Vengeance! and always repeated vengeance! Every war must leave one side defeated, and if this side can only find satisfaction in the next war, a war which must naturally produce another defeated side craving satisfaction, when is it to stop? 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. The Prussians are coming” was always the cry of terror which they kept uttering still, in spite of the hopes of peace which were cherished in many quarters; and people were packing up their treasures at home or burying them out of sight. Even in the château Aunt Mary and Frau Walter had taken care that the family plate had been put in a secret place of concealment. Lilly was in constant anxiety about Conrad, of whom there had been no news for several days; my father found himself wounded in his patriotic honour, and we two, Frederick and I, in spite of the bliss which lay deep in our hearts on account of our reunion, had been most painfully shaken by the miseries of the time which we had experienced, and with which we so warmly sympathised. And from all sides flowed in constantly fresh food for this pain. In all the correspondence in the papers, in all our letters from relatives and acquaintance, there was nothing but complaints and lamentations. First there was a letter from Aunt Rosalie, who had not yet learned her unhappiness, but who spoke in such moving terms of the fear in which she was of having to lose her only child—a letter over which we two shed bitter tears. And in the evening, when we sat all together, there was no more of cheerful chatter, seasoned with jokes, music, card-playing and interesting reading, but always, whether spoken or read, only histories of woe and death. We read nothing but newspapers, and these were filled with “war,” and nothing but “war,” and our talk related chiefly to the experiences which Frederick and I had brought back from the Bohemian battlefields. My departure thither had been, it is true, taken very ill by them all, but for all that they listened eagerly as I related the events there, partly from my own observation, partly from what I had been told. Rosa was an enthusiast for Frau Simon, and swore that, if the war was going to continue, she would join the Saxon Samaritans. Papa, of course, protested against this.
“With the exception of the sisters of charity and the sutlers no woman has any business in a war. You must surely see how useless our Martha showed herself to be. That was an unpardonable prank of yours, you silly child. Your husband ought to chastise you properly for it.”
Frederick stroked my hand.
“Yes, it was a folly, but a noble one.”
If I spoke of the horrors which I had seen with my own eyes, or which my travelling companions had related to me, in quite naked terms, I was often interrupted reproachfully by my father or Aunt Mary, with: “How can people repeat such dreadful things?” or, “Are you not ashamed, as a woman, as a gently bred lady, to take such ugly words into your mouth?” This exhausted my patience.
“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. Death and killing do not offer anything improper for you—well-bred ladies as you are—but at the bare mention of the things which are the sources of the implanted life, you must blush and look aside. 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—”
“Don’t get excited,” interrupted Aunt Mary; “however much we might look, and however much we might reflect, we should never be able to chase evil from the earth. It is now, once for all, a vale of misery, and will ever remain so.”
“It will not,” I replied; and so at least I had the last word.
“The danger that peace will be concluded is coming steadily nearer,” said my brother Otto complainingly one day.
We were sitting at the time at the family table again, Frederick on the sofa near us, and someone had just read out of the newspapers the tidings that Benedetti had arrived in Bohemia, obviously entrusted with the
