Lay Down Your Arms: The Autobiography of Martha von Tilling

by Bertha von Suttner

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——.