I could not catch any more. “Poor soldiers,” the word kept coming back to me for a long time, she had pronounced it with so much pity. Yes, “poor” indeed, and the more one could do to send them help and comfort the better. But it ran through my head: “If they had not sent these poor people into this misery at all, would not that have been much better?”
I tried to scare away the thought. It must be so! It must be so! There is no other excuse for the cruelty of making war except what is contained in the little word “must”.
Now I went on my way again. The friend whom I was going to visit lived quite close to the Landhaus on the Kohlmarkt. As I walked along I went into a book and print shop to buy myself a new map of Upper Italy—ours had become quite riddled with sticking in the little flags on pins. Besides me there were many other customers in the place. All were asking for maps, diagrams, and so forth. Now came my turn.
“Do you want the theatre of war, too, please?” asked the bookseller.
“You have guessed it.”
“No difficulty in that. There is hardly anything else bought.”
He went to get what I wanted, and while he wrapped up the roll in paper for me, he said to a gentleman standing next to me: “You see, professor, just now things go badly for those who write or publish books on belles lettres or science. No one asks for such things. As long as the war lasts no interest is taken by any one in intellectual matters. It is a bad time for writers and booksellers.”
“And a bad time for the nation,” replied the professor, “since a loss of interest in such things is naturally followed by its decline in the intellectual scale.”
“And there is my father wishing,” thought I for the third time, “that for the good of the country a thirty years’ war——”
I now took part audibly in the conversation.