Lay Down Your Arms · Chapter
Chapter X explained
Martha writes to Frederick, expressing her disgust with war and contrasting her feelings with the patriotic fervor of her father and Lori.
What happens
Martha writes to Frederick, expressing her disgust with war and contrasting her feelings with the patriotic fervor of her father and Lori. She describes the devastation of war in Bohemia and her family's preparations for flight. She reflects on the Red Cross and the inadequacy of official responses to suffering. Lilly's romantic regret and Martha's own traumatic visions of Frederick's possible death are depicted. Martha considers becoming a nurse but is dissuaded, instead joining her sisters in preparing bandages.
Themes in this chapter
Horrors of War
Martha vividly imagines the suffering of wounded soldiers, including being left to die, and contrasts it with romanticized views.
Critique of Nationalism and Propaganda
Martha criticizes the patriotic education that glorifies war, calling it a 'blind delusion' and a 'circle' of militarism.
Gender Roles and Women's Perspective
Martha reflects on women's limited role in war (preparing bandages) and her own internal conflict about becoming a nurse.
Grief and Psychological Trauma
Martha experiences traumatic visions of Frederick's death and feels like a widow, struggling with intense anxiety and grief.
Characters to notice
- Martha Tilling
Narrator and letter writer; expresses deep disgust with war and traumatic visions of her husband's death.
- Frederick Tilling
Martha's husband, serving in the war; recipient of Martha's letter and object of her longing and fear.
- Countess Lori Griesbach
Writes a triumphant letter about Custoza; offers to spend her grass-widowhood at Grumitz with her daughter Beatrix.
- Lilly
Martha's sister; works on bandages with a compassionate face; regrets not accepting a suitor before his departure.
- Rosa
Martha's sister; works on bandages with a gentle, almost happy expression.
- Aunt Mary
Removes to Grumitz with Martha's father and sisters.
- Dr. Bresser
Family doctor who voluntarily joined the army medical department and left for the theatre of war.
- Otto
Martha's brother; laments that war began before his admission to officer's rank; hopes peace does not 'break out'.
Key passages
“You will come back crowned with fame. We never tremble for an instant, for we are worthy comrades of your valour. No! no! the mothers of your sons must be no cowards if they would raise up a new race of heroes; and even if we have to give up what is dearest to us—for king and country no sacrifice is too great!”
Martha imagines a conventional patriotic letter from a soldier's wife, but immediately rejects it as insincere and incompatible with her true feelings.
Martha contrasts expected patriotic rhetoric with her own disgust for war.
“When I picture to myself these two armies, composed of individuals with the gift of reason, and for the most part kind and gentle men, how they are rushing on each other, to annihilate each other, desolating at the same time the unfortunate land, in which they cast aside the villages they have ‘taken’ like cards in their game of murder.”
Martha envisions armies of rational, kind men senselessly destroying each other and the land, treating villages like playing pieces in a murderous game.
Highlights Martha's horror at the irrationality and destructiveness of war.
“It is indeed the way they are brought up. As long as there are wars men must be brought up to be war-loving soldiers; and so long as there are war-loving soldiers there must be war. Is that our eternal, inevitable circle?”
Martha argues that the cycle of war is perpetuated by the militaristic education of boys, creating a self-reinforcing loop.
Critique of militarism and patriotic education.
“Oh, this official wisdom! so dry, so well-instructed, so real, so redolent of prudence, and so unfathomably stupid!”
Martha sarcastically condemns the bureaucratic objections to the Red Cross as being overly cautious and ultimately foolish.
Expresses frustration with institutional resistance to humanitarian innovation.
“‘Sinful,’ he went on, ‘and improper and nonsensical. Such cases as your excited fancy pictures, do no doubt occur once in a thousand times among the common men, but a staff-officer, as your husband is, is not left to lie on the field. Besides, as a general rule, folks should not think about such horrid things. Such conduct involves a kind of sacrilege, a profanation of war, in keeping these pitiful details before one’s eyes instead of the sublimity of the whole. One should not think about them.’”
Martha's father scolds her for imagining the gruesome details of war, calling it sinful and improper, and insists that one should focus on the grand picture rather than individual suffering.
Illustrates the generational and ideological conflict between Martha's realism and her father's romanticized view of war.
