Lay Down Your Arms: The Autobiography of Martha von Tilling

by Bertha von Suttner

“What is all I have seen to-day? If I shut my eyes, what has passed before them comes with terrible distinctness into my memory. ‘Nothing but pain and pictures of horror,’ you will say. Why then do other men bring such fresh, such joyful images away with them from war? Ah, yes! These others close their eyes to the pain and the horror. They say nothing about them. If they write, or if they narrate, they give themselves no trouble to paint their experiences after nature; but they occupy themselves in imitating descriptions which they have read, and which they take as models, and in bringing out those impressions which are considered heroic. If they occasionally tell also of scenes of destruction, which contain in themselves the bitterest pain and the bitterest terror, nothing of either is to be discovered in their tone. On the contrary, the more terrible the more indifferent are they, the more horrible the more easy. Disapprobation, anger, excitement? Nothing of all this. Well, perhaps instead of this, a slight breath of sentimental pity, a few sighs of compassion. But their heads are soon in the air again. ‘The heart to God, and the hand against the foe.’ Hurrah, Tra-ra-ra!

“Now look at two of the pictures which impressed themselves on me.

“Steep, rocky heights. Jägers nimble as cats climbing up them. The object was to ‘take’ the heights, from the top of which the enemy was firing. What I see are the forms of the assailants who are climbing up, and some of them who are hit by the enemy’s shot, suddenly stretch both arms out, let their muskets fall, and with their heads falling backwards, drop off the height, step by step, from one rocky point to another, smashing their limbs to pieces.

“I see a horseman at some distance obliquely behind me, at whose side a shell burst. His horse swerved aside, and came against the tail of mine, then shot past me. The man sat still in the saddle, but a fragment of the shell had ripped his belly open, and torn all the intestines out. The upper part of his body was held on to the lower only by the spine. From the ribs to the thighs nothing but one great bleeding cavity. A short distance further he fell to the ground, with one foot still clinging in the stirrup, and the galloping horse dragging him on over the stony soil.”

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“An artillery division is sticking fast in a part of the road which is steep and soaked with rain. The guns are sinking deeper than their wheels in the morass. It is only with the most extreme exertion, dripping with sweat, and animated by the most unmerciful flogging, that the horses can get forward. One, however, dead beat before, now can do no more. Thumping him does no good; he is quite willing, but he cannot. He literally can not. Cannot that man see this, whose blows are raining down on the poor beast’s head? If the cruel brute had been the driver of a waggon in the service of some builder, any peace officer, even I myself, would have had him arrested. But this gunner, who has to get his death-laden carriage forward anyhow, is only doing his duty. The horse, however, cannot know this. The tortured, well-meaning, noble creature, who has exerted himself to the utmost limit of his vital power, what must he think in his inmost heart of such hard-heartedness and such want of sense? Think, as animals do think, not in words and conceptions, but in feelings, and feelings which are all the more lively for wanting expression. There is but one expression for it, the shriek of pain; and he did shriek, that poor horse, till at last he sank down, a shriek so long drawn and so resounding, that it still rings in my ear, that it haunted me in my dream the next night—a horrible dream in other respects. I thought that I was—how can I ever tell you the story? dreams are so senseless that language conformable to sense is hardly adapted to their reproduction—that I was the sense of pain in such an artillery horse—no, not one, but in 100,000, for in my dream I had quickly summed up the number of the horses slaughtered in one campaign, and thus this pain multiplied its effect at once a hundred-thousandfold. The men know at least why their lives are exposed to danger. They know whither they are going, and what for; but we poor unfortunates know nothing—all around us is night and horror. The men seem to go with pleasure to meet their foes, but we are surrounded by foes—our own masters, whom we would love so truly, to serve whom we spend our last energies, they rain blows on us, they leave us lying helpless; and all that we have to suffer besides, the fear that makes the sweat of agony run from our whole body, the thirst—for we too suffer from fever—oh, that thirst! the thirst of us poor bleeding, maltreated 100,000 horses!... Here I woke, and clutched the water bottle. I was myself suffering from burning, feverish thirst.”

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“Another street fight in the little town of Saar. To the noise of the battle-cries and the shots is joined the crashing of timber and the falling of walls. A shell burst in one of the houses, and the pressure of the air, caused by its explosion, was so powerful that several soldiers were wounded by the ruins of the house which were borne along by the air. A window flew over my head with the window-sash still in it. The chimney-stack tumbled down, the plaster crumbled into dust and filled the air with a stifling cloud that stung one’s eyes. From one lane to another (how the hoofs rang on the jagged pavements) the fight wound on, and reached the market-place. In the middle of the square stands a high pillar of the Virgin. The Mother of God holds her child in one arm and stretches the other out in blessing. Here the fight was prolonged—man to man. They were hacking at me, I was laying about me on all sides. Whether I hit one or more of them I know not: in such moments one does not retain much perception. Still two cases are photographed on my soul, and I fear that the market-place at Saar will remain always burned into my memory. A Prussian dragoon, strong as Goliath, tore one of our officers (a pretty, dandified lieutenant—how many girls are perhaps mad after him) out of his saddle, and split his skull at the feet of the Virgin’s pillar. The gentle saint looked on unmoved. Another of the enemy’s dragoons—a Goliath too—seized, just before me almost, my right-hand man, and bent him backwards in his saddle so powerfully that he broke his back—I myself heard it crack. To this also the Madonna gave her stony blessing.”

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“From a height to-day the field-glass of the staff officer commanded once more a scene rich in changes. There was, for instance, the collapse of a bridge as a train of waggons was moving across it. Did the latter contain wounded? I do not know. I could not ascertain. I only saw that the whole train—waggons, horses, and men—sank into the deep and rushing stream and there disappeared. The event was a ‘fortunate’ one, since the train of waggons belonged to the ‘blacks’. In the game now being played I designate ‘us’ as the white side. The bridge did not collapse by accident; the whites, knowing that their adversaries had to cross it, had sawn through the pillars—a dexterous stroke that.