If it must be so, go forward—forward go.
The way is found by never looking back,
as the poet says. However, that is nothing to the point; the emperor has not put me in command, and so I am not responsible for the tactical blunders: the generals must see how they are to settle with their military superiors and with their own consciences; we, officers and soldiers, did our duty—we had to fight, and fight we did. And that is a grand sensation in itself. The very expectation, the very excitement one feels when one rushes on to the foe and when the word goes round ‘Now it is afoot,’ this consciousness that in that moment a portion of the world’s history is being enacted, and then the pride, the joy in one’s own courage, Death right and left, great and mysterious, and yet one bids him a manly defiance—”
“Just like poor Godfrey Tessow,” murmured Frederick to himself. “Well, of course, it is the same school.”
Conrad went on eagerly.
“One’s heart beats higher, one’s pulse flutters, there awakes—and that is the peculiar rapture of it—there wakes the joy of battle. The rage, the hate of the foe blazes up, and at the same time the most burning love for one’s menaced country, while the onward rush, the hewing down at them becomes a delight. One feels transported into another world from that in which one grew up, a world in which all the ordinary feelings and ways of looking at things are changed into their opposites. Life is changed into plunder; killing becomes a duty. Only, however, heroism, the most magnificent self-sacrifice, are left surviving—all other conceptions have perished in the tumult. Then add the powder-smoke, the battle-cries. I tell you it is a state of things to which no parallel is to be found elsewhere. At the most, perhaps, the same fire may glow through one in the lion or tiger hunt, when one stands in the face of the maddened wild beast, and—”
“Yes,” broke in Frederick, “the fight against an enemy who threatens you with death, the longing, proud desire of conquering him fills you with peculiar enjoyment—pray forgive me the word, Aunt Mary—as indeed everything which sustains or expands life is guaranteed to us by Nature through the reward of joy. As long as man was in peril from savage assailants, on two legs or four, and could only protect his life by killing the latter, battle became one of his delights. If in the midst of a fight the same pleasure creeps through our veins still though we are civilised men, it is only a reminiscence of heredity. And at the present time, when there are in Europe no more savages or beasts of prey, in order that this delight may not vanish from us entirely, we have invented artificial assailants for ourselves. This is what goes on. Attention! You wear blue coats, and those men there red coats. As soon as we clap hands three times the red coats will be turned for you into tigers, and the blue coats will become wild beasts to them. So now—one, two, three; blow the charge, beat the attack; and now you can set off, and devour each other; and after 10,000—or always in proportion to the rise in the magnitude of armies—100,000 artificial tigers have devoured each other with mutual delight in battle at Xdorf, then you have the battle of Xdorf, which is to become historical; and then the men who clap hands assemble round a green congress table in Xstadt, rule lines for altered frontiers on the map, haggle over the proportion of contributions, sign a paper which figures in the historical annals as the Peace of Xstadt, clap their hands three times once more, and say to the redcoats and the bluecoats surviving ‘Embrace each other, men and brethren’!”
XIV
The Prussians Advance on Vienna—Prussian Officers Quartered at Grumitz—My Brother Otto’s Warlike Ardour—He Gets Into Trouble—A Grand Dinner to the Self-Invited Guests—Sudden Engagement of My Sister Rosa to Prince Henry von Reuss—General Felicity and Enjoyment—Departure of the Prussians—Outbreak of Cholera at Grumitz—The Château Is Infected—First Some of the Servants, Then My Sisters, Then Otto Die of Cholera, and Lastly My Father Dies from Heart Disease, Cursing War with His Last Breath—Conrad’s Suicide.
There were Prussians quartered everywhere in the neighbourhood, and now Grumitz had to come into the circle.
Though the suspension of hostilities was already in force, and peace was almost certain, yet general fear and mistrust reigned throughout the people. The idea that these spike-helmeted tigers would tear them to pieces if they could was not easily eradicated out of the people. The three claps of the hand at Nicolsburg had not yet availed to undo the effect of the three claps of the declaration of war, and to make the country-folk look on the Prussians again in the light of brothers. The very name of the opposing nation gathers round it in war time a whole host of hateful implied meanings. It is not merely the distinctive name of a nation hostile for the moment, but it becomes the synonym for “enemy,” and comprises in itself all the repugnance which that word expresses.
And so it happened that the folks in the neighbourhood trembled, as before wolves broken loose, if a Prussian quartermaster came there to procure lodging for his troops. With
