SO it had come again—this greatest of all misfortunes—and was greeted by the populace with the accustomed rejoicing. The regiments marched out (in what state were they to return?) and wishes for victory, and blessings, and the shouting of the street boys were their accompaniment.

Frederick had been ordered to Bohemia some time previously, even before war had been declared; and just when matters were in such a position as to enable me to entertain a confident hope that the quarrel about the duchies, so unblessed and so contemptible, would be settled amicably. And, therefore, this time I was spared the heart-rending leave-taking which precedes the setting off of one’s beloved directly “to the war”. When my father brought me the news in triumph: “Now it is off,” I had been already alone for a fortnight. And for some time I had quite made my mind up to this news, as a criminal in his cell has made up his mind to the reading of the death-sentence.

I bowed my head and said nothing.

“Keep up a good heart, my child. The war will not last long; in a day or two we shall be in Berlin. And as your husband came back from Schleswig-Holstein, so he will come back from this campaign, but covered with much greener laurels. It may, indeed, be unpleasant for him, being himself of Prussian extraction, to fight against Prussia, but after he entered into the Austrian service he became one of us body and soul. Those Prussians! the arrogant windbags! they want to turn us out of the Bund! they will soon repent it; if Silesia becomes ours again, and if the Hapsburgs——”

I stretched out my hand: “Father—one request—leave me to myself”.

He might have imagined that I felt the need of giving my tears full vent; and as he was an enemy to all scenes of emotion, he willingly granted my wish and took his departure.

I, however, did not weep. I felt as if a numbing stroke had fallen on my head. Breathing heavily, staring blindly, I sat motionless for some time. Then I went to my writing-table, opened the red volume, and made this entry:—

“The sentence of death is pronounced. A hundred thousand men are to be executed. Will Frederick be among them? And I also, as a consequence. Who am I that I should not perish like the rest of the hundred thousand? I wish I were dead already.”

From Frederick I received the same day a few hasty lines.

“My wife, be of good cheer; keep your heart up! We have been happy—no one can take that from us—even if to-day for us, as for so many others, the decree has gone forth—‘It is finished’. (The same thought here as I expressed in my red book about the many others who were sentenced.) To-day we go to meet ‘the enemy’. Perhaps I shall recognise there a few comrades in battle at DÜppel and Alsen—possibly my little cousin Godfrey.... We are to march on Liebenau with the advanced guard of Count Clam-Gallas. From this time there will be no more leisure for writing. Do not look for any letters for you. At the most, if opportunity offers, a line, as a token that I am alive. But before that I should like to find one single word which could comprehend in itself the whole of my love that I might write it here for you in case it might be my last. I can find only this word—‘Martha’. You know what that means for me.”

Conrad Althaus had also to march. He was full of fire and delight in battle, and animated by sufficient hatred of the Prussians to make him start off with pleasure; still his parting was hard for him. The marriage licence had arrived only two days before the order to march.

“Oh, Lilly, Lilly,” he cried with pain, as he said adieu to his affianced bride, “why did you delay so long to accept me? Who knows now whether I shall come back again?”

My poor sister was herself full of repentance. Now for the first time there sprang up passionate love for him she had slighted so long. When he was gone she sank into my arms in tears.

“Oh, why did I not say ‘yes’ long ago! I should now have been his wife.”

“Then, my poor Lilly, the parting would have been all the more painful for you.”

She shook her head. I well understood what was going on in her mind, perhaps more clearly than she understood herself; to be obliged to part with love-longings still unfulfilled, and, perhaps, destined to remain for ever unfulfilled; to see the cup torn from their lips, and possibly shattered, before they had had a single draught—that might well be doubly torturing.

My father, sisters, and Aunt Mary now removed to Grumitz. I was easily persuaded to go there too with my little son. As long as Frederick was away, my own hearth seemed extinguished—I could not stay there. It is strange. I felt myself just as much a widow, to have done with life just as thoroughly, as if the news of the outbreak of war had been at the same time the news of Frederick’s death. Occasionally in the midst of my dull grief, a brighter thought would break in: “He is alive and surely may come back”; but along with it an idea of horror would rise again: “He is writhing and agonising in intolerable pains; he is fainting in a trench; heavy waggons are driving over his shattered limbs; flies and worms are crawling over his open wounds; the people who are clearing the field of battle take the stiffened object lying on the ground for dead, and are shovelling him still alive along with the dead into the damp trench: there he comes to himself and——”

With a loud scream I woke up from such images as these.

“What is the matter with you now, Martha,” said my father in a scolding tone. “You will drive yourself out of your senses if you brood in this way and cry out so; why will you summon up such foolish pictures out of your fancy? It is sinful.”

I had indeed often given expression aloud to these ideas of mine, and this irritated my father extremely.

“Sinful,” he went on, “and improper and nonsensical. Such cases as your excited fancy pictures, do no doubt occur once in a thousand times among the common men, but a staff-officer, as your husband is, is not left to lie on the field. Besides, as a general rule, folks should not think about such horrid things. Such conduct involves a kind of sacrilege, a profanation of war, in keeping these pitiful details before one’s eyes instead of the sublimity of the whole. One should not think about them.”

“Yes, yes, not think about it,” I replied, “that is always the custom of mankind in the presence of any human misery—‘don’t think about it,’ that is the support of all kinds of barbarity.”

Our family doctor, Dr. Bresser, was not at this moment at Grumitz, he had voluntarily placed himself at the disposal of the army medical department, and had started for the theatre of war, and the idea occurred to me also whether I should not go too, as a sick-nurse. Yes, if I could have known that I should be in Frederick’s neighbourhood, be at hand in case he was wounded, I would not have hesitated. But for others? No, there my strength broke down, my spirit of sacrifice failed. To see them die, hear the death-rattle, want to give help to hundreds begging for help, and have no help to give, to bring on myself all this pain, this disgust, this grief, without thereby getting to Frederick, on the contrary diminishing thereby the chance of meeting again, for the nurses themselves ran into various kinds of danger to their lives. No; that I would not do. Besides my father informed me that a private person like myself was altogether inadmissible for nursing in a field hospital, that this office could only be exercised by soldiers of the army medical service, or at the most by sisters of charity.

“To pluck charpie,” he said, “and prepare bandages for the Patriotic Aid Society, that is the only thing that you ladies can do to help the wounded, and that my daughters ought to do diligently, on that I bestow my blessing.”

And it was now to this occupation that my sisters and I devoted many hours of every day. Rosa and Lilly worked with gently compassionate, almost happy-looking faces. As we heaped up the fine threads under our fingers into soft masses, or folded up the strips of linen in beautiful order together, the occupation affected the two girls like an office of charitable nursing: they fancied themselves soothing the burning pains and staunching the bleeding wounds, hearing the sighs of relief and seeing the grateful glances of those on whom they attended. The picture they so formed of the condition of a wounded man was then almost a pleasant one. Enviable soldiers! who, delivered from the dangers of the raging fight, were now stretched on clean soft beds, and there would be nursed and pampered up to the time of their recovery, lulled for the most part in a half-unconscious slumber of luxurious fatigue, waking up again occasionally to the pleasant consciousness that their lives were saved, and that they would be able to return to their friends at home and relate to them how they had received their honourable wounds at the battle of——.

Our father also encouraged them in this innocent way of looking at it. “Bravo, bravo, girls! working again to-day! You have now again prepared delights for a number of our brave defenders. What a relief it is to get a pad of charpie like that on a bleeding wound! I can tell you a tale about that. Long ago, when I got that bullet in my leg at Palestro——” and so on, and so on.I however sighed and said nothing. I had heard other histories of wounds than those which my father loved to relate, histories which bore about the same relation to the usual veterans’ anecdotes, as the realities of the life of a poor shepherd do to the pastoral pictures of Watteau.

The Red Cross. I knew through what an impulse of popular sympathy, shocked to the most painful degree, that institution had been called into life. In its time I had followed the debate which took place at Geneva on the subject, and had read the tract by Dunant, which gave the impetus to the whole thing. A heart-rending cry of woe was that tract! The noble patrician of Geneva had hurried to the field of Solferino, in order to give what aid he could; and what he found there he related to the world. Innumerable wounded men, who had been lying there for five or six days without any assistance. He would have liked to save them all; but what could he, a single person, do, what could the other few individuals, in the face of this mass of misery? He saw men whose lives might have been saved by a drop of water, by a mouthful of bread. He saw men who, still breathing, had to be buried in fearful haste.... Then he spoke out; said what had often been admitted, but now found an echo for the first time, viz., that the means for nursing and rescue at the disposal of the army administration had not grown in proportion to the requirements of a battle. And so the “Red Cross” was founded.

Austria had at that time not yet adhered to the Geneva Convention. Why? Why is there resistance opposed to everything that is new, however rich in blessing, and however simple it may be? Because of the law of laziness, the power of holy custom. “The idea is very fine, but impracticable,” is the saying. I often heard my father repeat these arguments of hesitation used by several of the delegates at the Conference of 1863. “Impracticable, and, even if practicable, yet in many points of view unbecoming. The military authorities could not allow that private action on the field of battle was admissible. In war tactical aims must have the priority over the friendly offices of humanity; and how could this private action be surrounded with proper guarantees against the existence of espionage? And the expenses! Is not war costly enough already? The voluntary nurses would, through their own material wants, fall as a burden on the provision department; or, if they are to supply themselves in the country occupied, will there not arise a regrettable difficulty for the army administration through the purchase of the articles necessary for the service, and the immediate raising of their price?”

Oh, this official wisdom! so dry, so well-instructed, so real, so redolent of prudence, and so unfathomably stupid!

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The first engagement between our troops in Bohemia and the enemy took place on June 25 at Liebenau. My father brought us this news with his usual triumphant mien.

“That is a grand beginning,” he said; “you can see heaven is on our side. It is significant that the first with whom these windbags had to do were the troops of our celebrated ‘Iron Brigade’. You know, of course, the Poschach Brigade which defended KÖnigsberg in Silesia so valiantly—they will give them all they want!” (However, the next news from the seat of war showed that after five hours’ fighting this brigade, forming part of the advanced guard of Clam-Gallas, retreated to Podol. Also that Frederick was there—which I did not know—and that in the same night Podol, which had been barricaded, was attacked by General Horn, and the fight renewed by the bright moonlight; which also I heard later.) “But,” continued my father, “even more splendid than in the north is the beginning of matters in the south. At Custozza we have gained a victory, children, more glorious than any but one. I have always said it: Lombardy must become ours! Are you not delighted? I regard the war as already decided; for if we get done with the Italians, who do at any rate set a regular trained army in the field against us, we shall not find it hard to deal with these ‘tailors’ apprentices’. This Landwehr—it is really an impudence—but it is just of a piece with the whole Prussian conceit to take the field against regular armies with such stuff. There are these fellows, torn away from the workbench and the writing-desk; they are not inured to any hardship, and so it is impossible that they can stand in the field against soldiers proof against blood and steel. Just look there—at what the Wiener Zeitung of June 24 writes in its ‘original correspondence’—surely that is good news: ‘In Prussian Silesia cattle plague has broken out, and, as is understood, in a highly threatening form’.”

“‘Cattle plague,’ ‘threatening form,’ ‘joyful news,’” I said with a slight shake of the head; “nice things people must take pleasure in in times of war. However, one good thing is that black and yellow posts are erected on the frontiers, so that the plague cannot cross.”

But my father did not hear, and went on reading his pleasant intelligence:—

“The newspapers are all full of capital news; above all, the account of the glorious day of Custozza. You should keep these papers, Martha.”

And I have kept them. It is what people should always do; and when a new national quarrel is impending, then read, not the most recent newspapers, but those dating from the former war, and then you will see what weight to attach to all their prophesying and boasting, and even to their accounts and intelligence. That is instructive.

The new Frankfurter Zeitung relates a pleasant interlude, the march of Austrian troops of Italian nationality through Munich, as follows:—

At BÖhmisch-TrÜbau Field-Marshal Benedek communicated to the Army of the North the three bulletins relative to the victory of the Army of the South, and added the following order of the day:—

To the foregoing telegram the following answer from Verona reached BÖhmisch-TrÜbau:—

“Convinced! Convinced!” ...

“Does not your heart leap up, my children, when you read such things?” shouted my father in delight. “Can you not rise up to a sufficient height of patriotic feeling to throw into the background your private circumstances at the sight of such triumphs, you, Martha, to forget that your Frederick, and you, Lilly, that your Conrad is exposed to some danger? Danger which probably they will come out of safe and sound: and even to succumb to which—a fate which they share with the best sons of our country—would redound to their fame and honour. There is not a soldier who would not willingly die to the call, ‘For our country!’”

“If, after a lost battle, a man is left lying with shattered limbs on the field,” I replied, “and lies there undiscovered for four or five days and nights in indescribable agonies from thirst and hunger, rotting while still alive, and so perishes, knowing all the while that his death has not helped his country you talk of one bit, but has brought his loved ones to despair, I should like to know whether all this time he is gladly dying to the call you speak of.”

“You are outrageous, and besides you speak in such shrill tones, quite unbecoming for a lady.”

“Oh yes, the true word, the naked reality, is outrageous, is shameless. Only the phrase which by thousandfold repetition has become sanctioned is ‘proper,’ but I assure you, father, that this unnatural ‘joy in dying’ which is thus exacted from all men, however heroic it may seem to him who uses the phrase, sounds to me like a spoken death-knell.”

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Among Frederick’s papers, many years later, I found a letter which in those days I sent to the seat of war. This letter shows as clearly as possible with what feelings I was filled at that time.

“Grumitz, June 28, 1866.

“Dear one,—I am not alive. Fancy that in the next room people are debating whether I am to be executed in the next few days or no, while I have to wait outside for their decision. During this period of waiting I do indeed breathe, but can I call it living? The next room, in which the question is to be decided, is called Bohemia. But no, my love, the picture is hardly yet correct. For if it were only a matter of my life or death, the anxiety would not be so great. For my anxiety concerns a far dearer life than my own; and my fear is concerned even with something still worse than your death—with your possible agony in dying. Oh that all this were over, over! Oh that our victories would come in speedy succession; not for the sake of the victory, but of the end!

“Will these lines ever reach you? and where, and how? Whether after a hot day’s fight or in camp, or perhaps in hospital? In any case it will do you good to get news of your dear ones. If I can write nothing but what is mournful—and what else but what is mournful can be felt during this time, when the sun is darkened by the great black pall hoisted up in the name of ‘our country,’ to fall down on the country’s sons?—still my lines will bring you refreshment, for I am dear to you, Frederick—I know how dear, and my written word rejoices and moves you, as would a soft touch from my hand. I am near you, Frederick—be assured of that—with every thought, with every breath, by day and night. Here, in my own circle, I move and act and speak mechanically. My innermost self, that belongs to you, that never leaves you for a moment; only my boy reminds me that the world still contains for me a thing which is not you. The good little fellow—if you knew how he asks and cares for you! We two talk together of nothing but ‘papa’. He knows well, like a boy of sharp perceptions, what object fills my heart; and however little he may be (you know that!) he is already in a sense a friend of his mother. I even begin to speak with him as with a reasonable being, and for this he is thankful. I, on my part, am thankful to him for the love he shows to you. It is so seldom that children get on well with their step-parents. It is true there is nothing of the stepfather about you—you could not be more tender and kind to a child of your own, my own tender and kind one! Yes, kindness, great, soft, and mild, is the foundation of your being; and what does the poet say? ‘As heaven is vaulted by one single great sapphire, so the greatness of character of a noble man is formed of one single virtue, kindness.’ In other words, I love you, Frederick! That is still always the refrain of all my thoughts about you and your qualities. I love you so confidingly, with such assurance. I rest in you, Frederick, warm and soft—that is when I have you, of course. Now when you are again torn from me, my repose is naturally gone. Oh, if the storm were only over, over; if you all were only in Berlin to dictate terms of peace to King William! For my father is firmly convinced that this will be the end of the campaign; and from all that is heard and read here, I also most believe him. ‘As soon as, with God’s help, the enemy is struck down’—so runs Benedek’s proclamation—‘we will follow on his track, and you shall repose in the country of the foe, and enjoy those refreshments——’ and so on. What, then, are these refreshments? At this day no general dare say openly, and without circumlocution: ‘You shall plunder, burn, murder, and ravish,’ as they used to say in the middle ages to excite their hordes. Now, at the most, all that could be kept before their eyes as a reward would be the free distribution of beer and sausages; but that would be a little tame, and so it was put figuratively—‘those refreshments,’ and so on. Every one may make out of that what he pleases. The principle that in ‘the country of the foe’ is to be found the reward of war is still maintained in military language.... And how will you feel in ‘the foeman’s land,’ which is really your own ancestral country, where your friends and your cousins are living? Will you ‘refresh’ yourself by laying Aunt Cornelia’s pretty villa even with the ground? ‘Enemy’s country;’ that is really a fossilised conception of those times when war was openly what its raison d’etre proclaims it, a piracy; and when the enemy’s country attracted the combatant as a land of prey which promised him a recompense.

“I am talking now with you, as I used in those happy hours when you were at my side, and when, after the reading of some book of the progressive school, we used to philosophise with each other about the contradictions of our times, so intimately, so entirely understanding and supplementing each other. In my circle there is no one—no one—with whom I could talk about matters of that kind. Doctor Bresser would have been the only one with whom ideas condemnatory of war could be exchanged; and he also is now gone—himself drawn into this horrible war—but with the purpose of healing wounds, not inflicting them; another contradiction really, this ‘humanity’ in war: an essential contradiction. It is about the same as ‘enlightenment’ in faith. One thing or the other; but humanity and war; reason and dogma, that will not do. The downright, burning hatred of the enemy, coupled with an entire contempt for human life, that is the vital nerve of war, exactly as the unquestioning suppression of reason is the fundamental condition of faith. But we live in a time of compromise. The old institutions and the new ideas are working with equal power. And so people, who do not wish to break entirely with the old and who cannot entirely comprehend the new, make an attempt to fuse the two together; and it is this which generates this mendacious, inconsistent, contradictory, half-and-half system under which spirits who thirst for truth, accuracy, and completeness so groan and suffer.

“Ah, why do I compose all this treatise! You will at the present time be scarcely disposed for such generalisations, as you used to be in our happy hours of chat. You hear raging round you a horrible reality, with which you have to reckon. How much better would it be if you could accept it with the simple assurance of ancient times, when the warlike life was to the soldier a proud pleasure and a delight. Better also would it be if I could write to you, as other wives do, letters full of wishes for prosperity, confident promises of victory, and incitements to your courage. Girls of the present day are educated in patriotism, so that at the proper time they might cry to their husbands: ‘Go on, die for your country—that is the most glorious of deaths’; or, ‘Come back with victory, and then we will reward you with our loves. In the meantime we will pray for you. The God of battles, who protects our army, He will hear our prayers. Day and night our intercession is rising up to heaven, and we are sure to take His favour by storm. You will come back crowned with fame. We never tremble for an instant, for we are worthy comrades of your valour. No! no! the mothers of your sons must be no cowards if they would raise up a new race of heroes; and even if we have to give up what is dearest to us—for king and country no sacrifice is too great!’

“That would be the right letter for a soldier’s wife, would it not? But not such a letter as you would wish to read from your wife—from the partner of your thoughts, from her who shares your disgust at the old blind delusion of mankind. Oh, such disgust—so bitter, so painful that I cannot describe it to you.” When I picture to myself these two armies, composed of individuals with the gift of reason, and for the most part kind and gentle men, how they are rushing on each other, to annihilate each other, desolating at the same time the unfortunate land, in which they cast aside the villages they have ‘taken’ like cards in their game of murder. When I picture all this, I feel inclined to shriek out: ‘Do bethink you!’ ‘Do stop!’ And out of the 100,000, 90,000 individuals would certainly be glad to stop; but the mass is compelled to go on in its fury.

But enough; you will prefer to hear the accounts and the news from home. Well, then, we are all well. My father is constantly in the highest state of excitement over present events. The victory of Custozza fills him with radiant pride. He behaves as if he had won it himself. In any case he regards the splendour of that day as so bright that the reflection which falls on him as an Austrian and a general makes him completely happy. Lori, too, whose husband, as you know, is with the Army of the South, writes me a letter of triumph about this same Custozza. Do you recollect, Frederick, how jealous I was for a quarter of an hour about this same good Lori? And how I came out after that attack with stronger love and stronger trust in you? Oh, if only you had betrayed me then; if only you had sometimes a little ill-treated me; then I should perhaps bear your absence now more easily. But to know that such a husband is in the storm of bullets! Let me go on with my news. Lori has offered to spend the remainder of her grass-widowhood in Grumitz, along with her little Beatrix. I could not say ‘no’; yet frankly any society is at the present time disagreeable to me. I want to be alone, alone with my longing for you, the extent of which no one but you can measure. Next week Otto begins his vacation. He laments in every letter that the war should have begun before, instead of after, his admission to officer’s rank. He hopes to God that the peace will not ‘break out’ before he leaves the academy. That word ‘break out’ is not perhaps the one he used, but in any case it expresses his meaning, for peace appears to him a threatening calamity. It is indeed the way they are brought up. As long as there are wars men must be brought up to be war-loving soldiers; and so long as there are war-loving soldiers there must be war. Is that our eternal, inevitable circle? No, God be thanked! For that love, in spite of all school training, is constantly diminishing. We found the proof of this diminution in Henry Thomas Buckle. Do not you recollect? But I don’t want any printed proof; a glance into your heart, your noble human heart, my Frederick, is enough to demonstrate this to me. Let me get on with my news. From all our landed connections and acquaintances in Bohemia we get on all sides epistles of lamentation. The march of the troops through the country, even if they are marching to victory, devastates it and sucks everything out of it. And how if once the enemy should advance into it, if the fight should be played out in their neighbourhood, there where their possessions, their chÂteaux and fields are situated? All is ready for flight, all their effects packed up and their treasures buried. Adieu to our happy tours among the Bohemian Spas; adieu to the pleasant visits to the country houses; adieu to the brilliant autumn hunting parties; and, in any case, adieu to the usual revenues from farms and businesses. The harvests are trampled down, the factories, if they are not battered down and burned, are robbed of their labourers. ‘It is indeed a real misfortune,’ they write, ‘that we live exactly on the border-land; and it is a second misfortune that Benedek did not assume the offensive with more vigour, so as to fight out the war in Prussia.’ Perhaps it might also be called a misfortune that the whole political quarrel could not have been adjusted before a court of arbitration, but that the murderous devastation must be carried out on Bohemian or Silesian soil (for in Silesia also, if we believe the accounts of trustworthy travellers, there are really men and fields and crops). But that idea does not occur to anybody!

“My little Rudolf is sitting at my feet while I am writing. He sends you a kiss, and his love to our dear Puxl. We both miss him much, the good, merry little dog; but, on the other hand, he would have missed his master sadly, and he will be a diversion and a companion to you. Give Puxl both our loves. I shake his paw, and Rudi kisses his dear black snout.

“And now, good-bye for to-day, my all on earth!”