But my self-confidence was too completely crushed. It did not so quickly wake to new force. At the same time a hard sorrow befell me. Word came from Venice that my cousin Elvira was very ill, that her lung trouble had taken a turn for the worse, and that she was confined to her bed. Not many days later there came the news of her death. For the first time in my life I learned how it feels to lose a dear one. An incomprehensible emptiness, an unintelligible shuddering....
The bereaved mother came to us. She was on the verge of despair. Now of course all singing was hushed in the house.
The year 1866 brought me still another severe loss, that of my much-loved paternal friend Fürstenberg. He departed this life after a brief illness at his residence in Vienna. And one thing more that unblest year brought,—war.
I am ashamed to say it again, but this event made no impression upon me—none at all. I took knowledge of it just as one learns by hearsay that somewhere in the distance floods have set in, or fires broken out,—elemental events, of a very lamentable nature, but they will pass by. And at bottom the thing is not uninteresting—it is something historical. The Prussians will of course get a thrashing; and if we should lose the game, there would be peace again after it anyhow. We had no one dear to us in the army, so we were not anxious. I read no newspaper; and the stories that they told,—victories of the Prussians in Hannover, at Frankfurt, later also in Bohemia (but not much of it came to our ears, and if anything did I have forgotten it),—nothing of all that has remained imprinted on my memory: a proof that it was heartily indifferent to me.
To-day I cannot understand how I could be so stupid. Even apart from my future ardent sentiments in behalf of peace, which ought at that time to have been already dormant in the young woman of twenty-three and to have been awakened on this occasion, such a tremendous event should at any rate, even from the ordinary point of view, have stirred me, should have filled me with some kind of emotion, either patriotic enthusiasm or tingling human sympathy or, if nothing more, anxiety and terror; but there was nothing, nothing.
It would not be necessary to set down in these reminiscences the confession of such a fact, doubly humiliating for a future opponent of war, but the incongruity that is here apparent is a thing that distinctly deserves scrutiny. The most interesting thing for the reader of memoirs, I think, is always the opportunity to observe how and whereby certain destinies, talents, or deeds, which are known to pertain to the writer of the memoir, have been prepared for and developed; one wishes to trace out what inner aptitudes, and what outer influences, have contributed to the formation of the total product. From this there always result useful lessons and bits of knowledge. Provided, of course, that the autobiographer is entirely sincere: useful lessons are to be drawn only from unfalsified facts.
Here, in bringing to my present consciousness the conception of war that I then had, I myself find occasion for an interesting observation, an instruction worth taking to heart. Human society as a whole passes through just such stages of shifting ideas, knowledges, conceptions, and judgments, as does an individual man. Should not I to-day fully understand, and fully pardon, the fact that the generality of men in their preponderating mass take as cold and unconcerned an attitude toward war (when it does not lay hold directly of their own lives) as did I myself a few decades ago? Should I be amazed that this same generality regards the occasional breaking out of wars as a matter of course, a thing involved in natural law, which one may possibly sigh over, but which one cannot condemn and cannot antagonize? Against the inevitable one raises no voice of blame, strikes no blow.
And as the individual (in the case in hand, I myself) may under the influence of experiences and considerations come to have quite altered views, so may and will the generality obtain new insights and act accordingly.
When to-day in certain circles I meet with case-hardened misconception of the peace movement, when they try to show me the obvious naturalness and historical necessity of the scourge of war by arguments at which wrath and discouragement threaten to take possession of me, all I need to do, that my wrath may subside and my courage rise, is to think back to my own past. Moreover, in the matters of war and peace the generality is not even in such a state of stupidity any longer, for by this time almost every one has at least heard something of the movement, and the number of those who sympathize with it or even take an active part in it is growing every day. A greater and greater number of people are taking sides on the issue, either for it or against it; but at the time of which I am now talking the fact was that no one knew anything about the peace movement, because there was none; for the sporadic emergence of individual minds who took a stand for the abolition of war cannot be called “a movement.”
We spent the summer of 1886 once more in Homburg vor der Höhe, and although the war penetrated into our very near neighborhood there were no indications of it to be detected in the life of the bathers and gamblers at that cosmopolitan watering-place. The official band played; Patti sang; the Spaniard Garcia, who had become famous for his luck at gambling, continued to make his harvest of a hundred thousand francs a day at the trente-et-quarante table—until one fine morning he did begin to lose, and gradually put in all the millions he had won, and something of his own besides.