– Bookm. 23: 643. Ag. ’06. 360w. N. Y. Times. 11: 419. Je. 30, ’06. 1240w.
Suttner, Bertha, baroness von. “Ground arms:” “Die waffen nieder;” a romance of European war, tr. from the German by Alice Asbury Abbott. †$1.25. McClurg.
—Same. With title “Lay down your arms: the autobiography of Martha Von Tilling: authorized tr. by T. Holmes.” 75c. Longmans.
This book, which won the Nobel peace prize for 1905, is a powerful plea for universal disarmament. It is the autobiography of an Austrian countess born with true martial spirit, her only grief that she cannot win laurels on the field of battle. At seventeen she marries a dashing young lieutenant and one short year later, clasping her fatherless son to her heart she awakens to the real horrors of war. Her hatred of war and warfare is justified by the story of the thirty years that follow. She draws pictures of agony, disease and mutilation as seen in 1864, 1866, and again when she lost the love of her mature years at Paris, and she shows between these periods such happy years of peace that the reader shudders with her at the contrast.
“Regarded merely as a novel, the book has fine qualities—the reader’s interest never flags, and the realism is so vigorous that one who does not know the facts will continually feel inclined to suspect that the autobiography is fictitious only as far as the names of the personages are concerned.”
+ + Cath. World. 82: 841. Mr. ’06. 1320w.
“This version ... is both idiomatic and exact.”
+ Dial. 40: 161. Mr. 1, ’06. 50w. + Ind. 60: 1492. Je. 21. ’06. 150w. Lit. D. 32: 254. F. 17, ’06. 170w.
“Constructively it shows no literary genius, and its war pictures fall far short of those in Tolstoy’s ‘War and peace.’”