging admission of an especial distinction,
and next to " being left " what was most pleasant evidently was
to be severely wounded. The style and manner in which he
proudly showed his respect for himself or any one else in say-
ing that he had been wounded at a fight named after this or
that place made one quite forget that the thing in itself could
have given anybody pain. What a difference from Tilling's
short recital ! in his sketch of the ten poor creatures who were
shattered by the bursting shell, and broke out in loud shrieks I

LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS. 6 1

What a different tone of shuddering pity in it ! I did not
repeat Tilling's words to my father, because I felt instinctively
that they would have seemed to him unsoldierly, and would
have diminished his respect for the speaker, which would have
hurt me, for it was just the horror unsoldierly it might be,
but certainly nobly humane with which he saw and told of the
lerrible end of his comrades that had penetrated into my heart.

How gladly would I have spoken further on this theme with
Tilling, but he seemed not to wish to cultivate my acquain-
tance. Fourteen days had elapsed since his visit, and he had
neither repealed the visit, nor had I met him in society. Only
two or three times had I seen him in the Ringsstrasse, 1 and once
at the Burg Theatre. He bowed respectfully, and I acknow-
ledged his greeting in a friendly manner, but nothing more.
Nothing more ? Why did my heart beat at these accidental
meetings ? Why could I not for hours get his gesture as he
greeted me out of my mind ?

"My dear child, I have something to beg of you." My
father came into my house one morning with these words. He
held in his hand a parcel wrapped in paper, and added, " Here
is something I am bringing for you," as he laid the thing on the
table.

" What, a request and a present together ? " I said laughing.
"That is bribery indeed!"

" Then hear my request before you unpack my gift, and are
blinded by its magnificence. I have to-day a tedious dinner."

" Yes, I know. Three old generals and their wives."

" And two Ministers and their wives in short, a solemn, stiff,
sleepy business."

" But you do not expect that I "

"Yes, I expect you there, because, as ladies are pleased to
honour me with their company, I must at least have a lady to
do the honours."

" But Aunt Mary has always undertaken that office."

1 One of the chief streets of Vienna.

62 LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS.

11 She is again attacked to-day by her usual headache, and so
I have nothing else left "

" But to offer up your daughter, as other fathers did in
ancient times ; for example, King Agamemnon with Iphigenia ?
Well, I submit."

"Besides, there are among the guests a pair of younger
elements : Dr. Bresser, who treated me in my last illness so
excellently that I wished to show him the attention of an
invitation ; and also Lieutenant-Colonel Tilling. Why, you are
getting as red as fire I What is the matter with you ?"

" Me ? It is curiosity. Now, I really must look at what
you have brought me." And I began to take the parcel out of
its paper wrapping.

" Oh, that is nothing for you. Don't expect a pearl necklace.
That belongs to Rudi."

" Yes, I see, a plaything. Ah ! a box of lead soldiers !
But, father, a little child of four cannot

" I used to play at soldiers when I was only three years old.
You can't begin too early. My very earliest impressions were
of drums, sabres, manoeuvres, words of command : that's the
way to awaken the love for the trade, that's the way."

"My son Rudolf shall never join the army," I interrupted.

" Martha I I know at least it was his father's wish."

" Poor Arno is no more. Rudolf is all I have, and I do not
choose "

" That he should join the noblest and most honourable of