Lay Down Your Arms: The Autobiography of Martha von Tilling

by Bertha von Suttner

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 about it” is also a commandment easily obeyed, and on this occasion I followed it very willingly; and so I did not enter 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 contradictions 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 lukewarmness.”

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 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 château 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!”

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It was a time of excitement. The war “has broken out”. People forget that it is really two masses of men who are rushing 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 highest of human duties which called my dear one away, and that thereby the possibility was offered to him of covering himself 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 represented 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.