Lay Down Your Arms: The Autobiography of Martha von Tilling

by Bertha von Suttner

“Don’t trouble about that, aunt,” I said, to console her. “If that curse fell from the lips of everybody—yes, of everybody—it would be a great blessing to humanity.”

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Such was the cholera week at Grumitz. In the space of seven days nine inhabitants of the château had been snatched away: my father, Lilly, Rosa, Otto, my maid Netty, the cook, the coachman, and two grooms. In the village, during the same time, over eighty persons died.

Stated in this dry way all this sounds like a noteworthy statistical fact, or if it stands recorded in a tale book, like an extravagant play of the author’s fancy. But it is neither so dry as the one nor so romantically terrible as the other. It is a cold, intelligible fact, full of sadness.

It was not Grumitz alone in our neighbourhood that was so hardly hit. Whoever chooses to search the annals of the neighbouring villages and châteaux may find there plenty of similar cases of enormous calamity. For example, there is Schloss Stockern, in the vicinity of the little town of Horn. Of the family which inhabited it, during the time from the 9th to the 13th of August, 1866, and also after the departure of the Prussian troops quartered there, four members of the family—Rudolf aged twenty, his sisters Emily and Bertha, and his uncle Candide; and, besides them, five of the servants succumbed to the plague. The youngest daughter, Pauline von Engelshofen, was spared. She afterwards married a Baron Suttner, and she, even now, still tells with a shudder the tale of the cholera week at Stockern.

At that time such a resignation to woe and death had come over me that I was in daily expectation that Death, whose characters had been stamped on the land for the last two months, would carry off myself and my loved ones. My Frederick, my Rudolf; I actually wept for them in anticipation. And yet, along with all this, and in the midst of my trouble, I still had sweet moments. Such were when leaning on my husband’s breast, and encircled by his loving arms, I could pour my tears out on his faithful heart. How gently then would he speak words to me, not of consolation, but of fellow-feeling and love; so that my own heart warmed and expanded to them. No, the world is not so bad, I was compelled against my will to think. The world is not all lamentation and cruelty. Compassion and love are alive in it—at present, it is true, only in individual souls, not as an all-pervading law and a prevailing normal condition. Still they are present; and just as these feelings glow in us twain, sweetening, by means of their gentle contact, even this time of suffering, just as they dwell in many other, nay, in most other souls, so they will one day come to an outbreak, and will dominate the general relations of the human family. The future belongs to goodness.

CHAPTER XV.

Summer sojourn in Switzerland.—My husband’s researches in the history of the Geneva convention, and in international law.—Seclusion and mourning.—Visit to Vienna.—Frederick enters a new army, the army of peace.—Visit to Berlin.—On our way we visit the battlefield of Sadowa on All Souls’ Day.—The emperor as a mourner.—Aunt Cornelia: her grief and the consolations of religion.—The army chaplain.—A military-theological discussion.—We are summoned to Aunt Mary’s deathbed.—Retired life at Vienna.—Minister “To-be-sure”.—Political talks.—Universal liability to serve.

WE passed the remainder of the summer in the neighbourhood of Geneva. Dr. Bresser’s powers of persuasion had at last succeeded in moving us to fly from the infected country. I at first strove against leaving so quickly the graves of my family, and, as I have said, I was filled with such a resignation to death that I had become wholly apathetic, and held every attempt at flight to be useless; but in spite of all this Bresser was certain to conquer when he represented to me that it was my maternal duty to carry little Rudolf out of the way of danger as well as I could.

That we chose Switzerland as our place of refuge resulted from Frederick’s wish. He wanted to become acquainted with the men who had called the “Red Cross” into life, and to gain information on the spot about the proceedings of the conferences which had been held, as well as about the further aims of the convention.