“What is the matter with you, Martha? You are weeping; and today—on New-Year’s night! Why then salute the New Year with tears? Are you not happy? Have I given you any offence?”
“You? Oh no! no! You make me only too happy—much too happy—and that makes me anxious—”
“Superstitious, Martha? Do you then conjure up for yourself envious gods, who destroy men’s happiness when it is too great?”
“Not gods; it is senseless men who call misery down on themselves.”
“You are hinting at this possible war. But it is certainly not settled as yet. Why then this premature grief? Who knows whether it will come to blows? and who knows, if so, whether I shall be called out? Come here, my darling, and let us sit down,” and he drew me to the sofa by his side. “Do not spend your tears on a bare possibility.”
“Even the possibility is terrible to me. If it were a certainty, Frederick, I should not be crying so softly and quietly on your shoulder. I should have to shriek and wail out loud. But the possibility, nay, the probability, that in the year which is opening you may be torn from my arms by a marching order. That is quite enough to transport me with anxiety and grief.”
“Bethink you, Martha. You are yourself going to meet a peril, as this Christmas box of yours so charmingly informed me, and yet we two do not think of the cruel possibility which threatens every woman in childbed about as much as every man on the battlefield. Let us enjoy our life, and not think of the death which is impending over the heads of all of us.”
“You are talking just like Aunt Mary, dearest, as if our lot depended on ‘Providence,’ and not on the thoughtlessness, cruelty, excesses, and follies of our fellow-men. Wherein lies the inevitable necessity of this war with Denmark?”
“It has not yet broken out, and there may still—”
“I know, I know; accidents may still happen to avert the evil. But it is not accident, not political intrigues and humours which ought to decide such questions of destiny; but the firm, righteous will of mankind. But what is the good of my ‘ought’ or ‘ought not’? I cannot alter the order of things. I can only complain of it. But do help me so far, Frederick! Do not try to console me with hollow conventional evasions! You do not believe in them yourself! You yourself are shuddering with noble repugnance! The only consolation I find is in thinking that you condemn and bewail as I do what will make me and numberless others so unhappy.”
“Yes, my dear; if this fatality should come to pass, then I will say you are right. Then I will not hide from you the shuddering and the hate which the national slaughter ordained on us awakes in me. But today let us still enjoy our life. We surely have each other—nothing separates us. There is not the slightest bar between our souls! Let us enjoy this happiness as long as we have it; enjoy it to the full. Let us not think of the threatened destruction of it. No joy assuredly can last forever. In a hundred years it will be all the same whether our life has been long or short. The number of beautiful days is not the question, but the degree of their beauty. Let the future bring what it pleases, my dearly-loved wife; our present is so beautiful, so very beautiful, that I cannot now feel anything but a blessed delight.”
As he said this, he threw his arm around me, and kissed my head, which rested on his breast. And then the threatening future disappeared for me also, and I too let myself sink into the sweet transport of the moment.
On 10th January we returned to Olmütz.
No one any longer doubted about the outbreak of war. I had heard a few individuals in Vienna hope that the Schleswig-Holstein dispute could even yet be capable of diplomatic settlement; but in the military circles of our garrison town all possibility of peace was held to be out of the question. Among the officers and their wives there prevailed an excited, but on the whole joyfully excited, temper. Opportunities for distinction and advancement were in prospect, for the satisfaction of the love of adventure in one, the ambition of another, the thirst for promotion of a third.
“This is a famous war which is in prospect,” said the colonel, to whose house, with several other officers and their wives, we were invited to dinner; “a famous war, and one that must be immensely popular. No danger to our territory; and even the population of our country will suffer no diminution, since the scene of war lies on foreign soil.”
“What inspires me in the matter,” said a young first lieutenant, “is the noble motive, to defend the rights of our brethren under oppression. The fact that the Prussians are marching with us—or rather we with them—assures us in the first place of victory, and in the next place it will bind still closer the bonds of nationality. The national idea—”
“I had rather you would not talk about that,” interposed the colonel rather sternly. “That humbug does not sit well on an Austrian. It was that that raised up the Italian war against us; for it was on this hobbyhorse, ‘Italy for the Italians,’ that Louis Napoleon kept always mounting, and the whole principle is specially unsuitable for Austria. Bohemians, Hungarians, Germans, Croats—where is the bond of nationality? We know one principle only which unites us, and that is a loyal love of our reigning family. Therefore, what ought to put spirit into us when we take the field is not the circumstance that we are Germans, and have Germans as allies, but that we can render loyal service to our exalted and beloved commander-in-chief. The emperor’s health!”
All stood up to drink the toast. A spark of animation even reached my heart,
