Lay Down Your Arms

in the state of health absolutely no recollection remained to me. Now for several years I have been free from them. Free, that is, from the insensibility of my spirit pangs, but not from conscious attacks of the bitterest pain of soul. Eighteen years have gone since the 1st of February, 1871, but the deep resentment and the deep mourning, which the tragedy of that day awoke in me, no time can remove, even should I live a hundred years. Even though in these later times the days come ever more frequently in which I, absorbed in the events of the present, do not think about the misery of the past, in which I even sympathise so livelily with the joy of my children as to feel myself also filled with something like joy in my life, yet no night passes, no, not one, in which my wretchedness does not seize on me. That is something quite peculiar, something thing I can hardly describe, and which only those will understand who have experienced something similar themselves. It appears to me like a kind of double life of the soul. Although the single consciousness in the waking condition can sometimes be so taken possession of by the things of the outer world that it from time to time forgets, yet in the depths of my personality there is a second consciousness still which always retains that awful recollection with the same true pain; and that self, when the other has gone to sleep, asserts itself, and rouses the other up, as it were, to share its pain with it. Every night, and it must be at the same hour, I wake with an indescribable feeling of pain. My heart contracts painfully, and I feel as if forced to weep bitter tears and utter sighs of agony. This lasts a few seconds, without my awakened self quite knowing why the other unhappy self is so unhappy. The next stage after this is a compassion embracing the whole world, and a sigh, full of the most painful pity: “Oh you poor, poor men!” And then I see next shrieking shapes which are being torn to pieces by a rain of murderous shot, and then I recollect that my dearest love too was so torn in pieces.

But in my dreams, wonderful to relate, I never knew anything of my loss. Thus it happened often that I was speaking to Frederick and conversing with him as during his life. Whole scenes from the past were represented, but never any sad ones, our meeting again after Schleswig-Holstein, our jokes over Sylvia’s cradle, our walking tours in Switzerland, our hours of study over favourite books, and occasionally that same picture in the evening light, where my white-haired husband with his garden-shears was pruning the rose-branches, and was saying with a smile to me: “Are we not a happy old couple?”

I have never put off my mourning, not even at my son’s wedding. When anyone has loved, possessed, and lost such a husband, and lost him as I did, her love “must be stronger than death,” her passion for vengeance can never cool. But whom does this anger threaten? On whom would I execute vengeance? The men who did the deed were not in fault. The only guilty party is the spirit of war, and it is on this that my work of persecution, all too weak as it is, must be exercised.

My son Rudolf agrees with my views, though this of course does not prevent him from going through his military exercises every year, and could not prevent him, either, from marching to the frontier, if the European war, which is always hanging over our heads, should break out. And then, perhaps, I shall have once more to see how all that is dearest to me in the world has to be sacrificed on the altar of Moloch, how a hearth blessed with love, and which is the sign to my old age of all its rest and peace, has to be laid in ruins. Shall I have to see all this once more, and then once more to fall into irrecoverable madness, or shall I yet behold the triumph of justice and humanity, which now, at this very moment, is striving for accomplishment in widely extended associations and in all strata of society?

The red volumes, my diary, contain no further entries. Under the date February 1, 1871, I marked a great cross, and so closed the history of my life also. Only the so-called Protocol, a blue volume which Frederick began along with me and in which we described the phases of the idea of peace, has been since that time enriched with a few notes.

In the first years which succeeded the Franco-German war, I had few opportunities, even apart from my diseased condition of mind, for marking any tidings of peace. The two most influential nations on the Continent were revelling in thoughts of war; the one proudly looking back on the victories she had gained, the other longingly expecting her impending revenge. The current of these feelings gradually began to subside. On this side of the Rhine the statues of Germania were a little less shouted over, and on that side those of Strasbourg decked with fewer mourning-wreaths. Then, after ten years, the voice of the servants of peace might again be heard. It was Bluntschli, the great professor of international law, the same with whom my lost one had put himself in communication, who set to work to obtain the views of various dignitaries and Governments on the subject of national peace. And then the silent “thinker-out of battles” let fall the well-known expression: “Everlasting peace is a dream, and not a pretty dream either.”

“Oh, of course,” I wrote at the time in my blue book, beside Moltke’s words, “if Luther had asked the Pope what he thought of the revolt from Rome, the answer he would have received would not have