How quickly and easily does one in happy circumstances forget the misery one has gone through. Two pairs of lovers, or, if I may venture to say so, three—for Frederick and I, the married ones, were not much less in love with each other than the betrothed—well, so many pairs of lovers in the little company gave an air of felicity to everything. For the next day or two Schloss Grumitz was an abode of cheerfulness and worldly enjoyment. I, too, gradually felt the pictures of terror of the past weeks fading out of my remembrance. It was not without reproaches of conscience that I became aware how my compassion, which had been so burning a short time since, was at some moments quite gone. It is true that sounds of mourning still came pealing from the world without, the complaints of people who in the war had lost goods or money or lives of those dear to them, accounts of threatened financial catastrophes, of the outbreak of pestilence. It was said that the cholera had shown itself among the Prussian troops; a case had even been reported in our village, but only a doubtful one, it is true: “It might be diarrhea, which occurs every summer,” was the consolatory remark. Let us only chase away troubled thoughts and anxious fears with: “It is nothing,” or “It has passed over,” or “It will not come”; all this is so easy to say. All that is wanted is a vigorous shake of the head and the unpleasant facts are gone.
“I say, Martha,” said the happy fiancée to me one day, “this war was indeed a horrible thing, and yet I must bless it; without it should I ever have been so immeasurably happy as I am now? Should I ever have had the opportunity of making Henry’s acquaintance? And as to him, would he ever have found a bride to love him so?”
“Very well, dear Rosa. I shall be happy to share this view of it with you. Let your two hearts made happy be weighed against the many thousands of hearts that have been broken.”
“But it is not only individual destinies that are concerned, Martha. In the gross and on the whole war also brings great gain to those who conquer, and therefore to a whole nation. You must hear Henry talk on that subject. He says Prussia shines out grandly. In the army universal exultation reigns, and enthusiastic thankfulness and love for the generals who have led it to victory. And in this way there arises for German civilisation, for commerce—or perhaps he said for the prosperity of Germany, I have forgot the exact term—its historical mission—in short, you should hear him talk himself.”
“Why, does not your fiancé prefer to speak of your love rather than of political and military matters?”
“Oh, we speak about everything, and everything he says sounds like music in my ears. I feel that it is so good for him that he is proud and happy to have joined in fighting out this war for his king and country—”
“And carried away for himself so dear a sweetheart as his booty,” I added, to finish her sentence.
His future son-in-law suited my father very well, and who would not have been pleased with such a grand young man? Still he gave him his sympathy and his blessing with all kinds of protestations and restrictions.
“You are dear to me in every respect, dear Reuss—as a man and as a soldier and as a prince”—this is what he said to him repeatedly, and in various modes of speech—“but as a Prussian officer of course I reserve to myself the right, despite any family connection, of wishing for nothing so much as a future war, in which Austria may pay back handsomely the present victory snatched from her. The political question must be separated altogether from the personal. My son will one day—God grant that I may live to see it—take the field against the Prussian state. I myself, if I were not too old, and if my emperor were to summon me to it, would at once accept a command to fight William I., and especially his overbearing Bismarck. This does not prevent me from recognising the military virtues of the Prussian army, and the strategic science of its leaders; and from thinking it quite a matter of course that in the next campaign you, at the head of your battalion, should try to storm our capital, and set fire to the house in which your father-in-law lives—in short—”
“In short,” said I, one day breaking in on a rhapsody of this kind, “confusions in terms and inconsistencies of fact twine round each other like the infusoria in a putrefying drop of water. It is always so, when you pen up together conceptions repugnant to each other. To hate the whole and love its parts, to want to have one way of thinking as members of a nation and another as a man. That will not do; it must be one thing or another. So I approve of the Indian chief’s way of looking at it. He entertains for the adherent of a different tribe—as to which he does not even know that it consists of individuals—no other wish than to scalp him.”
“But my dear girl, Martha, such savage feelings do not suit the stage of our civilisation, which has grown more cultured and more humane.”
“Rather say that our present stage of civilisation does not suit the savagery which has come down to us from old times. As long as this savagery, that is, so long as the spirit of
