“You are right, and if at length there are enough millions animated by the enthusiasm of this duty, then that thousand-year-old fortress will be abandoned by its garrison and must fall.”
From Vienna, I made a pilgrimage to Grumitz, whose mistress I had now become. But I did not even enter the château. I only laid down four wreaths in the churchyard, and drove back again. After my most important matters of business were put in order, Frederick proposed a little journey to Berlin, in order to pay a visit to Aunt Cornelia, who was so much to be pitied. I assented. During our absence I put my little son Rudolf in the charge of Aunt Mary. The latter had been cast down more than I can describe by the events of the cholera week at Grumitz. Her whole love, her whole interest in life, she now concentrated on my little Rudolf. I even hoped that she might be somewhat diverted and raised in her spirits by having the child with her for a time.
We left Vienna on November 1. We broke our journey in Prague, intending to spend the night there. Next day, instead of pursuing our journey to Berlin, we made a new pilgrimage.
“All Souls’ Day,” said I. “How many poor dead bodies are lying on the battlefield in this neighbourhood, for whom even this day of honour to the graves does nothing, because they have no graves. Who will pay them a visit?”
I looked at him for a while in silence. Then, half aloud, I said:—
“Will you?”
He nodded. We understood one another, and in an hour we were on our way to Chlum and Königgrätz.
What a prospect. An elegy of Tiedge came into my mind.
Oh, sight of horror! mighty prince, come, see,
And o’er this awful heap of mouldering clay
Swear to thy folk a gentler lord to be,
And give to earth the light of peaceful day.Great leader, when thou thirstest for renown,
Come, count these skulls, before the solemn hour
When thine own head must lay aside its crown,
And in Death’s silence ends thy dream of power.Let the dread vision hover o’er thee ever
Of these sad corpses here around thee strown,
And then say, does it charm thee, the endeavour
Upon men’s ruins to erect thy throne?
Yes, unfortunately it will charm men, so long as the histories of the world, i.e., those who write them, build the statues of their heroes out of the ruins of war, so long as they offer their crowns to the Titans of public murder. To refuse the laurel crown, to give up fame, would be nobler. Is that what the poet means? The first thing to do should be to despoil the thing, which it should appear so beneficent to renounce, of its glory, and then there would be no ambitious man any longer to grasp after it.
It was twilight already when we got to Chlum, and from thence walked on, arm in arm, to the battlefield, near at hand, in silent horror. A mist was falling, mingled with very fine snowflakes, and the dull branches of the trees were bent by the shrill-sounding pipe of a cold November wind. Crowds of graves, and the graves of crowds, were all around us. But a churchyard?—no. No pilgrim weary of life had there been invited to rest and peace; there, in the midst of their youthful fire of life, exulting in the fullest strength of their manhood, the waiters on the future had been cast down by force, and had been shovelled down into their grave mould. Choked up, stifled, made dumb forever, all those breaking hearts, those bloody mangled limbs, those bitterly-weeping eyes, those wild shrieks of despair, those vain prayers.
On this field of war it was not lonely. There were many—very many—whom All Souls’ Day had brought hither, from friends’ and enemies’ country, who were come here to kneel down on the ground where what they loved most had fallen. The train itself which brought us was full of other mourners, and thus I had heard now for several hours weeping and wailing going on around me. “Three sons—three sons, each one more beautiful and better and dearer than the others, have I lost at Sadowa,” said to us an old man who looked quite broken down. Many others, besides, of our companions in the carriage mingled their complaints with his—for brother, husband, father. But none of these made so much impression on me as the tearless, mournful “Three sons—three sons” of the poor old man.
On the field one saw on all sides, and on all the roads, black figures walking, or kneeling, or painfully staggering along and breaking out from time to time into loud sobs. There were only a few there who were buried by themselves—few crosses or stones with an inscription. We bent down and deciphered, as well as the twilight permitted, some of the names.
“Major v. Reuss of the Second Regiment of the Prussian Guards.”
“Perhaps a relation of the one engaged to our poor Rosa,” I remarked.
“Count Grünne. Wounded, July 3. Died, July 5.”
What might he not have suffered in those two days! Was he, I wondered, a son of the Count Grünne who uttered, before the war, the well-known sentence: “We are going to chase the Prussians away—wet foot”? Ah, how frantic and blasphemous! how shrilly out of tune sounds of a surety every word of provocation spoken before a war when one stands on a place like this! Words, and nothing more, boasting words, scornful words, spoken, written and printed; it is these alone that have sown the seed of fields like these.
We walk on. Everywhere earth heaps, more or less high, more or less broad, and even there
