Lay Down Your Arms: The Autobiography of Martha von Tilling

by Bertha von Suttner

And again they go further: following the adjutant, at the double quick, who spurs on in front and points the way. There is no halting on the way, although on the right hand and on the left resound shrieks of woe and cries for help; and although also many bullets fall among those who are thus hurrying on, and stretch one and another on the ground—only onwards and over everything. Over men writhing with the pain of their wounds, men trodden down by horses tearing over them, or crushed by guns passing over their limbs, and who, seeing the rescue corps, mutilated as they are, rear themselves up for the last time. Over them, over them!

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This sort of thing goes on for pages of the red book. The relation that the regimental surgeon gave of the march of a sanitary patrol over the battlefield contains many similar, and even more painful things, such as the description of moments when bullets and shells fall in the midst of the dressers and tear up new wounds; or when the course of the battle brings the fight on to the dressing station itself, right up on to the ambulance, and sucks in the whole personnel of the sanitary corps, with the physicians and with the patients into the whirl of the fighting or fleeing or pursuing troops; or when frightened riderless horses all abroad come across the way, and overturn the stretcher on which a severely wounded man is lying, who is now dashed to the earth all shattered. Or this, the most gruesome picture of all—a farmyard, into which a hundred wounded men had been carried, bandaged, and made comfortable—the poor wretches, glad and thankful that their rescue had been effected. Then a shell came and set the whole on fire. A minute afterwards the hospital was in flames. The shrieks, or rather the howls, which resounded from this abode of despair, and which in its wild agony drowned all the other noises, will remain for ever in the memory of any one who heard it. Ah me! it remains for ever in my memory too, though I did not hear it; for, as the regimental surgeon was telling it, I fancied again that Frederick was there—that I heard his shriek out of the burning place of torture.

“You are getting ill, dear madam,” said the narrator, breaking off. “I must have tried your nerves too much.”

But I had not yet heard enough. I assured him that my momentary weakness was the consequence merely of the heat and of a bad night, and I was not too tired to ask for the rest. I kept feeling still that I had not yet heard enough; that of the infernal circles that were being described, the description had not yet been given of the lowest and most hellish; and when once the thirst for the horrible has been awakened it is impossible to stop till it has been slaked by the most horrible of all. And I was right, for there is something more hideous than a battlefield during the fight, viz., one afterwards.

No more thunder of artillery, no more blare of trumpets, no more beat of drum; only the low moans of pain and the rattle of death. In the trampled ground some redly-glimmering pools, lakes of blood; all the crops destroyed, only here and there a piece of land left untouched, and still covered with stubble; the smiling villages of yesterday turned into ruins and rubbish. The trees burned and hacked in the forests, the hedges torn with grape-shot. And on this battle-ground thousands and thousands of men dead and dying—dying without aid. No blossoms of flowers are to be seen on wayside or meadow; but sabres, bayonets, knapsacks, cloaks, overturned ammunition waggons, powder waggons blown into the air, cannon with broken carriages. Near the cannon, whose muzzles are black with smoke, the ground is bloodiest. There the greatest number and the most mangled of dead and half-dead men are lying, literally torn to pieces with shot; and the dead horses, and the half-dead which raise themselves on their feet—such as they have left them—to sink again; then raise themselves up once more and fall down again, till they only raise their head to shriek out their pain-laden death-cry. There is a hollow way quite filled with corpses trodden into the mire. The poor creatures had taken refuge there no doubt to get cover, but a battery has driven over them, and they have been crushed by the horses’ hoofs and the wheels. Many of them are still alive—a pulpy, bleeding mass, but “still alive”.

And yet there is still something more hellish even than all this, and that is the appearance of the most vile scum of humanity, as it shows itself in war—i.e., the appearance and the activity of “the hyenas of the battlefield”. “Then slink on the monsters who grope after the spoils of the dead, and bend over the corpses and over the living, mercilessly tearing off their clothes from their bodies. The boots are dragged off the bleeding limbs, the rings off the wounded hands, or to get the ring the finger is simply chopped off, and if a man tries to defend himself from such a sacrifice, he is murdered by these hyenas; or, in order to make him unrecognisable, they dig his eyes out.”

I shrieked out loud at the doctor’s last words. I again saw the whole scene before me, and the eyes into which the hyena was plunging his knife were Frederick’s soft, blue, beloved eyes.

“Pray, forgive me, dear lady, but it was by your own wish——”

“Oh yes; I desire to hear it all. What you are now describing was the night which follows the battle; and these scenes are enacted by the starlight?”