Wlasta heard these threats, and suffered personally from their insolence; but while the proposed change in affairs depressed her comrades, it only fired her with the spirit of vengeance and resistance.

Never was a woman more truly born for a leader, for a revolutionist than Wlasta. She was tall and majestic like a goddess; proud or gracious as it was necessary to accomplish her ends. She disciplined her troops in military tactics, teaching her women warriors a skill and adroitness that immortalized them in the annals of war. She heaped upon men. whom she called “barbarians," all the imprecations of her wrathful eloquence, and commanded that wherever a man should be found, he should be killed, maimed, or added to their galley-force.

Plots were laid to entrap men to their ruin, wives were incited to stab their husbands when giving caresses; lovers were inveigled into conferences to be maimed, mutilated, or captured. Men suspected poison at the table, and feared the dagger at every turn. As Wlasta's power increased the insolence of women also increased. Wifely obedience was no longer the ritual of Bohemian households. Women carried the purse, went to the chase, and formed the heads of the families. Men nursed the babies, cooked, and mended the clothes. In brief the rôle of the two sexes was completely changed.

Naturally enough that state of subjection did not endure, and the men rallied at the call of one Stamolas. Wlasta, apprised of their approach, put her women under arms, and rode through their ranks, crying: "The longed-for hour has come! The day of vengence has arrived! You will meet husbands, brothers, fathers even, but let that not arrest your hand or make falter your heart. The nearer the tie, the tenderer the heart into which you plunge the dagger, the greater will be your glory. It is your liberty and not your love that is at stake; and liberty, liberty was never won but through seas of blood and fields of carnage." She called each of her warriors by name, and praised the ferocious ardor she saw gleaming in their eyes. Like a torrent they fell upon the men and the first fierce yell of the Amazons put their whole camp in disorder. The women cut to pieces the men they met; the carnage became general, and the camp was surrounded on all sides. Wlasta's eye fell upon Stamolas, about whom was grouped his staff. With one swoop of her charger she was upon him, and cleft his head in twain. Intimidated by the fall of their chief, the men took to their heels, leaving three hundred of their dead on the field. Wlasta issued the following laws:

I. Upon the birth of every male child in Bohemia, the thumb of his right hand shall be cut off and his right eye destroyed, so that he may be disabled for using the sabre, and for giving true aim to his

arrow.

II. It is forbidden to men, under pain of death, to carry arms, no matter of what sort. They are permitted to ride on horseback, with their legs joined and hanging at the left side of the horse. Any man, daring to ride otherwise, incurs the penalty of death.

III. All men, noble or of low birth, shall follow the plough, and perform every sort of servile labor. Women will fight for them, defending their homes and their country.

IV. All young women will choose husbands to suit themselves. Every man, who shall refuse to accept the hand offered to him, shall be punished with death.

These laws were promulgated everywhere in Bohemia. Men cursed and groaned with renewed force upon the appearance of this last afront to their sex. They assembled before the prince's palace, demanding with loud cries to be armed, and threatening to dethrone Przémyle, if he did not march against the women at once.

It would be tiresome to tell and painful to read the story of that final battle; how every woman "to a man" perished rather than surrender; how Przémyle offered them quarter, and not one would accept it; how they all fell, arms in hand, faithful to the last; and how the dreadful Wlasta met a "Hec

tor" worthy of her steel, and both fell together. One must admire their heroism, and the spirit that reigned so triumphantly to the bitter end.

The discontent engendered by Wlasta in the feminine heart, did not perish with her on the battlefield. Many years afterward occasional efforts were made by women to regain supremacy over men.

The Wlastas of to-day fight with different arms, and pursue a different mode of warfare; but it may be some comfort for them to know that their "griefs" have the merit of age and the prestige of heroic and martial valor.

THE SKULL OF A MAN WHO SAW SAINT GEORGE. GUSTAVE SCHLUMBERGER.

TH

Revue des Etudes Grecques, Paris, January to March. HE patron saint of England has been dead a good while, the year of his death being generally put at 303 of our era. In the general decay of all sublunary things, including human bodies, it would hardly seem possible that there can be yet in existence any portion of a man who had set eyes on a person who died sixteen centuries ago. Nevertheless, the fact of such a phenomenon seems tolerably well established.

When Saint George was put to death, under Diocletian, for embracing Christianity, there were present at his martyrdom a number of persons, who were so touched by what they saw that they turned Christians. Forthwith they were all arrested and decapitated at Nicomedia. One of these persons was Akindynos, who became a notable saint of the Greek Church. After his death the churches of the Orient divided among them his remains. A portion of his skull became the property of the church of Saints Comus and Damien in Constantinople. A Russian pilgrim, Archbishop Anthony, of Novgorod, who visited the capital of the Eastern Empire in the year 1200, and who left a manuscript account of his visit, which has come down to us, venerated this relic, and has given a description of it. A silver plate was fastened to the bone of the saint, and on this plate was engraved his name and bust.

Four years after the visit of the Archbishop, in 1204, the Latin warriors of the Fourth Crusade took Constantinople, and the spoils of the innumerable religious edifices of the city became the property of the conquerors, and, transported to the West, were bestowed there on various churches and monasteries.

The piece of the skull of Saint Akindynos was allotted to a lord of Franche-Comté, long a part of the kingdom of Burgundy. He was, probably, a Sire de Vadans. However that may be, the possessor of the relic presented it to the Cistercian Abbey of Rosières, a rich monastery which is entirely destroyed, but which stood in what is now the canton of Arbois.

The piece of the skull was carefully preserved in the abbey of Franche-Comté. It is mentioned in an inventory of the property of the convent made in 1714. In the time of the Revolution the relic of Rosières disappeared with the abbey and the church. The monks were dispersed, the monuments destroyed, the precious objects sent to the melting-pot. From that time to this nothing was ever heard of the skull of Saint Akindynos until this year, when it was discovered in a remarkable way.

The parish priest of a little commune in the vicinity of Rosières, the Abbé Guichard, an archeologist of reputation, in some excavations he had made among a mass of wood-ashes contained in an old salt-pit, Im. 50c. under ground, found the bone of the saint, with the silver plate still affixed to it. The Abbé Guichard, enlightened as to the value of his discovery by Mr. Gauthier, sent the relic to me.

The fragment of skull is a portion of the left parietal fossa. The silver plate, a work of the tenth century, is of circular form. On it is engraved the bust of the saint, with his name written in Greek characters. The figure is that of a young man; the hair is long, the beard pointed. The plate is fastened to the skull by four little bands of metal and eight nails.

!

Books.

DIE WAFFEN NIEDER!* Eine Lebensgeschichte. Von Bertha von Suttner. Dresden and Leipzig: E. Pierson. 1892.

[Twenty-two years ago, the cry" To Arms!" aroused all Germany to an enthusiastic response. Napoleon III., for dynastic reasons, thought it good policy to curb the growing power of Prussia, and signalize his reign by a brilliant campaign. He determined to satisfy the French thirst for glory by the annexation of the Rhine provinces. Prussia's appeal to the smaller States to rally to the defense of the sacred soil of the German Rhineland swept over the land like an electric wave, arousing in every breast a fierce fire of patriotism, a passionate impulse to fight for the integrity of the Fatherland, and to die for it if need be. Once more Germany was united; princes and people were of one accord; and Saxony and Bavaria, Baden and Westphalia, Hesse and Silesia, Hanover and Brunswick, Pomerania and the Swabianland, sent forth their sons to battle for the German cause. Not a man in Germany, worthy of the name, shrank from the needed sacrifice, not a mother hesitated to send her son or husband to the front. It is a period which Germans may well recall with pride, a period at which all thought of self was subordinated to a loftier impulse of duty. Other forces may have been at work also; the long slumbering battle-instinct in the German burgher class had been aroused, it had found its justification in the Gallic invasion; but, whatever the causes, the German nation was for the moment exalted, and ennobled.

The German arms were everywhere successful. France, beaten in the field, brought on herself further humiliation by prolonged struggle; but so far from being humbled by defeat, she at once set herself about the reform of her army, and has spent the intervening years in preparation for revenge. Germany must needs keep pace with her. Industry is crippled, the nation, in common with all the nations of Europe, is an armed camp.

And now,

while Germany is groaning under the burden of war-taxation in time of there falls clarion-tongued upon the national ear, "Die Waffen nieder!" peace, (Lay down your arms!). Clear, sharp, and imperative it rings out as though it were a command from heaven, a respite from the weary burden under which the nations of Christendom are groaning. It is a woman's cry, but the volumes through which she has found access to the public ear have been characterized as epochmaking. It is a call to the nations to disband their armies, and submit all differences to an international tribunal. It strips war of its glamour, presents the battle-field in all its naked horrors, dwells on the noble lives wasted, the rich blood spilled, and the bright homes desolated for the indulgence of a surviving instinct of savagedom; and it appeals to all who regard war in that light to engage in a new crusade for its suppression.

And now to the work itself, which is written in the form of an autobiography. Martha, borr von Althaus, afterward Martha von Dotzky, finally Martha von Tilling, is the medium employed by the author to depict the horrors of war from her own experiences, to arouse sympathy by the passionate outpouring of her own sufferings, and with her keen woman's wit to combat the plea of "inevitable" with which Junkerdom justifies its profession of arms.]

MARTHA VON ALTHAUS was a member of the inner circle of

Austrian nobility. Her father, a retired general, centres all his past in a glorious campaign in Italy, her brother, and all the young men in her circle of acquaintance, worship the profession of arms, which, apart from diplomacy, is regarded as the only profession fit for a gentleman. Martha has read histories which represent war as the chief employment of nations, and military distinction as the acme of virtue. Saturated with the element which envelopes her, she, too, is emulous of distinction, and in her day-dreams pictures herself as a modern Joan of Arc. This is only the hankering after an unknown ideal which interprets itself at her first ball, which she is allowed to attend, en tour, to give her confidence on her first appearance in the Salons of Vienna. Here she was introduced to Count Arno von Dotzky, a lieutenant of Hussars, who made love "like a soldier." On both sides, it was a case of love at first sight, and they were married on her eighteenth birthday, shortly after her presentation at Court. They enjoy a brief year of unalloyed happiness, during which she gives birth to a boy whom the fond parents at once enroll as a soldier, promoting him to corporal at the end of three months. While thus playing with life after the manner of children who have never known care, she is aroused to a realization of its earnestness by the prospect of war with Italy. Arno is fired with dreams of distinction, and his wife and child, the Corporal Rudolf, are relegated to the background; but she pictures him as borne down by the flying-wounded, helpless, deserted. These are moments of terrible anguish, but Arno consoles

her.

My darling, courage, control! there is nothing so dreadful about it. We shall soon return home as conquerors, Then we shall be doubly happy. Do not cry so; it rends my heart. I'm almost sorry that I pledged myself to go, in any case, even if my own regiment were not ordered to the front but no, only think of it: If my comrades must go to the front, with what right could I remain at home? You yourself would be ashamed of me. Some time I must go through the baptism of fire, and until that occurs, I can hardly regard * The peculiar significance of this book, in consideration of its authorship, the importance of the subject treated, and the attention it has attracted in Europe, seem to justify the appropriation to it of all our space in this department.

But Arno came back no more: he "remained" on the field of glory. And Martha ? In the interval between Arno's departure and his death in the battle of Solferino, she had protested with all her soul against the conventional pleas by which her party sought to justify the war, and especially against the plea that war was of divine institution; nevertheless in the early days of her mourning there was something of solace in the feeling that she was regarded as one of those who had made great sacrifices for her country. Next to the blood of the patriot were not the tears of the bereaved mother, wife, and sweetheart the most precious libation?

The succeeding four years were spent by Martha in close retirement which she devoted mainly to the young Rudolf, and the study of the problems which perplexed her. Her views were greatly biassed by Buckle in whose "History of Civilization" she saw all her dim perplexities mirrored in clear outline. She saw it laid down as a fact that war which is the prime pursuit of the savage, becomes less and less a measure of self-preservation as civilization advances; that the chronicles of camps and courts, which make history in earlier stages of society, are mere isolated phenomena of modern civilization, impeding, but scarcely warping the career of human progress. She saw war reduced to its true proportions in history and stripped of its glamour, and concluded that the battle-instinct is kept alive mainly by illusions fostered in youth, by a false presentation of the subject in history.

Martha thought, for she had felt, and she possessed, moreover, the critical faculty; but she was still young; the despair which crushed her with the news of Arno's death passed into grief, the grief into melancholy, the melancholy into indifference, and this, in turn, into the joyousness of life. After four years of retirement she woke one morning to the realization that she was really a very enviable young woman-three and twenty years of age, and the possessor of wealth, beauty, station, freedom, an attached family, and a very lovable boy. Her two sisters were ready to "come out," and she herself was enchanted with the idea of presenting them, and of mingling once more in the gay world from which she had so long withdrawn. The old wound had healed; and the broader views of life opened up by Buckle and Darwin made her realize that had Arno lived, they two would have drifted intellectually apart from each other. She resolves never to marry a soldier again; but in due course a new suitor came in the person of Lieutenant-Colonel von Tilling, and she could not say him nay. In fact, although he let his secret be read, she had to exert consider. able address to wring the confession from him. But Baron von Til

ling is a man fitted in every way to be her mate. A Prussian by birth, he has taken service in the Austrian army, but he has been brought to realize that his calling is, for him, an anachronism, that the profession of the soldier is opposed to progress and humanity. Moreover, he has experienced all the horrors of war, he has witnessed the terrors of the panic-stricken, with the exultant foe shouting behind them, the hor rors of the battlefield after friend and foe have swept by and left the wounded to their fate; with all this he realizes the force of existing conditions, and the necessity of keeping in touch with the spirit of the age; and, at the period of his marriage, although pride alone or the fear of being misconstrued would have withheld him from sending in his resignation, he was still further influenced by the sense that as there was fighting to be done, it behooved him to take his share. But as he participated in his wife's studies his mental horizon widened, and he meditated resigning, and organizing the nucleus of a peace crusade, when the Schleswig-Holstein affair came to a crisis, and effectually thwarted his intentions. The order to join his regiment was a severe blow to both of them; the birth of her child was at hand, and the excitement of parting brought on premature birththroes, in the midst of which he had to tear himself from her, and hurry to the scene of action, with no better consolation on the road than the news that his child was dead, and his wife in a very precarious condition.

Tilling served through the campaign, but was slightly wounded at its close, and Martha's life hung in the balance through the whole period. With his sentiments opposed to war as a means of settling international difficulties, he had studied the Schleswig-Holstein tangle exhaustively, and depicts the pleas which were advanced to justify the

war with cutting irony. Yes, he has done with soldiering. Henceforth he will enlist as a soldier in a cause which he may not live to see victorious, but which sooner or later shall triumph-the cause of peaceful adjustment of international difficulties.

Tilling now decided to quit the service, but man proposes in the face of unseen obstacles. The war inaugurated speculation and commercial disasters, and among these was the collapse of the bankinghouse in which Martha had her private fortune. They had now nothing but Tilling's pay, and for him to resign now and render himself dependent on her father was beyond discussion.

The Austro-Prussian campaign followed quickly, and its announcement came at a moment when Tilling was on duty in Bohemia, and she in Vienna. With the news came a letter from Tilling that he was already under orders to march with the advance guard; and for Martha there remained nothing but to make lint for the wounded, and see visions of Tilling lying among heaps of slain.

Tilling found abundant opportunities to write, down to the eve of the decisive battle of Königgratz, in which he was to take part on the morrow. The battle was fought and lost, but day succeeded day, and no letter from Tilling. After some days there came a letter from her good friend, Dr. Bresser, who was in the neighborhood of the battlefield, trying to organize what help he could for the wounded. He expected a Frau Simon, a Saxon Miss Nightingale, to join him in a few days. The sufferings, he described as boundless-beyond the power of imagination to conceive. Martha read and pictured Tilling lying among the wounded and the dead, until, in imagination, she heard him calling her name. The tension was too terrible-she hastily resolved to hurry to the scene, and search the battlefield and hospitals for her wounded husband. She had a letter from Tilling in which he had described the measures for removing the wounded to the rear during a battle, and she soon found that there were scenes more horrible even than battle-the field after the battle.

No cannonading, no braying of trumpets, no beating of drums now, nothing but low, agonizing groans. The trodden earth saturated with blood, the once smiling villages reduced to ruins . . . and on the battlefield, thousands upon thousands of dead and dying-helpless dying. Scarce a trace of vegetation to be seen, but road and meadow are strewn with swords, bayonets, knapsacks, mantles, overturned ammunition wagons, blown-up powder tumbrils, guns with broken carriages. Near the cannon whose throats are blackened with smoke, the ground reeks with blood; there lie the most, and the most mutilated dead and halfdead, literally torn by balls. And the dead and half-dead horses!-they raise themselves on their remaining legs only to sink again, until at length they raise their heads for the agonizing death-cry. One gully is completely filled with bodies trodden into the mire. The unfortunates had probably fled here for shelter, but a battery had charged over them-the horses' hoofs and the wheels crushed them. Many of them still live. A mangled, bloody mass, but "still living." Frau Simon accompanied the Prussian surgeon to the castle where the most of the wounded lay. Dr. Bresser determined to go through the remaining houses of the village, and I decided to accompany him. That Friedrich was not in the castle the Doctor was positive, having already made the round of it.

. .

What all have I seen and experienced on this day!

To close the narration were truly the simplest and the most attractive course. In the presence of too-horrible scenes, one closes the eyes and turns aside the head-even memory strives to exclude such scenes. When no good can be done. -when the past is beyond recall, why should we torment ourselves and others by raking it up?

To what end? I will answer that question later. For the present let it suffice: I must!

Here follows a long series of horrid scenes from the other battlefields of the campaign, which Martha gathered from eye-witnesses, principally surgeons. Her own tour of inspection was soon over. She broke down completely in a few days, and Dr. Bresser sent her back to Vienna, and telegraphed to her father to meet her. arrived at Grumitz, her father's estate, a few hours after Friedrich, who had been wounded in the leg, and had no opportunity of writing.

She

"Oh Friedrich, Friedrich!" I repeated amid tears and caresses, "have I recovered you?" "And you must needs search for and tend me? How heroic, and yet how foolish, Martha !"

"Foolish, yes-I see that now. Your voice calling to me was fantasy, superstition, for you did not call me. But heroic? No. If you only knew how cowardly I behaved in the presence of the suffering! Only you-if you had lain there, I could have tended you. Oh Friedrich I have seen terrible things, scenes which never can be effaced from memory. Oh, how can man thus mar our beautiful world, Friedrich? A world in which two persons can love each other as you and I do. How can people, capable of such happiness as ours, be mad enough to fan the flames of death-bringing and misery-bringing hate?"

"I also have witnessed a horrible sight, Martha-something which will ever

And now the Prussians marched upon Vienna, and while terms of peace were being discussed, a body of troops were quartered on Grumitz. One of their number, Prince Heinrich von Reuss, was enamored of one of Martha's sisters; and the author indulges in much sarcastic humor over the dilemma of her father, who hated the Prussians collectively like poison, but liked the Prince individually well enough for a son-in-law.

The young people were affianced, the Prussians marched off, leaving only their sick behind them, and now the cholera broke out among these, and fatal indeed was its record in Martha's house. Her two sisters and brother were swept off, and her broken-down father fell a victim to paralysis of the heart. Martha herself fell into a state of blank passive despair. Her father's wealth had all fallen to her and her husband took her to Switzerland, where she gradually recovered interest in life, a life with a steady purpose now, for Friedrich had sought out the promoters of the Swiss Cross Movement and was discussing measures for the New Crusade. This was now to be the business of their lives; and, while resolved to hold aloof from society, they sketched out for themselves a course of study and of travel.

now,

Friedrich had now left the service, and some months later they returned to Vienna, and after Martha had set her affairs in order they determined on a visit to Berlin. The road lay through Bohemia, they broke the journey in Prague, and at breakfast the next morning they learnt that it was All-Souls'-Day, and determined to visit the graves of those who fell at Königgratz.

We had now reached the spot where the greatest number lay buried-friend and foe side by side. The plot was enclosed like a church-yard. Hither flocked the great body of mourners; for here, most probably, were their own mourned ones laid at rest. Here, by the fence, the mourners knelt and wept; here, on the palings, they hung their wreaths and grave-lanterns.

A tall, slight man, with distinguished youthful bearing, and wearing a general's cloak, advanced toward the tumulus; the crowd fell back respectfully, and I heard a low murmur:

"The Kaiser."

Yes, it was Francis Joseph, the father of his country, the chief of the army, who, on this All-souls-Day, had come to offer up a silent prayer for the lost children of the soil, for his fallen soldiers.

He, too, like Friedrich, stood with bare, bent head in mournful reverence before the majesty of death.

Long, long, he stood motionless. I could not turn my eyes from him. What were the thoughts that surged through his soul? What feelings agitated his heart, which, I knew, was a good and gentle heart? It came over me that I could follow him in his train of sensations, and share with him the thoughts which coursed through his bowed head. Oh my poor, brave fellows dead, and to what purpose? We have not even conquered. My Venice! lost so much, so much lost and your young lives and you sacrificed them so freely for me. Oh, that I could restore them to you! It was not for my own sake that I required the sacrifice. For your own sakes, and for the sake of your country were you led into this war and not through me, even although at my command. Was I not compelled to issue the command? It is not for my sake that my subjects exist-no, it was for their own sakes that I was called to the throne. And I was ready at any moment to die for the welfare of my people. Oh, if I had only followed the promptings of my own heart, and withheld the fatal yes when all around me clamored: But could I have opposed them? God is my witness, I could not. scarcely know myself now, what the forces were which urged me on-only this I know-it was an irresistible pressure from without-from you yourselves, ye dead soldiers. Oh how sad, sad, sad-what have you not suffered? and now you lie here, and on other battlefields, swept away by cartridges and sabre cuts, by cholera and typhus. Oh, if I could have said "No And you, Elizabeth, appealed to me to say it. Oh had I said it! The thought is unendurable, alas, it is a miserable, imperfect world too much, too much

war!"

that

"War.

I

of misery! And even as I thus interpreted his thoughts, my eyes hung on his lineaments, and now-yes! it was "too much, too much of misery "-he covered his face with both hands, and burst into passionate weeping.

Such was the scene on All-Souls-Day, 1866, on the lost field of Sadowa.

Last scene of all, the Tillings take up their residence in Paris. It was the place best suited to the development of their plans for disarmament: their "Peace politics" as they called it. The war of 1870 burst on them unprepared, and Martha's illness prevented their leaving the city before the threatened siege. Their German tongue grated on French ears, and during the reign of the Commune their rooms were searched, and some Berlin letters found in Tilling's possession stamped him as a Prussian and a spy. There was no appeal; the frenzied mob dragged him out and shot him.

[We have here unquestionably a very remarkable work. As a plea for a general disarmament it stands unrivaled. For familiarity with the details of the subject treated, for breadth of view, for logical acumen, for dramatic effect, and literary excellence it stands unequaled by any work written with a purpose. It has already created an enormous stir in Germany and Austria, and we are led to infer that Frau von Suttner has devoted herself to the subject for a lifetime, and that her heroine (herself?) was the chief instrument in the inauguration of the International Peace Conferences.]