“Oh,” I groaned, when he was gone, “that was a torture!”
“Yes,” said Frederick; “it was. Our want of straightforwardness especially was uncomfortable to me, and particularly the false premises under which we got him to display his eloquence. At one moment I was on the point of saying to him: ‘Stop, reverend sir, I myself entertain the same views against war as my wife, and what you are saying only serves, as far as I am concerned, to enable me to see more clearly the weakness of your arguments’. But I held my tongue. Why interfere with an honest man’s conviction—a conviction which is besides the foundation of his profession in life?”
“Conviction? Are you certain of that? Does he really believe that he is speaking the truth, or does he purposely deceive his common soldiers, when he promises them an assured victory through the assistance of a God of whom he nevertheless must know this—that He is invoked in exactly the same way by the enemy? These appeals to ‘our people’ and to ‘our cause’ as the only righteous one, and one which is God’s cause too, were surely only possible at a time when one people shut out all other peoples, and considered itself as the only one entitled to exist—the only one beloved of God. And then all these promises of heaven, with the view of more easily procuring the sacrifice of earthly life, all these ceremonies, consecrations, oaths, hymns which are intended to awaken in the breast of the man ordered into war that ‘joy in death’ (repulsive words to me!) which they so admire; is it not——”
“Everything has two sides, Martha,” said Frederick interrupting me. “It is because we deprecate war that everything which supports and excuses it, everything which veils its horrors, appears hateful to us.”
“Yes, of course; because the hateful thing is upheld thereby.”
“But not thereby only. All institutions stand on roots of a thousand fibres, and as long as they exist it must be a good thing that those feelings and methods of thought should persist by which they are excused, by which they are rendered not only tolerable, but even beloved. How many a poor fellow is helped through his death-agony by that same ‘joy in death’ into which he has been educated! how many a pious soul relies in all confidence on the help of God of which he has been assured by the preacher! how much innocent vanity and proud feeling of honour are awakened and satisfied by those ceremonies! how many hearts beat higher at the sound of those hymns! From the total of the pain which war has brought on men, we must at least deduct that pain which war poets and war preachers have contrived to sing away and lie away.”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
We were summoned away from Berlin very hurriedly. A telegram announced to me that Aunt Mary was very ill and wished to see me.
I found the old lady given up by her physicians.
“It is my turn now,” she said. “For my own part I am right willing to go. Since my poor brother and the three children were snatched away, this world has had no more joy for me. Apart from anything else, I shall never more have the strength to bear up after such a blow. I shall find the others there above. Conrad and Lilly are also united there; it was not ordained that they should be united here on earth.”