Lay Down Your Arms 50

Lay Down Your Arms 50

We got again into the open air. The waggon was standing in the same

place. Dr. Bresser decided that I should get in again.

 

“Frau Simon and I are going meanwhile into the village to seek for aid,

and you shall remain here.”

 

I willingly submitted, for my feet could hardly carry me. The doctor

helped me to get up and arranged a convenient seat for me with the straw

that was lying about. Two soldiers remained behind with the waggon. The

rest Frau Simon and the doctor took along with them.

 

After about half-an-hour the whole expedition came back. No success. The

parsonage was destroyed, like everything else, and empty. All the houses

in ruins; no light to be obtained anywhere. So there was nothing else to

be done except to wait till day dawned. How many of the poor wretches in

whom our coming had already roused hope, and whom our aid might still

have saved, might perhaps die during this night?

 

What a long, long night that was! Though in reality only between three

and four hours passed before sunrise, how endless these hours

necessarily seemed to us, their course being marked, not by the ticking

of a clock, but by the helpless cries of fellow-men for aid.

 

At last the morning dawned. Now we could act. Frau Simon and Dr. Bresser

took the road again to see whether they could rouse up some of the

concealed inhabitants of the village. They succeeded. Out of the ruins

here and there one or two peasants crawled forth, at first morose and

distrustful. When, however, Dr. Bresser spoke to them in their own

language, and Frau Simon urged them with her soft voice, they agreed to

give their services. It was necessary before all things to recruit all

the other hidden villagers, so that they might help in the work--bury

the dead that were lying about, get the wells into working order so as

to procure water for the living, collect the field kettles that lay

scattered about the roads so as to have vessels, empty the knapsacks of

the slain and the dead, and use the linen they contained for the

wounded. Now arrived also a Prussian staff-surgeon with men and aid

materials, and then the work of bringing help to these poor creatures

could be undertaken with some success. Now the moment was come for me

too, when I might perhaps discover him at whose fancied call I had

undertaken this luckless journey, and whose recollection whipped up to

some extent my failing powers.

 

Frau Simon betook herself, under the conduct of the Prussian surgeon,

first to the château, where most of the wounded were lying. Dr. Bresser

chose to search through the other places in the village. I preferred to

keep with my friend, and went along with him. That Frederick was not

lying in the château the doctor had discovered by a previous look round

it.

 

We had hardly gone a hundred paces when loud cries of pain smote on our

ears. They came from the open door of the little village church. We went

in. There more than a hundred men were lying on the hard stone pavement,

severely wounded, crippled. With feverish, wandering eyes they shrieked

and cried for water. I had nearly sunk down even on the threshold; still

I walked through the whole row. I was seeking for Frederick. He was not

there.

 

Bresser with his people set themselves to attend to the poor fellows. I

leaned against a side altar, and contemplated the scene of woe with

infinite horror.

 

And _this_ was the temple of the God of Love! These were the

wonder-working saints who were there folding their hands so piously in

the niches and on the walls, and lifting up their heads with the golden

glories round them! “Oh Mother of God--holy Mother of God, one drop of

water; have mercy on me!” I heard a poor soldier pray. That prayer he

had probably been addressing all the long day to the gaudily-painted

dumb image. Ah poor men! Till you yourselves have listened to the

command of love which God has put into your own hearts you will always

call in vain upon God’s love. So long as cruelty is not overcome in your

own selves you have nothing to hope from the compassion of heaven.

 

* * * * *

 

Ah, how much I had to see and to go through in the whole of this same

day! It would in truth be the simplest way and the most pleasant to

pursue the narrative no further. One shuts one’s eyes and turns away

one’s head when something altogether too horrid presents itself--even

the recollection has the power to make one shut one’s eyes. And if there

is no more power to help (and what can be altered in this stony past?)

why torture oneself and others by writing up these horrors?

 

Why? I will answer the question afterwards. Now I can only say I _must_

do it.

 

More still. I will not merely tax my own memory that I may be able to

relate what I have in view, for my powers of perception were far too

weak to bear the burden of the events, but I will also add what Frau

Simon, Dr. Bresser, and the Saxon inspector of field hospitals, Dr.

Naundorff, told me. As in Horonewos, so also in many of the villages in

this neighbourhood, Hell had set up branch establishments. It was so in

Sweti, in Hradeck, in Problus. So in Pardubitz, where, when the

Prussians first took possession of it, “over _one thousand_ severely

wounded men, operations and amputations, were lying about, some dying,

some already dead, corpses mixed with those in the act of death, and

those who envied them their end, many with nothing on but bloody shirts,

so that no one could tell even what countrymen they were. All those who

had still a spark of life in them were shrieking for water and bread,

writhing with the pain of their wounds, and begging for death as a

blessing.”

 

“Rossnitz,” writes Dr. Bauer in his letters--“Rossnitz, a place whose

picture will live in my memory till the hour of my death--Rossnitz,

whither I was sent by the St. John’s Society six days after the

murderous fight, and where the greatest misery which the human fancy can

picture was still reigning down to that day. I found there ‘R.’ of ours

with 650 wounded, who were lying in wretched barns and stables without

any nursing in the midst of death and half-dead men, some of them lying

for days in their own offal. It was here that after the erection of the

funeral mound of the fallen Lt.-Col. von F---- I was so overcome with

pain that _for an hour I poured out the hottest tears_ and could hardly

regain self-control in spite of the expenditure of all my moral force.

Though as a medical man I am accustomed to look at human suffering in

all its forms, and in the exercise of my profession have learnt to bear

the shrieks of tortured human nature, yet here in very truth tears which

I could not repress welled from my eyes. It was here in Rossnitz that

when, on the second day, I found that our powers were not equal to cope

with such misery, I lost courage and left off dressing the wounds.”

 

“In what condition were these 600 men?” It is Dr. Naundorff who is

speaking this time. “It is impossible to depict it accurately. Flies

were feeding on their open wounds, which were covered with them; their

gaze, flaming with fever, wandered about asking and seeking for some

help--for refreshment, for water and bread! Coat, shirt, flesh and blood

formed in the case of most of them one repulsive mass. _Worms were

beginning to generate in this mass and to feed on them._ A horrible

odour filled every place. All these soldiers were lying on the bare

ground; only a few had got a little straw on which they could repose

their miserable bodies. Some who had nothing under them but clayey,

swampy ground had half sunk into the mud it formed; they had not the

strength to get out of it. Others lay in a puddle of horrible filth

which no pen could consent to describe.”

 

“In Masloved,” so says Frau Simon, “a place of about fifty houses, there

were lying, eight days after the battle, about 700 wounded. It was not

so much their shrieks of agony as their abandonment without any

consolation which appealed to heaven. In one single barn alone sixty of

these poor wretches were crowded. Every one of their wounds had

originally been severe, but they had become hopeless in consequence of

their unassisted condition, and their want of nursing and feeding;

almost all were gangrenous. Limbs crushed by shot formed now mere heaps

of putrefying flesh, faces a mere mass of coagulated blood, covered with

filth, in which the mouth was represented by a shapeless black opening,

from which frightful groans kept welling out. The progress of

putrefaction separated whole mortified pieces from these pitiable

bodies. The living were lying close to dead bodies which had begun to

fall into putrefaction, and for which the worms were getting ready.

 

“These sixty men, as well as the greater number of the others, lay for a

week in the same situation. Their wounds were either not dressed at all,

or only in a most imperfect way--since the day of the battle they lay

there, incapable of moving from the spot--only scantily fed, and without

sufficient water. The bedding under them corrupting with blood and

excrement--that is how they passed eight days! living corpses--through

whose quivering limbs a stream of poisoned blood hardly circulated. They

had not been able to die, and yet how could they expect ever again to

return to life? Which is the more astonishing in this matter,” says Frau

Simon, in concluding her tale, “the eternal living force of human

nature, which could endure all this and yet go on breathing, or the want

of efficient assistance?”

 

What is most astonishing, according to my way of looking at it, is, that

men should bring each other into such a state--that men who have seen

such a sight should not sink on their knees and swear a passionate oath

to make war on war--that if they are princes they do not fling the sword

away--or if they are not in any position of power, they do not from that

moment devote their whole action in speech or writing, in thought,

teaching or business to this one end--Lay down your arms.

 

* * * * *

 

Frau Simon--she was called the Mother of the Lazarettos--was a heroine.

For weeks she stayed in that neighbourhood and bore all privations and

dangers. Hundreds were saved by her agency. Day and night she worked,

provided, directed. Sometimes she was doing the lowest offices beside

the sick-beds, sometimes ordering the transport of wounded, sometimes

requisitioning necessaries. When she had provided assistance in one

place, she hastened without any rest to another; she got a copious

supply from Dresden, and conveyed it in spite of all opposing

difficulties to the points when help was needed. She undertook to

represent the Patriotic Aid Society on the soil of Bohemia, and made a

position for herself there equal to that which Florence Nightingale took

in the Crimea. And as to me? Exhausted, comfortless, overpowered by pain

and disgust, I had no power to render any help. Even in the church--our

first station--I had fallen fainting with fatigue on the steps of that

altar of the Virgin, and Dr. Bresser had a good deal of trouble to bring

me round again. Thence I tottered a little further by his side, and we

got into just such a barn as Frau Simon has depicted. In the church

there was at least a large space, in which the poor fellows lay side by

side; here they were crowded upon each other, or in each other’s arms,

in heaps or rolls. Into the church there had come nurses--probably some

sanitary corps on its march through--and these had given some help,

though insufficient. But here they were mere castaways quite

undiscovered--a crawling whining mass of half-putrefied remains of men.

Choking disgust laid hold of my throat, the bitterest grief of my

breast. I felt as if my heart was breaking in two, and I gave utterance

to a resounding shriek. This shriek is the last thing remaining in my memory of that scene.