Lay Down Your Arms: The Autobiography of Martha von Tilling

by Bertha von Suttner

What a long, long night that was! Though in reality only between three and four hours passed before sunrise, how endless these hours necessarily seemed to us, their course being marked, not by the ticking of a clock, but by the helpless cries of fellow-men for aid.

At last the morning dawned. Now we could act. Frau Simon and Dr. Bresser took the road again to see whether they could rouse up some of the concealed inhabitants of the village. They succeeded. Out of the ruins here and there one or two peasants crawled forth, at first morose and distrustful. When, however, Dr. Bresser spoke to them in their own language, and Frau Simon urged them with her soft voice, they agreed to give their services. It was necessary before all things to recruit all the other hidden villagers, so that they might help in the work—bury the dead that were lying about, get the wells into working order so as to procure water for the living, collect the field kettles that lay scattered about the roads so as to have vessels, empty the knapsacks of the slain and the dead, and use the linen they contained for the wounded. Now arrived also a Prussian staff-surgeon with men and aid materials, and then the work of bringing help to these poor creatures could be undertaken with some success. Now the moment was come for me too, when I might perhaps discover him at whose fancied call I had undertaken this luckless journey, and whose recollection whipped up to some extent my failing powers.

Frau Simon betook herself, under the conduct of the Prussian surgeon, first to the château, where most of the wounded were lying. Dr. Bresser chose to search through the other places in the village. I preferred to keep with my friend, and went along with him. That Frederick was not lying in the château the doctor had discovered by a previous look round it.

We had hardly gone a hundred paces when loud cries of pain smote on our ears. They came from the open door of the little village church. We went in. There more than a hundred men were lying on the hard stone pavement, severely wounded, crippled. With feverish, wandering eyes they shrieked and cried for water. I had nearly sunk down even on the threshold; still I walked through the whole row. I was seeking for Frederick. He was not there.

Bresser with his people set themselves to attend to the poor fellows. I leaned against a side altar, and contemplated the scene of woe with infinite horror.

And this was the temple of the God of Love! These were the wonder-working saints who were there folding their hands so piously in the niches and on the walls, and lifting up their heads with the golden glories round them! “Oh Mother of God—holy Mother of God, one drop of water; have mercy on me!” I heard a poor soldier pray. That prayer he had probably been addressing all the long day to the gaudily-painted dumb image. Ah poor men! Till you yourselves have listened to the command of love which God has put into your own hearts you will always call in vain upon God’s love. So long as cruelty is not overcome in your own selves you have nothing to hope from the compassion of heaven.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Ah, how much I had to see and to go through in the whole of this same day! It would in truth be the simplest way and the most pleasant to pursue the narrative no further. One shuts one’s eyes and turns away one’s head when something altogether too horrid presents itself—even the recollection has the power to make one shut one’s eyes. And if there is no more power to help (and what can be altered in this stony past?) why torture oneself and others by writing up these horrors?

Why? I will answer the question afterwards. Now I can only say I must do it.

More still. I will not merely tax my own memory that I may be able to relate what I have in view, for my powers of perception were far too weak to bear the burden of the events, but I will also add what Frau Simon, Dr. Bresser, and the Saxon inspector of field hospitals, Dr. Naundorff, told me. As in Horonewos, so also in many of the villages in this neighbourhood, Hell had set up branch establishments. It was so in Sweti, in Hradeck, in Problus. So in Pardubitz, where, when the Prussians first took possession of it, “over one thousand severely wounded men, operations and amputations, were lying about, some dying, some already dead, corpses mixed with those in the act of death, and those who envied them their end, many with nothing on but bloody shirts, so that no one could tell even what countrymen they were. All those who had still a spark of life in them were shrieking for water and bread, writhing with the pain of their wounds, and begging for death as a blessing.”