The train began to move. That is just the time when every traveller brings before his mind’s eye the object towards which he is being taken. I had often before travelled over the same ground; and then there lay before me a visit to a château full of guests, or a pleasant bathing-place—my wedding-tour, a blessed memory, was made on this same route, to meet with a brilliant and loving reception in the metropolis of “Prussia”. What a different sound that last word has assumed since then! And to-day? What is our object to-day? A battlefield and the hospitals round it—the abodes of death and suffering. I shuddered——
“My dear lady,” said one of the physicians, “I think you are ill yourself. You look so pale and so suffering.”
I looked up; the speaker had a friendly, youthful appearance. I guessed that this was his first service on being recently promoted to the rank of surgeon. It was good of him to devote his first service to this dangerous and laborious duty! I felt grateful to these men who were sitting in the carriage with me for the relief which they were in the act of bringing to the sufferers. And to the self-sacrificing sisters—really of mercy—I paid heartfelt admiration and thanks. Yet what was it that each of these good men had to bestow? An ounce of help for 1000 hundredweights of need. These courageous nuns must, I thought, bear in their hearts for all men that overmastering love which filled mine for my own husband; as I had felt just now that if the fearfully disfigured and repulsive soldier who was gurgling at my feet had been my husband, all my repulsion would have vanished, so these women must have felt towards every brother-man, and surely through the power of a higher love—that for their chosen bridegroom, Christ. But alas! here also these noble women brought an ounce only—one ounce of love to a place where 1000 hundredweights of hatred were raging!
“No, doctor,” I replied to the sympathetic question of the young physician. “I am not ill, only a little exhausted.”
The staff-surgeon now joined in the conversation.
“Your husband, madam, as Baron S—— told me, was wounded at Königgrätz, and you are travelling thither to nurse him. Do you know in which of the villages around he is lying?”
No, I did not know.
“My destination is Königinhof,” I replied. “There a physician awaits me who is a friend of mine—Dr. Bresser.”
“I know him. He was with me when we made a three days’ examination of the field of battle.”
“Examined the field of battle!” I repeated with a shudder. “Let us hear.”