Lay Down Your Arms quotes

Girlish Days and Girlish Fancies—Youthful Enthusiasm for War—Education—“Coming Out”—An Important Visit to Marienbad—Love at First Sight—Marriage—A First Child—The Baby-Soldier—Threatenings of War—Declaration of War with Sardinia—My Husband Is to See Active Service.

At seventeen I was a thoroughly overwrought creature.

This perhaps I should no longer be aware of today, if it were not that my diaries have been preserved.

… which I longed—see entry of September 19, 1853—was not to be compassed by me, and so I had plainly to suffer under the consciousness that the great deeds after which my soul thirsted must remain ever unaccomplished, that my life, considered fundamentally, was a failure.

Ah! why had I not come into the world as a boy?

(another fruitless reproach against destiny which often found expression in the red volumes); in that case I would have been able to strive after and to achieve “the exalted.” Of female heroism history affords but few examples.

I fell on my knees. I could not help it.

Silently, but still as earnestly as if with a cry, there rose the prayer from my soul to heaven for “Peace! peace!”

“My silly child, what are you doing?”

If a few days had passed thus, without my hearing from Arno, and a list of killed and wounded was published, with what terror did I not read over the names!

It is as great a strain as for the holder of a lottery ticket to look through the winning numbers in the list of a drawing⁠—but in the opposite sense; what one seeks in this case, well knowing, thank God, that the chance is against one, is the chief prize in misery.

The first time that I read the names of the slain—and I had been four days without news—and saw that the name of Arno Dotzky was not among them, I folded my hands and cried aloud: “My God, I thank Thee!”

“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.”

… 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.

Everyone 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.

“What say you, Baron Tilling?” I asked.

“I should have wished for the man a decoration to adorn his valiant breast, and a bullet to pierce his hard heart. Both would have been well deserved.”

I threw the speaker a warm, thankful glance; but the others, except the doctor, seemed affected unpleasantly by the words they had just heard. A little pause ensued. As the French say: “Cela avait jeté un froid.”

If I can succeed in forming you into such a man as he is—if some day I may be wept by you, as he weeps for his mother—I shall have gained my end.”

It is surely a foolish habit⁠—this diary-writing.

These wishes, plans, and views, always changing, vanishing and coming anew, which form the current of our soul’s life—to strive to immortalise them by writing them down is a mistake to start with, and brings before oneself, when one peruses it in after years, the …

‘Oh! that goes for nothing.’ Children sometimes make the same agreement in their games. ‘If I do this or that it goes for nothing,’ you may hear them say. And in the game of war the same conventions, though unspoken, apply.

Manslaughter is no longer to count as manslaughter; robbery counts no longer as robbery; theft is not thieving but ‘requisition’; villages burnt represent, not conflagrations, but ‘positions taken.’

To all the precepts of the statute book, of the catechism, of the moral law, as long as the game lasts, the same applies—‘It goes for nothing.’

“

Because my thoughts never rose to the hope that I could win you.

It was not till you ordered me, by the memory of my mother—ordered me to come to you, and to remain near you—that I understood that you were favourably disposed to me, that I might dedicate my life to you.”

Tilling was now obliged to smile. He threw me a look which said plainly “I know you better,” and answered aloud:

“I think so too; she really only fell in love with my uniform.”

“I admire your penetration, doctor. Yes, we are happy. Shall we remain so? That, unfortunately, depends not on ourselves but on Fate. …

Over every happiness there hangs a danger, and the more heartfelt is the former so much the more terrible the latter.

”

“By the tribunals. But nations have no such over them.”

“No more have savages,” said Dr. Bresser, coming to my help. “Ergo, nations in their intercourse with each other are still uncivilised, and it will take a good long time yet before we come to the point of establishing an international tribunal of arbitration.”

“We shall never get to that,” said my father. “There are things which can only be fought out, and cannot be settled by law.

“Well, I would, of feudal rank. The future has no need for ‘nobility.’ ”

“So much the more need for noble men,” said Frederick in confirmation.

“And this new race will put up with their slaps on the face?”

… that it was only their rulers who were quarrelling about the possession of territory and power, and that in the present case, for example, the question was not their good or their suffering, but the wishes of the so-called Prince “Protocol” and of the Augustenburgs?

If a number of dogs are fighting over some bones, it is still only the dogs themselves who tear each other; but in the history of nations it is chiefly the poor silly bones themselves that rush at each other and knock each other to pieces on the two sides, in fighting for the rights of the combatants who covet them.

“Lion wants me,” or “Towser has a claim on me.” “I protest against Caro’s fangs,” or “I reckon it an honour to be swallowed by Growler,” cry the bones. “Denmark up to the Eider,” shouted the Danish patriots.

He must conduct the matter so that the precise number of men bleed to death and villages are set on fire, that are necessary in order that the family of Glückstadt, or that of Augustenburg should rule over a particular spot of earth.

What a foolish world⁠—still in leading strings⁠—cruel, unthinking!

Such was the result of my historical studies.

And I was also pacified with the following consideration. That war had come so short a time since, I took as a pledge that it would not be very soon repeated.

Sunshine follows after rain and in the sunshine one forgets the rain.

Even after earthquakes and eruptions of volcanoes men build up new dwellings again and do not think of the danger of a repetition of the past catastrophe. A chief element in our life’s energy appears to reside in forgetfulness.

Sunshine follows after rain and in the sunshine one forgets the rain. Even after earthquakes and eruptions of volcanoes men build up new dwellings again and do not think of the danger of a repetition of the past catastrophe.

A chief element in our life’s energy appears to reside in forgetfulness.

We took up our winter quarters in Vienna. Frederick had now got employment in the Ministry of War, a business which he at any rate preferred to barrack life. This year my sisters and Aunt Mary had gone to spend the carnival at Prague.

On the one side, the same assertions and principles; on the other, the same counter assertions and opposite principles.

There is nothing to which the fable of the hydra is so applicable as to some standing difference of opinion.

No sooner have you cut one head off the argument, and settled yourself to send the second the same way, when, lo! the first has grown again. Thus my father had one or two favourite positions in favour of war which nothing could uproot:—

… so much because the situation pointed to a bloody arbitrament, but on this account, that if once the word “war” has been pronounced there may be a good deal of debating one way and the other, but experience shows that the end always is war.

The little invisible egg which contains the casus belli is brooded over so long that at last the monster creeps out of it.

Daily did I note in the red volumes the phases of the varying strife, and thus I knew at that time, and still know today, how the eventful “war of ’66” was prepared and how it broke out.

“The opposite party” is always the one that wishes for war.

The “opposite party” are always charged with setting up force in the place of right.

Why, then, is it anyhow possible, consistently with public law, that this can happen? An “impious” war, because it is one of “Germans against Germans.” Quite true.

Besides, as a general rule, folks should not think about such horrid things. Such conduct involves a kind of sacrilege, a profanation of war, in keeping these pitiful details before one’s eyes instead of the sublimity of the whole. One should not think about them.”

“Yes, yes, not think about it,” I replied, “that is always the custom of mankind in the presence of any human misery⁠—‘don’t think about it,’ that is the support of all kinds of barbarity.”

Our family doctor, Dr.

or, if they are to supply themselves in the country occupied, will there not arise a regrettable difficulty for the army administration through the purchase of the articles necessary for the service, and the immediate raising of their price?”

Oh, this official wisdom! so dry, so well-instructed, so real, so redolent of prudence, and so unfathomably stupid!

The first engagement between our troops in Bohemia and the enemy took place on June 25 at Liebenau. My father brought us this news with his usual triumphant mien.

“Oh yes, the true word, the naked reality, is outrageous, is shameless.

Only the phrase which by thousandfold repetition has become sanctioned is ‘proper,’ but I assure you, father, that this unnatural ‘joy in dying’ which is thus exacted from all men, however heroic it may seem to him who uses the phrase, sounds to me like a spoken death-knell.

”

Wherever you looked, you saw cowering, prostrate, bandaged, pale forms. I could not look at them. The little energy which I possessed I had to save up for my journey, and for its object.

I could not venture to expend here anything of the stock of strength, of compassion, or of power of assistance which was at my command⁠—all belonged to him⁠—to him who was calling for me.

Meantime, there was no corner to be found in which a painful scene could be spared me.

Evidently a general wounded. It is necessary to obey and leave the rest. “Patience, comrades, and keep a good heart; we will return.”

Those who hear and those who say it know that it is not true.

And again they go further: following the adjutant, at the double quick, who spurs on in front and points the way. There is no halting on the way, although on the right hand and on the left resound shrieks of woe and cries for help;

Many who have been saved by accident have told of the danger of being buried alive which they have escaped. But how many are there of those who are not able to tell anything!

If a man has once got a foot or two of earth over his mouth he may well hold his tongue.

”

that is how I saw a family making their escape as they moved down a road near me. Where were the poor creatures going? They themselves very likely did not know, it was only away, away from “the Prussians.”

So men flee from the roaring fire, or the rising flood.

Frequently a train passed us on the other line—wounded, always and again wounded—always once more the ashy faces, the bandaged heads, the arms in slings. At the stations especially one might feed on this sight in all its variations to satiety.

All these inventions of the new era which are designed to promote the intercourse of nations, to lighten, beautify, and enrich life, are now misapplied by that old-world principle which aims at dividing the peoples and annihilating life.

Our boast before savages is: “Look at our railroads, look at our telegraphs; we are civilised nations”; and then we use these things to increase a hundredfold our own savagery.

My being forced to torture myself with such thoughts as these, and these only, as I waited at the station or pursued my way in the train, made my grief still more deep and bitter.

… one that he would be prevented from coming, or that he would get here at another hour than the one fixed, for there was no longer any regularity in the service, my train had certainly arrived much later than was fixed by the railway regulations.

Regulations⁠—another civilised conception, and so it was now set aside along with the rest.

My undertaking seemed to me now a perfect lunacy. This fancied call from Frederick—could I then believe in mystical things of that sort? It certainly had no foundation whatever. Who knows? Frederick was perhaps on his way home, perhaps he was dead;

Hostile stars? there are no such things.

Man has no enemy except man, but he is savage enough.

And no other friend either,” added Bresser after a short pause; “of that you yourself are giving an example, magnanimous lady. You are—”

… the narrow pass of Thermopylae, that star shed a bloody light on the battles of men, and to him rose up the curses of the fallen who accused him of their misfortune, while he indifferent and peaceful, then as now, was circling round the sun.

Hostile stars? there are no such things.

Man has no enemy except man, but he is savage enough. And no other friend either,” added Bresser after a short pause; “of that you yourself are giving an example, magnanimous lady. You are—”

How can justice be attained, when can old injustice be atoned, if fresh injustice is always to be employed as the means of atonement?

It would never suggest itself to any reasonable man to wash out ink spots with ink and oil stains with oil, it is only blood which has always to be washed out with new blood!

The frame of mind prevailing at Grumitz was on the whole a gloomy one. In the village panic reigned. “The Prussians are coming.

“Oh, away with your prudery! away with your affected decorum! Any cruelties may be committed, but it is not permitted to name them.

Gently bred ladies are not to know anything about blood and filth, but they may embroider the flags which are to wave over this bath of blood

; maidens may not know anything of the cause which is to render their lovers incapable of reaping the reward of their love, but they are allowed to promise them that reward, in order to inspire their martial ardour.

That is cruel ethics I would have you know—cruel and cowardly.

This looking aside⁠—with the bodily and the spiritual eye⁠—it is to this that is due the persistence of so much misery and injustice.

If one had but the courage to look steadily whenever one’s fellow-creatures are pining in pain and misery, and the courage to reflect on what one saw—”

Yes, they are the very same men who, obeying in each case a common impulse, behave and feel at one time courageously, at another cowardly.

Bravery and fear are to be regarded, not as fixed qualities, but rather as states of the spirits, just like joy and grief.

I, during my first campaign, was once involved in the whirl of one of these panic flights. In the official account of the État-major, it is true, the affair was passed over in a few words as an ‘orderly retreat’;

“No, indeed, not to conjure it away, but to mitigate it. What cannot be prevented, one must always seek to mitigate.”

“Experience teaches that no sufficient mitigation is possible. I should therefore wish the maxim to be inverted, ‘What cannot be mitigated ought to be prevented.’ ”

It began to be a fixed idea with me, that war must cease. And every individual must contribute, all that he is able, to bring mankind nearer to this end, were it but by the thousandth part of a line.

That is, it had been proclaimed that peace was concluded. A word is sufficient to unchain the horrors, and thence one is apt to think that a word will also suffice to remove them again, but no spell has in reality that power.

Hostilities may be suspended, and yet hostility may persist.

The seed of future war is sown, and the fruit of the war just ended spreads still further, in wretchedness, savagery, and plagues. Yes, no falsehood and no “not thinking of it” was any good now, the cholera was raging through the country.

For the sword of Damocles was always suspended over the dear one’s head, and even to die oneself, so terribly and so uselessly, who is there that such a thought would not fill with horror?

The chief proof of courage consists in this: not to think about it.

To flee? The idea had occurred to myself also, so as to get my little Rudolf into a safe place.

“Don’t trouble about that, aunt,” I said, to console her.

“If that curse fell from the lips of everybody⁠—yes, of everybody⁠—it would be a great blessing to humanity.”

Such was the cholera week at Grumitz. In the space of seven days nine inhabitants of the château had been snatched away: my father, Lilly, Rosa, Otto, my maid Netty, the cook, the coachman, and two grooms.

… us twain, sweetening, by means of their gentle contact, even this time of suffering, just as they dwell in many other, nay, in most other souls, so they will one day come to an outbreak, and will dominate the general relations of the human family.

The future belongs to goodness.

“When I look at war as a thing that protects wife, child, house, land, goods, and honour—and in doing so gains peace and secures it—in that view war is a right precious thing.”

“Oh, yes; if I look at the panther as a dove, in that case the panther is a very gentle beast,” I remarked unheard.

The military chaplain did not allow himself to be disturbed in his flow of eloquence; and, when he ended and took leave, I found myself with two convictions:

how much innocent vanity and proud feeling of honour are awakened and satisfied by those ceremonies! how many hearts beat higher at the sound of those hymns!

From the total of the pain which war has brought on men, we must at least deduct that pain which war poets and war preachers have contrived to sing away and lie away.

”

“One can never look too far.

Everything a man undertakes he ought to think out to its remotest consequence⁠—at least as far as his mind reaches.

We were likening war just now to a game at chess.

The others must imitate it. Or battalions of boys? The others must imitate it. And in the armaments—in the means of destruction—where can the limit be?

Oh this savage, blind leap into the pit!

”

“Keep silence? Not forever. As I talk—though I have myself kept silence long—so will the others also break out into speech.

If the thought ripens, the word will come.

I am an individual who have come to the age of forty before my conviction acquired sufficient strength to expand itself in words.

and even Frederick’s energy in the pursuit of his aim gradually abated. And it was no doubt discouraging, wherever one knocked at any doors with these ideas, to meet with shrugs of shoulders, compassionate smiles, if not a regular setting to rights.

The world, as it seems, is fond not only of being cheated, but also of being made miserable.

Wherever one tries to put forward any proposals for removing misery and woe, they are called “Utopian—a childish dream”—and the world will not listen to them.

But gradually we became more attentive to the subject for all that.

As, before the storm, a certain rustling of leaves goes through the forest, so, before war, a rustle of certain voices goes through the world.

“Nous aurons la guerre—nous aurons la guerre,” was what resounded in the air of Paris. Then an unspeakable anxiety possessed me. Not for my own people—for we, as Austrians, were at first out of the game.

July 19. The French chargé d’affaires in Berlin handed the Prussian Government the declaration of war.

Declaration of war! Three words, which can be pronounced quite calmly. But what is connected with them? The beginning of an extra-political action, and thus, along with it, half-a-million sentences of death.

This document also I entered in the red volumes. It runs thus:—

… attack) of its outraged dignity and its outraged interests, and being determined to employ for that end all means which are offered by the position which has been imposed upon it, regards itself from this time forward as in a state of war with Prussia.

State of war! Does the man think who puts these words on paper, on the green cloth of his writing-table, that he is plunging his pen in flames, in tears of blood, in the poison of plague?

And so the storm is unchained, this time on account of a king being sought for a vacant throne, and as the consequence of a negotiation undertaken between two monarchs! Must Kant then be right in his first definitive condition for everlasting peace?

“Ah,” I sighed, “when will that be?”

“When? that is a very relative term. In regard to the duration of our life, never; in regard to that of our race, tomorrow.”

When war has broken out all the subjects of neutral states divide themselves into two camps, one takes the side of the one, the other of the opposite party; it is like a great fluctuating wager, in which everyone has a share.

what a mighty lesson speaks from this writing, when compared with the events which ensued upon it! This campaign, then, was undertaken by France in order to attain security—to attain lasting peace? And what came of it? L’annèe terrible and lasting enmity—enmity which still prevails.

No; as with coal you cannot whitewash, as with asafoetida you cannot diffuse a sweet perfume, so neither with war can you make peace secure.

This “miserable situation,” to which Napoleon alludes, how much has it not changed for the worse since then! The emperor was in earnest, thoroughly in earnest about the scheme for setting on foot a European disarmament. I have it quite certainly from his nearest relations;

Literally for nothing. The whole thing was more of an armed promenade, undertaken by the French from love of knightly adventure, by the Germans from brave feelings of defensive duty. A few sabre-cuts would be exchanged, and the adversaries would shake hands again.

Fool that I was! As if the consequences of a war remained in any proportion to the causes which produced it.

It is its course which determines its consequences.

That the leaders of defeated armies have said the same thing a hundred times over does not prevent the others from saying the same words at the beginning of every new campaign and awakening the same confidence by doing so.

Is there anything more short and more weak than the memory of the people?

On July 31 King William quitted Berlin and left the following writing:—

But as we have been provoked, we are determined, like our fathers, and in firm reliance on God, to brave the battle for the deliverance of our fatherland.

Necessity of defence⁠—necessity of defence⁠—that is the only recognised way of killing, and so both parties cry out: “I am defending myself.”

Is not that a contradiction? Not altogether, for over both there presides a third power, the power of the conquering, ancient war-spirit. It is only against him that all should join in a defensive league.

A Ministry of the Defence of the Country was formed. The war loan of 500 millions, which had been voted, was raised to 1000.

It is quite refreshing to see how freely people always offer up the money and the lives of others.

A trifling financial unpleasantness, to be sure, was soon perceptible to the public. If one wanted to change bank notes one had to pay the money-changer ten percent.

Wherever a bold stroke was executed by the German cavalry, it was attributed to the Uhlans—a kind of half-men, getting no pay, and therefore bound to live on their plunder. Along with the rumours of terror arose rumours also of triumph.

To tell lies about successes is one of the duties of Chauvinism.

Of course, because courage must be kept up. The command, to tell truth, like so many other commands, loses its obligation in war time. Frederick dictated to me the following passage out of the newspaper Le Volontaire for my red book:—

nor did anyone explain how they could contain three army corps; but the joyous message went round from mouth to mouth. “Have you heard? In the quarries—” “Oh yes! Of Jaumont.” No one uttered a doubt or question.

It was as if everybody had been born at Jaumont, and knew these army-swallowing quarries as well as his own pocket.

About this time the rumour also prevailed that the King of Prussia had gone mad from despair at the condition of his army.

The chance of arms may change at any time. Ah yes! The advantage may be now on this side, now on that.

It is only woe that is certain⁠—death that is certain⁠—to be on both.

Trochu felt himself called upon to arouse the spirit of the populace by a new proclamation, and in it appealed to an old motto of Bretagne, “With God’s help for our fatherland.” That did not sound new to me.

it has come, and all their force, all their enthusiasm must be spent on turning it aside again, or else uniting with unthinking self-sacrifice in a common ruin.

Trust me, there is much noble capacity for love in us children of men, the pity only is that we lavish it on the old-world tracks of hatred.

… And on the other side, the hated ones, the invaders, ‘the red-haired eastern barbarians,’ what are they doing? They were the challenged; and they are pressing forward into the country of those who threatened to overrun theirs—‘À Berlin, à Berlin.’

Why is it never said in an account of a battle by the losing party: ‘The enemy has obtained a glorious victory’?”

“I repeat, because the war spirit and patriotic egotism are the denial of all justice.”

So it came about—I can see it from all our conversations entered in the red books in those days—that we did not and could not think of anything at that time except the result of the present national duel.

but before all this a curtain had fallen. How dared we, how could we taste of our joys while around us everyone was suffering and trembling, shrieking and raving?

It was as if one should set oneself to enjoy oneself heartily on board a storm-tossed vessel.

“A theatrical fellow, this Trochu,” Frederick told me—it was on August 25. “Such a coup de theâtre has been played off today! You will never guess it.”

And strangely enough, a pleasant recollection. I was, it is true, very ill, and everything in the place where I resided was unceasingly mournful and terrible; and yet when I look back on it it was a singularly joyful time.

Yes, joy, perfectly intense joy, such as children are in the habit of feeling.

The cerebral affection which I was suffering, and which brought with it an almost continuous absence, or at least only half-presence of consciousness, caused all thoughts and judgments, all reflections and deliberations, to vanish out of my head, and there remained only a vague enjoyment …

And now all the other men and maids, down to the kitchen-maid, came pushing into the room. In such catastrophies—in the exigencies of war, fire, or water, all distinctions of society fall away, and those threatened all cluster together.

All feel equal before danger⁠—much more than before the law⁠—much more than before Death, which in its burial ceremonies knows so much of distinction of rank.

“C’est le bombardment, c’est le bombardment.” Everyone who came into the room uttered the same cry.

Whilst ordinarily 1,100 died in a week, the death-list of Paris in these times rose to between 4,000 and 5,000 weekly. That is, there were every day between 400 and 500 unnatural deaths—that is to say, murders.

For if the murderer is not an individual man, but an impersonal thing, viz., war, it is not any the less murder.

Whose is the responsibility? Does it not lie on those parliamentary swaggerers, who in their provocative speeches declared with proud self-assumption—as that Girardin did in the sitting of July 15—that they “took on themselves the responsibility for this war in the face of history”?