I pressed the dear creature to my heart, and to show him that I had understood him, I too faltered out: “My son, my son!”
At the same time I recollected my girl, his girl, and my resolution to live was fixed. But the pain was too intolerable. I fell into intellectual darkness; and not at this time only. For the space of years, at ever-increasing intervals, I remained subject to recurring attacks of abstraction, of which afterwards in the state of health absolutely no recollection remained to me. Now for several years I have been free from them. Free, that is, from the insensibility of my spirit pangs, but not from conscious attacks of the bitterest pain of soul. Eighteen years have gone since the 1st of February, 1871, but the deep resentment and the deep mourning, which the tragedy of that day awoke in me, no time can remove, even should I live a hundred years. Even though in these later times the days come ever more frequently in which I, absorbed in the events of the present, do not think about the misery of the past, in which I even sympathise so livelily with the joy of my children as to feel myself also filled with something like joy in my life, yet no night passes, no, not one, in which my wretchedness does not seize on me. That is something quite peculiar, something thing I can hardly describe, and which only those will understand who have experienced something similar themselves. It appears to me like a kind of double life of the soul. Although the single consciousness in the waking condition can sometimes be so taken possession of by the things of the outer world that it from time to time forgets, yet in the depths of my personality there is a second consciousness still which always retains that awful recollection with the same true pain; and that self, when the other has gone to sleep, asserts itself, and rouses the other up, as it were, to share its pain with it. Every night, and it must be at the same hour, I wake with an indescribable feeling of pain. My heart contracts painfully, and I feel as if forced to weep bitter tears and utter sighs of agony. This lasts a few seconds, without my awakened self quite knowing why the other unhappy self is so unhappy. The next stage after this is a compassion embracing the whole world, and a sigh, full of the most painful pity: “Oh you poor, poor men!” And then I see next shrieking shapes which are being torn to pieces by a rain of murderous shot, and then I recollect that my dearest love too was so torn in pieces.
But in my dreams, wonderful to relate, I never knew anything of my loss. Thus it happened often that I was speaking to Frederick and conversing with him as during his life. Whole scenes from the past were represented, but never any sad ones, our meeting again after Schleswig-Holstein, our jokes over Sylvia’s cradle, our walking tours in Switzerland, our hours of study over favourite books, and occasionally that same picture in the evening light, where my white-haired husband with his garden-shears was pruning the rose-branches, and was saying with a smile to me: “Are we not a happy old couple?”
I have never put off my mourning, not even at my son’s wedding. When any one has loved, possessed, and lost such a husband, and lost him as I did, her love “must be stronger than death,” her passion for vengeance can never cool. But whom does this anger threaten? On whom would I execute vengeance? The men who did the deed were not in fault. The only guilty party is the spirit of war, and it is on this that my work of persecution, all too weak as it is, must be exercised.
My son Rudolf agrees with my views, though this of course does not prevent him from going through his military exercises every year, and could not prevent him, either, from marching to the frontier, if the European war, which is always hanging over our heads, should break out. And then, perhaps, I shall have once more to see how all that is dearest to me in the world has to be sacrificed on the altar of Moloch, how a hearth blessed with love, and which is the sign to my old age of all its rest and peace, has to be laid in ruins. Shall I have to see all this once more, and then once more to fall into irrecoverable madness, or shall I yet behold the triumph of justice and humanity, which now, at this very moment, is striving for accomplishment in widely extended associations and in all strata of society?
The red volumes, my diary, contain no further entries. Under the date February 1, 1871, I marked a great cross, and so closed the history of my life also. Only the so-called Protocol, a blue volume which Frederick began along with me and in which we described the phases of the idea of peace, has been since that time enriched with a few notes.
In the first years which succeeded the Franco-German war, I had few opportunities, even apart from my diseased condition of mind, for marking any tidings of peace. The two most influential nations on the Continent were revelling in thoughts of war; the one proudly looking back on the victories she had gained, the other longingly expecting her impending revenge. The current of these feelings gradually began to subside. On this side of the Rhine the statues of Germania were a little less shouted over, and on that side those of Strasbourg decked with fewer mourning-wreaths. Then, after ten years, the voice of the servants of peace might again be heard. It was Bluntschli, the great professor of international law, the same with whom my lost one had put himself in communication, who set to work to obtain the views of various dignitaries and Governments on the subject of national peace. And then the silent “thinker-out of battles” let fall the well-known expression: “Everlasting peace is a dream, and not a pretty dream either”.
“Oh, of course,” I wrote at the time in my blue book, beside Moltke’s words, “if Luther had asked the Pope what he thought of the revolt from Rome, the answer he would have received would not have been very favourable to the Reformation.” To-day there is hardly any one left who has not dreamed this dream, or who would not confess its beauty. And there are watchers too; watchers conspicuous enough, who are longing to awake mankind out of the long sleep of savagery, and energetically and with a single eye to their object collecting themselves for the purpose of planting the white flag. Their battle-cry is, “War on War,” their watchword, the only word which can have power to deliver from ruin Europe armed against herself is, “Lay down your arms”. In all places, in England and France, in Italy, in the northern countries, in Germany, in Switzerland, in America, associations have been formed, whose object is, through the compulsion of public opinion, through the commanding pressure of the people’s will, to move the Governments to submit their differences in future to an Arbitration Court, appointed by themselves, and so once for all to enthrone justice in place of brute force. That this is no dream, no “enthusiasm,” is proved by the facts that the questions of the Alabama, the Caroline Islands, and several others have already been settled in this manner. And it is not only people without power or position, like the poor blacksmith of a former time, who are now co-operating in this work of peace; no, members of parliament, bishops, professors, senators, ministers are inscribed on the lists. I know all this (which is unknown to most people), because I have kept in communication with all those persons, with whom Frederick established relations in the pursuit of his noble aim. What I found out, by means of these persons, about the successes and the designs of the peace societies has been duly entered in The Protocol of Peace. The last of these entries is the following letter which the president of the International Arbitration and Peace Association, having its headquarters in London, wrote me in answer to an inquiry bearing on this subject:—
“International Arbitration and Peace Association,
“London, 41 Outer Temple, July, 1889.
“Madam,—You have honoured me by inquiring as to the actual position of the great question to which you have devoted your life. Here is my answer: At no time, perhaps, in the history of the world has the cause of peace and good-will been more hopeful. It seems that, at last, the long night of death and destruction will pass away; and we who are on the mountain-top of humanity think that we see the first streaks of the dawn of the kingdom of Heaven upon earth. It may seem strange that we should say this at a moment when the world has never seen so many armed men and such frightful engines of destruction ready for their accursed work; but when things are at their worst they begin to mend. Indeed, the very ruin which these armies are bringing in their train produces universal consternation; and soon the oppressed peoples must rise and with one voice say to their rulers: ‘Save us, and save our children from the famine which awaits us, if these things continue; save civilisation and all the triumphs which the efforts of wise and great men have accomplished in its name; save the world from a return to barbarism, rapine and terror!’