Lay Down Your Arms

you first got into the melée?’ ‘Oh, delightful! ennobling!’ ‘You need not use falsehood to me, my dear boy. It is not the staff officer who is asking about your feelings as a lieutenant bound to duty, but a man and a friend.’ ‘I can only repeat, delightful and ennobling. Awful, I grant, but so magnificent. And the consciousness that I am fulfilling, with God’s help, the highest duty of a man to king and country! And further, that I see Death, the spectre elsewhere so feared and shunned, so close and busy all round me, his very breath breathing over me⁠—the thought raises me to a mood of mind so elevated above the common, so epic that I feel the muse of history hovering over our heads and lending our swords the might of victory. A noble rage glows in me against the presumptuous foe, who would have trampled on the rights of the German countries, and it is to me an enthusiasm to have the power of gratifying this hatred. It is a curious, mysterious thing, this power of killing⁠—nay, this compulsion to kill⁠—without being a murderer⁠—with a fearless exposure of one’s own life.’

“So the boy chattered on. I let him talk. I had similar feelings when my first battle was raging round me. ‘Epic!’⁠—yes, there you hit on the right word. The heroic poems and the heroic histories by whose means our schools bring us up to be warriors, these are what are set vibrating in our brains by the thunders of the cannonade, the flash of naked weapons, and the shouts of the combatants. And the freedom from ordinary circumstances, the inexplicable freedom from law in which one finds oneself all of a sudden, makes one feel as if transported into another world⁠—it is like an outlook beyond this trumpery earthly existence, with its peaceful domestic quiet, into a titanic struggle of infernal spirits. But this giddiness soon passed over with me, and it is only with an effort that I can bring back to my mind the sensations which young Tessow sketched to me. I recognised too soon that the desire for battle was not a super-human but an infra-human feeling, no mystic revelation from the realms of the morning, but a reminiscence of the realm of the animal, a reawakening of the brutal. And a man who can intoxicate himself into a savage lust for blood, who⁠—as I have seen several of our men do⁠—can cut down with uplifted sabre an unarmed enemy, who can sink into a Berserker, or lower still, a bloodthirsty tiger⁠—that is the man who, for the moment, revels in the ‘joy of battle.’ I never did this. Believe me, my wife; I never did.

“Godfrey is delighted that we Austrians are united in fighting for the ‘right cause’ (how does he know that? As if every cause is not always represented as the ‘right’ one by its own side!) with the Prussians: ‘Yes, we Germans are all one united people of brothers!’ ‘That was seen long ago in the Thirty Years’ War, and also in the Seven Years’ War,’ I struck in half-aloud. Godfrey missed what I said, and went on: ‘For each other and with each other we can conquer every foe.’ ‘What will you say then, my young friend, if today or tomorrow the Prussians and Austrians quarrel, and we two shall be ranged as foes, one against each other?’ ‘Not conceivable, now, after the blood of both of us has flowed for the same cause. Now surely we can never more⁠—’ ‘Never more? I would warn you not to use the expressions “never” or “forever” in political matters. What ephemerides are in the scale of living beings, such are the friendships and enmities of nations in the scale of historical phenomena.’

“I write all this down, Martha, not that I think it can interest you, poor sufferer, nor because I want to make reflections to you upon it, but I have an idea that I shall fall, and in that case I do not wish my sentiments to sink into the grave with me unuttered. My letter may even be found and read by others, if not by you. That which is coming up in the minds of soldiers who think freely, and feel like men, shall not remain forever unspoken and concealed. ‘I have dared it’ was Ulrich v. Hutten’s motto. ‘I have spoken it,’ and with this to quiet my conscience, I can depart this life.”

The most recent news that had reached me had been sent off five days, and arrived two days previously. What was to show that in five days⁠—five days of war⁠—anything might not have taken place? Anxiety and fear seized me. Why had no line come yesterday? Why none today? Oh, this longing for a letter⁠—or, better, a telegram! I believe no one in the tortures of fever can so long for water as I then was longing for news. I was saved; he would have the great joy of finding me alive, if⁠—always this “if” which nips every hope for the future in the bud.

My father was obliged to depart. He could now leave me with a quiet mind. The danger was over, and he had now pressing business at Grumitz. As soon as I had got the needful strength, I was to follow him there with my little Rudolf. A stay in the fresh country air would in the first place restore me entirely, and would also do good to the little boy. Aunt Mary stayed behind. She was to keep on nursing me and then to travel with us to Grumitz where Rosa and Lilly had already gone on before. I let them talk and make plans for me. Without saying anything I had made up my mind, as soon as I was even half able to do so, to set off for Schleswig-Holstein.

Where Frederick’s regiment might be at this moment, we knew not. It was impossible to get