Bertha von Suttner

“ All institutions stand on roots of a thousand fibres, and as long as they exist it must be a good thing that those feelings and methods of thought should persist by which they are excused, by which they are rendered not only tolerable, but even beloved. How many a poor fellow is helped through his death-agony by that same ‘joy in death’ into which he has been educated! how many a pious soul relies in all confidence on the help of God of which he has been assured by the preacher! how much innocent vanity and proud feeling of honour are awakened and satisfied by those ceremonies! ”

“ You could not tell of your joys in love; nor could we of our sufferings in war. The former might lay bare your chief virtue, modesty; the latter ours, courage. The delights of the honeymoon, and the terrors of the battlefield, no ‘womanly’ woman can speak of the one, nor any ‘manly’ man of the other. What? You may, in the rapture of love, have poured out sweet tears! and I may have in the imminence of the death-agony uttered a cry. How could you acknowledge such a sensibility; how could I such a cowardice?”
“But did you cry out, Frederick, did you tremble? ”

“ Troops of men kept coming from outside into the city with all their belongings. Oh, those sorrowful trains of carts and pack horses, and laden men, who were trailing the ruins of their desolated hearths through the streets! I had already seen the same thing once in Bohemia, when the poor country folk were flying from the enemy; and now I had to look on the same picture of wretchedness in the joyous, brilliant capital of the world. There were the same frightened, sorrowful visages, the same weariness and haste, the same woe.
At last, God be praised, once more a good piece of news! ”

“ I was alone, in fear and anxiety. How if Dr. Bresser were prevented from coming? What step could I then take in this place? Besides I was, so to speak, broken on the wheel by the journey, quite unnerved by all the experiences of grief and terror that I had passed through. If it had not been for my longing for Frederick I should have wished now for nothing but death. To be able to lie down, go to sleep, and never wake again in a world where things go on so horribly and so madly! But preserve me from one thing at least, to live on and know that Frederick is among the “missing”! ”

“ Frederick! Frederick!”
“What is the matter with you, Martha? You are weeping; and to-day—on New-Year’s night! Why then salute the New Year with tears? Are you not happy? Have I given you any offence?”
“You? Oh no! no! You make me only too happy—much too happy—and that makes me anxious——”
“Superstitious, Martha? Do you then conjure up for yourself envious gods, who destroy men’s happiness when it is too great?”
“Not gods; it is senseless men who call misery down on themselves.”
“You are hinting at this possible war. But it is certainly not settled as yet. Why then this premature grief? ”

“ And further, that I see Death, the spectre elsewhere so feared and shunned, so close and busy all round me, his very breath breathing over me—the thought raises me to a mood of mind so elevated above the common, so epic that I feel the muse of history hovering over our heads and lending our swords the might of victory. A noble rage glows in me against the presumptuous foe, who would have trampled on the rights of the German countries, and it is to me an enthusiasm to have the power of gratifying this hatred. ”

“ Ah, my son! my grown-up, stately Rudolf, what 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 nevertheless often discussed over Ruru’s cradle and always decided unanimously—a soldier. ”

“ I have seen horrors, Frederick, that I can never forget. Oh! this beautiful world of ours, how can people so spoil it, Frederick? A world in which two beings can so love each other as you and I do, in which there can glow such a fire of bliss as is our union, how can it be so foolish as to rake up the flames of hate which brings death and woe in its train?”
“I also have seen something horrible, Martha—something that I can never forget. Just think of Godfrey v. Tessow{285} rushing wildly upon me with uplifted sword—it was in the cavalry action at Sadowa.” ”

“ Every war must leave one side defeated, and if this side can only find satisfaction in the next war, a war which must naturally produce another defeated side craving satisfaction, when is it to stop? How can justice be attained, when can old injustice be atoned, if fresh injustice is always to be employed as the means of atonement? It would never suggest itself to any reasonable man to wash out ink spots with ink and oil stains with oil, it is only blood which has always to be washed out with new blood! The frame of mind prevailing at Grumitz was on the whole a gloomy one. ”

“ Eighteen years have gone since the 1st of February, 1871, but the deep resentment and the deep mourning, which the tragedy of that day awoke in me, no time can remove, even should I live a hundred years. Even though in these later times the days come ever more frequently in which I, absorbed in the events of the present, do not think about the misery of the past, in which I even sympathise so livelily with the joy of my children as to feel myself also filled with something like joy in my life, yet no night passes, no, not one, in which my wretchedness does not seize on me. ”

“ The rage, the hate of the foe blazes up, and at the same time the most burning love for one’s menaced country, while the onward rush, the hewing down at them becomes a delight. One feels transported into another world from that in which one grew up, a world in which all the ordinary feelings and ways of looking at things are changed into their opposites. Life is changed into plunder; killing becomes a duty. ”

“ Now he is snoring sweetly and happily—is dreaming, I fancy, very likely, of his friend and patron, Rudolf, Count Dotzky. And I am dreaming of you, Martha; I am silly, I know, but I see your dear form as like you as the image of a dream sitting in yonder corner of the tent on a camp-stool. What longing seizes me to go thither and lay my head on your bosom. But I do not do so, because I know that then the image would disappear.
“I have just been out for an instant. The stars are shining as indifferently as ever. On the ground a few shadows are gliding—those of stragglers. ”

“ People who are happy, and people who are beloved by those they hold dear, cannot feel any contempt for Death. The chief ingredient in the latter is contempt for life. On my sick bed, where sickness buzzed around me with its deadly power, as the warrior on the battlefield hears the buzz of the bullets around him, I was able to enter perfectly into the feelings of those soldiers who love their lives and who know that their death will plunge hearts they love into despair. ”

“ No, countess, that sort of thing passes my talents for company, which are only weak at the best.”
“You seem, as a general rule, to keep yourself apart from society. One sees you nowhere. Are you a misanthrope? But, no; I withdraw the question. From a good deal you have said I drew the conclusion that you love all men.”
“I love humanity; but as to all men, no. There are too many among them worthless, bornés, self-seeking, cold-blooded, cruel. Those I cannot love, though I may pity them, because their education and circumstances have not allowed them to be worthy of love.” ”

“ The bloodless laurel is by far the more lovely.”
“But, my dear baron,” said my aunt at this point, “I have never heard a soldier speak so. What becomes, then, of the ardour of battle, of the warlike fire?”
“Dear lady, those are feelings not at all unknown to me. It was by them that I was animated when as a youngster of nineteen I took the field for the first time. But when I had seen the realities of butchery, when I had been a witness of the bestialities which are connected with it, my enthusiasm evaporated, and I went into my subsequent battles, not with pleasure, but with resignation.” ”

“ That it is themselves who provoked this invasion by declaring war, they have forgotten. Indeed it was not they who did it, but their Government, which they believed on its word; and now they lose no time over reproaches or reflections, as to who called down this misfortune on them: it has come, and all their force, all their enthusiasm must be spent on turning it aside again, or else uniting with unthinking self-sacrifice in a common ruin. Trust me, there is much noble capacity for love in us children of men, the pity only is that we lavish it on the old-world tracks of hatred.... ”

“ 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. ”

“ We kept the Sylvester Night quite alone, my Frederick and I. When it struck twelve,—
“Do you recollect,” I asked with a sigh, “the speech my poor father made in proposing a toast last year at this same hour? I do not dare to wish you good fortune now. The future sometimes hides something so unexpectedly terrible in its bosom; and no wish has ever availed to turn it aside.”
“Then let us use the turn of the year, Martha, as an occasion not for thinking of what is coming, but for looking back into the year which has just flown by. What sufferings you have had to endure, my poor, brave wife! ”

“ When I saw the pride which she visibly had in Godfrey, and the tenderness with which he treated his mother, I was already delighting myself with imagining the time when my son Rudolf should be grown up. One thing only I could not understand, and this I expressed to my husband, thus:—
“How can a mother allow her only child, her treasure, to embrace so dangerous a profession as the army?”
“My dear, there are simple reflections which no one ever makes,” Frederick answered, “considerations which lie so near one that no one ever heeds them. ”

“ And this forward march of the Germans from victory to victory strikes me with admiration. I have been a soldier also, and I know with what a magical power victory fastens on the mind, what pride, what joy are contained in it. It is in any case the aim, the reward for all the sacrifices made, for the renunciation of rest and happiness, for the risk of life.”
“But then why do not the conquered adversaries, since they too are soldiers, and know what fame accompanies victory, why do they not admire their conquerors? ”

“ 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! ”

“ Well, you had a husband true as steel, Martha. I could not say as much for mine. But none the less for that, I was very sorry about Griesbach. Well, he died a glorious death; that is one comfort. A widow’s life is truly a tedious one; especially as one grows older. As long as there are treats, and people to pay court to you, widowhood is not devoid of ... but now I assure you, one is quite melancholy all alone. With you the case is rather different. You live with your son; but I am not at all anxious to live with Beatrix. ”

“ Thus it happened often that I was speaking to Frederick and conversing with him as during his life. Whole scenes from the past were represented, but never any sad ones, our meeting again after Schleswig-Holstein, our jokes over Sylvia’s cradle, our walking tours in Switzerland, our hours of study over favourite books, and occasionally that same picture in the evening light, where my white-haired husband with his garden-shears was pruning the rose-branches, and was saying with a smile to me: “Are we not a happy old couple?”
I have never put off my mourning, not even at my son’s wedding. ”

“ Let your hearts beat for God and your hands strike the foe. In this war, as you know, Prussia’s dearest interests, nay, the continued existence of our beloved Prussia, are in question. The enemy avows, in the most open manner, the wish to dismember and humiliate her. Shall then the rivers of blood which your fathers and mine poured out under Frederick the Great, and that which we lately poured out at Düppel and Alsen, have been poured out in vain?{214} Never! we will maintain Prussia as she is, and make her stronger and more powerful by victory. We will show ourselves worthy of our fathers. ”

“ Self-defence, which is enjoined on us, and righteous retribution, my dear Martha. Do you think that our people like the bullets of their needle-guns? Our brave fellows have to be exposed, like defenceless cattle in a slaughter-house, to this murderous weapon. But we are too numerous, too disciplined, too warlike, not to conquer these ‘tailors’ for all that. At the beginning one or two failures have taken place; that I admit. Benedek ought to have crossed the Prussian frontier at once. I have my doubts whether this choice of a general was quite a happy one. ”

“ How quickly and easily does one in happy circumstances forget the misery one has gone through. Two pairs of lovers, or, if I may venture to say so, three—for Frederick and I, the married ones, were not much less in love with each other than the betrothed—well, so many pairs of lovers in the little company gave an air of felicity to everything. For the next day or two Schloss Grumitz was an abode of cheerfulness and worldly enjoyment. ”

“ Cleanliness, that virtue of the body, corresponding to honour in the soul, that second nature of educated humanity, what a lesson had I now to learn, that there can be no thought of it at such times as these! That, however, is only consistent—war is the negation of education, and therefore all the triumphs of education must be annihilated by it; it is a step backwards into barbarism and must therefore have everything that is barbarous in its train, and amongst others that thing which to the cultured man is so utterly abominable—dirt. ”

“ I said to Frederick, when the title deeds were delivered to me from the notary’s, “what would you say if I were now to praise the war which has just passed because of the advantages which have fallen to my share from its consequences?”
“Why, that you would not then be my Martha. Still I understand what you mean. The heartless egotism, which is capable of rejoicing over material gains that proceed out of the ruin of others—this impulse which every individual, even if he is base enough to feel it, still takes all possible care to hide—is proudly and openly confessed by nations and dynasties. ”

“ Now, the thing was to turn Paris into a fortress.
Paris a fortress! I could not take in the idea. The city which V. Hugo called “la ville-lumière,” which is the point of attraction for the whole world of civilisation, riches, the pursuit of art, and the enjoyment of life—the point from which radiate splendour, fashions, esprit—this city is now to be “fortified”—i.e., become the point at which hostile attacks are to be aimed; the target for shot; to close itself against all intercourse, and expose itself to the danger of being set in flames by bombardment, or starved by famine! ”

“ Everything else which engaged the people’s interest at other times—the theatre, business, 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 victory 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 ”

“ And that is a grand sensation in itself. The very expectation, the very excitement one feels when one rushes on to the foe and when the word goes round ‘Now it is afoot,’ this consciousness that in that moment a portion of the world’s history is being enacted, and then the pride, the joy in one’s own courage, Death right and left, great and mysterious, and yet one bids him a manly defiance——”
“Just like poor Godfrey Tessow,” murmured Frederick to himself. “Well, of course, it is the same school.”
Conrad went on eagerly. ”

“ That thousands should love one and the same cause, one and the same person, is a thing which produces a peculiar, a thousandfold impulse of devotion. And that is the feeling which swells the heart under the name of loyalty, patriotism, or esprit-de-corps. It is in reality nothing but love; and this has such a mighty working that a man regards the work of hatred ordained in its name, even the most horrible work of the deadliest hatred—War—as the fulfilment of the duty of his love. ”

“ Frederick respected my mourning, and made no attempt whatever to recommend me the vulgar resource of “diversion” as a cure for it; I owed it to the graves at Grumitz—and my tender husband saw this well—to grieve over them for some time in perfect quiet. Those who had been hurried so speedily and so cruelly out of this fair world should not be equally quickly and coldly stolen also out of the place of memory which they held in my mourning heart. ”