Lay Down Your Arms

battlefield contains many similar, and even more painful things, such as the description of moments when bullets and shells fall in the midst of the dressers and tear up new wounds; or when the course of the battle brings the fight on to the dressing station itself, right up on to the ambulance, and sucks in the whole personnel of the sanitary corps, with the physicians and with the patients into the whirl of the fighting or fleeing or pursuing troops; or when frightened riderless horses all abroad come across the way, and overturn the stretcher on which a severely wounded man is lying, who is now dashed to the earth all shattered. Or this, the most gruesome picture of all⁠—a farmyard, into which a hundred wounded men had been carried, bandaged, and made comfortable⁠—the poor wretches, glad and thankful that their rescue had been effected. Then a shell came and set the whole on fire. A minute afterwards the hospital was in flames. The shrieks, or rather the howls, which resounded from this abode of despair, and which in its wild agony drowned all the other noises, will remain forever in the memory of anyone who heard it. Ah me! it remains forever in my memory too, though I did not hear it; for, as the regimental surgeon was telling it, I fancied again that Frederick was there⁠—that I heard his shriek out of the burning place of torture.

“You are getting ill, dear madam,” said the narrator, breaking off. “I must have tried your nerves too much.”

But I had not yet heard enough. I assured him that my momentary weakness was the consequence merely of the heat and of a bad night, and I was not too tired to ask for the rest. I kept feeling still that I had not yet heard enough; that of the infernal circles that were being described, the description had not yet been given of the lowest and most hellish; and when once the thirst for the horrible has been awakened it is impossible to stop till it has been slaked by the most horrible of all. And I was right, for there is something more hideous than a battlefield during the fight, viz., one afterwards.

No more thunder of artillery, no more blare of trumpets, no more beat of drum; only the low moans of pain and the rattle of death. In the trampled ground some redly-glimmering pools, lakes of blood; all the crops destroyed, only here and there a piece of land left untouched, and still covered with stubble; the smiling villages of yesterday turned into ruins and rubbish. The trees burned and hacked in the forests, the hedges torn with grapeshot. And on this battleground thousands and thousands of men dead and dying⁠—dying without aid. No blossoms of flowers are to be seen on wayside or meadow; but sabres, bayonets, knapsacks, cloaks, overturned ammunition wagons, powder wagons blown into the air, cannon with broken carriages. Near the cannon, whose muzzles are black with smoke, the ground is bloodiest. There the greatest number and the most mangled of dead and half-dead men are lying, literally torn to pieces with shot; and the dead horses, and the half-dead which raise themselves on their feet⁠—such as they have left them⁠—to sink again; then raise themselves up once more and fall down again, till they only raise their head to shriek out their pain-laden death-cry. There is a hollow way quite filled with corpses trodden into the mire. The poor creatures had taken refuge there no doubt to get cover, but a battery has driven over them, and they have been crushed by the horses’ hoofs and the wheels. Many of them are still alive⁠—a pulpy, bleeding mass, but “still alive.”

And yet there is still something more hellish even than all this, and that is the appearance of the most vile scum of humanity, as it shows itself in war⁠—i.e., the appearance and the activity of “the hyenas of the battlefield.” “Then slink on the monsters who grope after the spoils of the dead, and bend over the corpses and over the living, mercilessly tearing off their clothes from their bodies. The boots are dragged off the bleeding limbs, the rings off the wounded hands, or to get the ring the finger is simply chopped off, and if a man tries to defend himself from such a sacrifice, he is murdered by these hyenas; or, in order to make him unrecognisable, they dig his eyes out.”

I shrieked out loud at the doctor’s last words. I again saw the whole scene before me, and the eyes into which the hyena was plunging his knife were Frederick’s soft, blue, beloved eyes.

“Pray, forgive me, dear lady, but it was by your own wish⁠—”

“Oh yes; I desire to hear it all. What you are now describing was the night which follows the battle; and these scenes are enacted by the starlight?”

“And by torchlight. The patrols which the conquerors send out to survey the field of battle carry torches and lanterns, and red lanterns are hoisted on signal poles to point out the places where flying hospitals are to be established.”

“And next morning, how does the field look?”

“Almost more fearful still. The contrast between the bright, smiling daylight and the dreadful work of man on which it shines has a doubly-painful effect. At night the entire picture of horror is something ghostly and fantastic. By daylight it is simply hopeless. Now you see for the first time the mass of corpses lying around on the lanes, between the fields, in the ditches, behind the ruins of walls. Everywhere dead bodies⁠—everywhere. Plundered, some of them naked; and just the same with the wounded. These who, in spite of the nightly labour of the Sanitary Corps, are still always lying around in numbers, look pale and collapsed, green or yellow, with fixed and stupefied gaze, or writhing in agonies of pain, they beg anyone who comes near to put them to