Lay Down Your Arms: The Autobiography of Martha von Tilling

by Bertha von Suttner

The short year of my married life lay behind me like a dream. No doubt I had been desperately in love with my handsome hussar—no doubt my loving husband had made me very happy—no doubt the parting had caused me grievous pain and his loss wild agony! but that was all over—over! My love had assuredly never grown so closely into the whole existence of my soul that I could never have survived its uprooting, never have lost the pain of it; our life together had been too short for that. We had adored each other like a pair of ardent lovers; but to have entered into each other, heart to heart, soul to soul, to be fast bound to each other in mutual reverence and friendship, to have shared for long years our joys and our sorrows—this, which is the lot of some married people, had not been given to us two. Even I was assuredly not his highest object, not something indispensable, otherwise he could not so cheerfully and with no compulsion of duty (for his own regiment was never ordered out) have left me. Besides, in these four years I had gradually become another creature, my spiritual horizon had enlarged in many respects, I had come into possession of acquirements and views of which I had no notion when I married, and of which Arno also—as I could now perceive—had no idea either, and so—if he could have risen again—he would have stood in the position of a stranger towards many parts of my present spiritual life. How had this change come about with me? This is how it happened.

One year of my widowhood had passed. The first phase—despair—had given place to mourning. But it was very deep mourning, and my heart was bleeding. Of any renewal of the intercourse of society I would not hear. I thought that from this time my life must be occupied only with the education of my son Rudolf. I called the child no longer Ruru, or corporal. The baby-jokes of the pair of married lovers were over. The little one turned into “my son Rudolf”—the sacred centre of all my effort, hope, and love. In order to be one day a good teacher for him, or rather in order to follow his studies, and be able to become his intellectual companion, I wanted to acquire myself all the knowledge that I could, and with this view reading was the only amusement I allowed myself; and so I plunged anew into the treasures of the library of our château. I was especially impelled to take up again the study which was my peculiar favourite—history. Latterly, when the war had demanded such heavy sacrifices from my contemporaries and myself, my former enthusiasm had become much cooled, and I now wished to light it up again by appropriate reading. And, in fact, it brought me sometimes a kind of consolation, if I had been reading a few pages of accounts of battles with the praises of the heroes which are the natural continuation of those accounts, to think that the death of my poor husband and my own widowed grief were comprised as items in a similar grand historical process. I say “sometimes”—not always. I could not get myself back entirely and absolutely into the feelings of my girlhood, when I wanted to rival the Maid of Orleans. Much, very much, in the over-wrought tirades of glory, which accompanied the accounts of the battles, sounded to me false and hollow, if at the same time I set before me the terrors of the fight—as false and hollow as a sham coin paid as the price for a genuine pearl. The pearl, life—can it be fairly paid for with the tinsel phrases of historical glory?

I had soon exhausted the provision of historical works to be found in our library. I begged our bookseller to send me some new historical work to look at. He sent Thomas Buckle’s History of Civilisation in England. “The work is not finished,” wrote the bookseller, “but the accompanying two volumes, which form the introduction, compose by themselves a complete whole, and their appearance has excited, not only in England, but in the rest of the educated world, the greatest attention. The author, it is said, has in this work laid the foundation for a new conception of history.”

Yes, indeed, quite a new one. When I had read these two volumes, and then read them again, I felt like a man who had dwelt all his life in the bottom of a narrow valley, and then, for the first time, had been taken up to one of the mountain tops around, from which a long stretch of country was to be seen, covered with buildings and gardens and ending in the boundless ocean. I will not assert that I—only twenty years old and who had received only the well-known superficial “young lady’s” education—understood the book in all the extent of its bearings, or, to keep to the former metaphor, that I appreciated the loftiness of the monumental buildings and the immensity of the ocean which lay before my astonished gaze; but I was dazzled, overcome; I saw that beyond the narrow valley in which I was born there lay a wide, wide world, of which, up to this time, I had never heard. It is not till now that, after fifteen or twenty years I have read the book again and have studied other works conceived in the same spirit, I may, perhaps, take it on myself to say that I understand it. One thing, however, was clear to me even then: that the history of mankind was not decided by, as the old theory taught, kings and statesmen, nor by the wars and treaties that were created by the greed of the former or the cunning of the latter, but by the gradual development of the intellect. The chronicles of courts and battles which are strung together in the history books represent isolated phenomena of the condition of culture at those epochs, not the causes which produce those conditions. Of the old-fashioned admiration with which other historical writers are accustomed to relate the lives of mighty conquerors and devastators of countries I could find absolutely nothing in Buckle. On the contrary, he brings proof that the estimation in which the warrior class is held is in inverse ratio to the height of culture which the nation has reached; the lower you go in the barbaric past, the more frequent are the wars of the time, the narrower the limits of peace, province against province, city against city, family against family. He lays stress on the fact that, as society progresses, not only war itself, but the love of war will be found to diminish. That word spoke to my innermost heart. Even in my short spiritual experience this diminution had been going on, and though I had often repressed this movement as something cowardly or unworthy, believing that I alone was the cause of such a fault within me, now, on the contrary, I perceived that this feeling in me was only the faint echo of the spirit of the age, that learned men and thinkers, like this English historian, and innumerable men along with him, had lost the old idolatry for war, which, just as it had been a phase of my childhood, was represented in this book as being also a phase of the childhood of society.

And so in Buckle’s History of Civilisation I had found just the opposite of what I sought. And yet I counted what I found as all pure gain. I felt myself elevated by it, enlightened, pacified. Once I tried to talk with my father about this point of view that I had just attained, but in vain. He would not follow me up the mountain, i.e., he would not read the book, and so it was to no purpose to talk with him of things which one could only see from the top of it.

Now followed the year—my second phase—in which mourning turned into melancholy. I now read and studied with even greater assiduity. This first work of Buckle had given me an appetite for reflection, and given me an inkling of an enlarged view of the world. I wanted now to enjoy this yet more and more; and therefore I followed this book up with a great many more conceived in the same spirit. And the interest, the enjoyment, which I found in these studies helped me to pass into the third phase, i.e., to cause the disappearance of my melancholy. But when the last change was wrought in me, i.e., when my joy in life awoke again, then all at once books contented me no longer, then I saw all at once that ethnography and anthropology, comparative mythology, and all the other ’ologies and ’graphies were insufficient to set my longings at rest, that for a young woman in my position, life had other flowers of bliss all ready, and for which I had only to stretch my hand out. And so it came about that in the winter of 1863 I offered myself to introduce my younger sisters into the world and opened my saloons to Vienna society.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

“Martha, Countess Dotzky, a rich young widow.” It was under this promising title that I had to play my part in the comedy of the “great world”. And I must say that the character suited me. It is no slight pleasure to get greetings from all sides, to be fêted, spoiled, on all hands, and overwhelmed with distinctions. It is no slight enjoyment, after nearly four years’ separation from the world, to come all at once into a whirlpool of all sorts of pleasures, to make the acquaintance of interesting and influential persons, to be present at some splendid entertainment almost every day, and when there to feel yourself the centre of universal attention.

We three sisters had got the nickname of the “three goddesses of Mount Ida”; and the “Apples of Discord,” which the several young Parises distributed amongst us, were innumerable. I, of course, in the dignity of my description in the list of dramatis personæ as “rich young widow,” was the one generally preferred. Besides it was taken as a settled thing in our family, and even ever so little in my own inward consciousness, that I was to marry again. Aunt Mary was no longer in the habit in her homilies of dwelling on the blessed one who “was waiting for me above,” for if I, in my few short years on earth that separated me from the grave, united myself to a second husband, an event desired by Aunt Mary herself, the pleasantness of the meeting again in Heaven would be a good deal spoiled thereby.

Every one around me seemed to have forgotten Arno’s existence. I was the only one who did not. Though time had relieved my pain about him, his image had not been extinguished. One may cease to mourn for one’s dead; mourning does not depend quite on the will, but one ought not to forget them. I looked on this dead silence about the dead, which was preserved by my entourage, as a second and additional slaughter, and shrank from killing the poor fellow in my thoughts. I had made it my duty to speak every day to little Rudolf of his father, and the child had always to say in his prayers at night: “God make me good and brave as my dear father Arno would have me!”