Lay Down Your Arms: The Autobiography of Martha von Tilling

by Bertha von Suttner

“Rossnitz,” writes Dr. Bauer in his letters—“Rossnitz, a place whose picture will live in my memory till the hour of my death—Rossnitz, whither I was sent by the St. John’s Society six days after the murderous fight, and where the greatest misery which the human fancy can picture was still reigning down to that day. I found there ‘R.’ of ours with 650 wounded, who were lying in wretched barns and stables without any nursing in the midst of death and half-dead men, some of them lying for days in their own offal. It was here that after the erection of the funeral mound of the fallen Lt.-Col. von F—— I was so overcome with pain that for an hour I poured out the hottest tears and could hardly regain self-control in spite of the expenditure of all my moral force. Though as a medical man I am accustomed to look at human suffering in all its forms, and in the exercise of my profession have learnt to bear the shrieks of tortured human nature, yet here in very truth tears which I could not repress welled from my eyes. It was here in Rossnitz that when, on the second day, I found that our powers were not equal to cope with such misery, I lost courage and left off dressing the wounds.”

“In what condition were these 600 men?” It is Dr. Naundorff who is speaking this time. “It is impossible to depict it accurately. Flies were feeding on their open wounds, which were covered with them; their gaze, flaming with fever, wandered about asking and seeking for some help—for refreshment, for water and bread! Coat, shirt, flesh and blood formed in the case of most of them one repulsive mass. Worms were beginning to generate in this mass and to feed on them. A horrible odour filled every place. All these soldiers were lying on the bare ground; only a few had got a little straw on which they could repose their miserable bodies. Some who had nothing under them but clayey, swampy ground had half sunk into the mud it formed; they had not the strength to get out of it. Others lay in a puddle of horrible filth which no pen could consent to describe.”

“In Masloved,” so says Frau Simon, “a place of about fifty houses, there were lying, eight days after the battle, about 700 wounded. It was not so much their shrieks of agony as their abandonment without any consolation which appealed to heaven. In one single barn alone sixty of these poor wretches were crowded. Every one of their wounds had originally been severe, but they had become hopeless in consequence of their unassisted condition, and their want of nursing and feeding; almost all were gangrenous. Limbs crushed by shot formed now mere heaps of putrefying flesh, faces a mere mass of coagulated blood, covered with filth, in which the mouth was represented by a shapeless black opening, from which frightful groans kept welling out. The progress of putrefaction separated whole mortified pieces from these pitiable bodies. The living were lying close to dead bodies which had begun to fall into putrefaction, and for which the worms were getting ready.

“These sixty men, as well as the greater number of the others, lay for a week in the same situation. Their wounds were either not dressed at all, or only in a most imperfect way—since the day of the battle they lay there, incapable of moving from the spot—only scantily fed, and without sufficient water. The bedding under them corrupting with blood and excrement—that is how they passed eight days! living corpses—through whose quivering limbs a stream of poisoned blood hardly circulated. They had not been able to die, and yet how could they expect ever again to return to life? Which is the more astonishing in this matter,” says Frau Simon, in concluding her tale, “the eternal living force of human nature, which could endure all this and yet go on breathing, or the want of efficient assistance?”

What is most astonishing, according to my way of looking at it, is, that men should bring each other into such a state—that men who have seen such a sight should not sink on their knees and swear a passionate oath to make war on war—that if they are princes they do not fling the sword away—or if they are not in any position of power, they do not from that moment devote their whole action in speech or writing, in thought, teaching or business to this one end—Lay down your arms.

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Frau Simon—she was called the Mother of the Lazarettos—was a heroine. For weeks she stayed in that neighbourhood and bore all privations and dangers. Hundreds were saved by her agency. Day and night she worked, provided, directed. Sometimes she was doing the lowest offices beside the sick-beds, sometimes ordering the transport of wounded, sometimes requisitioning necessaries. When she had provided assistance in one place, she hastened without any rest to another; she got a copious supply from Dresden, and conveyed it in spite of all opposing difficulties to the points when help was needed. She undertook to represent the Patriotic Aid Society on the soil of Bohemia, and made a position for herself there equal to that which Florence Nightingale took in the Crimea. And as to me? Exhausted, comfortless, overpowered by pain and disgust, I had no power to render any help. Even in the church—our first station—I had fallen fainting with fatigue on the steps of that altar of the Virgin, and Dr. Bresser had a good deal of trouble to bring me round again. Thence I tottered a little further by his side, and we got into just such a barn as Frau Simon has depicted. In the church there was at least a large space, in which the poor fellows lay side by side; here they were crowded upon each other, or in each other’s arms, in heaps or rolls. Into the church there had come nurses—probably some sanitary corps on its march through—and these had given some help, though insufficient. But here they were mere castaways quite undiscovered—a crawling whining mass of half-putrefied remains of men. Choking disgust laid hold of my throat, the bitterest grief of my breast. I felt as if my heart was breaking in two, and I gave utterance to a resounding shriek. This shriek is the last thing remaining in my memory of that scene.

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When I came to my senses again, I found myself in a railway carriage in motion. Opposite me sat Dr. Bresser. When he perceived that I had opened my eyes, and was looking about me astonished and questioning, he took my hand.

“Yes, yes, Lady Martha,” he said, “this is a second-class carriage. You are not dreaming. You are here in company with a slightly wounded officer and your friend Bresser, and we are on our way to Vienna.”