"Lay down your arms!"
Martha, several times
Lay Down Your Arms (German original title: Die Waffen nieder!) is an anti-war novel written by Bertha von Suttner (1843-1914), a Bohemian-Austrian pacifist, peace researcher and author who also gave Alfred Nobel the idea to include Peace into the categories for his renowned Nobel Prizes (and also became the first woman to receive the Peace Nobel Prize in 1905).
The story was published in 1889 and is set up as the memoir of the Austrian noblewoman Martha Althaus, widowed Dotzky, married von Tilling, who writes down her life memories in her old age. Memories that have far too often something to do with war – what is the main reason she wants to write them down, so others can learn from history, and to explain the pacifistic cause she started working for as a result of that.
The novel itself isn’t high art, but nevertheless it survived and was highly acclaimed thanks to its Brutal Honesty about the horrors of war and its timeless, resonant message. A critic compared it to Uncle Tom's Cabin once and postulated that it would do the same for the end of war what the former did for the end of slavery. ‘’Lay Down Your Arms’’ was viewed as the most important anti-war novel written in the German language, basically until a guy named Erich Maria Remarque came along with All Quiet on the Western Front.
Contains examples of the following tropes:
- Age-Gap Romance: Martha is in her early twenties when she meets and falls in love with Friedrich von Tilling, her then forty-year-old second husband.
- An Aesop: Lay down your arms! Understand that War Is Hell and doesn't do any good for humanity, and be the one to prevent bloodshed. And let's establish international forums for diplomacy and courts to bring war criminals to justice.
- Arc Words: “Lay down your arms!” in any situation in which Martha gets a humanitarian idea.
- Author Filibuster: Bertha von Suttner uses Martha as her mouthpiece, delivering pages-long monologues about reasons why war is wrong and useless, and calling for the establishment of international treaties and organizations for the simplification of diplomacy and peacekeeping.
- Because Destiny Says So: Deconstructed. Martha’s aunt Marie is a strong believer in destiny and that everyone gets only their predestined fate in the end (and if you die in war, then it was just your fate to die in war). Martha deconstructs this, since it is impossible that the thousands who died in a battle all had died in accidents the same day if it hadn’t been for the war.
- Berserk Button: Saying anything good about war becomes one for Martha. Especially when God or the Christian faith is in some way involved.
- Bittersweet Ending: Martha is widowed twice, but nevertheless, she sees her children grow up further in a largely stable and peaceful Europe, has become a grandmother and first advances for the pacifistic cause were made.
- Canine Companion: Friedrich takes a pinscher named Puxl to the battlefield.
- Caretaking is Feminine: Women on the battlefield in the era usually work in field hospitals. Martha remembers hating this fact as a teen, since she wanted to become a war heroine on the battlefield herself and looked up to people like early Christian martyrs or Jeanne d’Arc. She also once goes and helps out in a field hospital with other women while looking for Friedrich.
- Conveniently an Orphan: Downplayed. Martha is only conveniently a half-orphan. Her mother is remarked to have died when she was still very young, and she doesn’t remember much about her.
- The Dead Have Names: Lists with names of the fallen are frequently published in Austrian newspapers during the wars described in the story. This makes Martha think for the first time: She may be relieved that nobody she knows is on the list today, but what about those who knew and loved those on the list?
- Delivery Stork: Invoked by Martha, who announces her pregnancy to her husband Friedrich by giving him a paperweight in the shape of a silver stork for Christmas. This stork carries the message “In summer next year I will bring something.” in its beak. Too bad that war will come around and the child will be born dead.
- Driven to Suicide: After Martha’s younger sister he is courting dies of cholera, her cousin Konrad shoots himself at her grave.
- Everybody's Dead, Dave: Martha has to experience the loss of most of her family in a timeframe of a week in 1866. The fact that this makes the family estate go to her and her husband of course doesn’t make up for it.
- Fourth-Date Marriage: After falling in love at a ball, Martha and Arno Dotzky get married very soon and after seeing each other not too many times. They just know they are right for each other.
- From the Mouths of Babes: Martha overhears her son Rudolf tormenting two street dogs. When she calls him out for it, he calls one of the dogs a “naughty Dane” and the other one a “lying Italian”. Shocked about hearing him repeating hateful stereotypes about the two countries Austria fought in the last two wars, she immediately suspects that her father taught him this.
- Glad-to-Be-Alive Sex: Glad to see Friedrich again alive, it comes to one another on a beautiful New Year’s Eve, and their daughter Silvia is born on 1st October of the following year.
- Good Smells Good: Inverted, in an Evil Smells Bad kind. When going to the front lines to help the wounded and look for her husband, Martha frequently remarks how much war stinks.
- Gray-and-Grey Morality: A frequent topic is how both sides in wars are only people in many varieties, and that they are only commanded by some rich and powerful people to go and die. Both sides are told that they are defending their countries, and both sides only want to do what they believe to be the right thing, so there isn’t any fully black side. There is also no fully white side, since everyone has to commit atrocities in a war.
- Homeschooled Kids: Martha didn’t go to a school as a child and teen but was taught at home by private teachers. Justified, since normal for European earlier 19th century nobility.
- How We Got Here: The story is depicted as Martha’s memoir, written in her old age.
- Humans Are Warriors: Deconstructed. Those who are tend to die rather quickly without leaving behind anything good, and there are also those who explicitly aren’t and have to deal with nothing but damages produced by the former.
- Imperiled in Pregnancy: Martha is heavily pregnant when war breaks out again and Friedrich has to go off to fight. It is implied that this did its part to cause her miscarriage.
- Kissing Cousins: Martha’s younger sister and their cousin Konrad fall in love and plan to get married.
- Love at First Sight: Martha and Arno immediately fall for each other when they meet at a ball.
- Missing Mom: Martha’s mother died when she was still very young and isn’t remarked about much afterwards.
- Mission from God: Deconstructed in regards of war. Martha understands more and more that the horrors of war and the Christian ideas of pacifism and loving your enemy don’t go together, since if God would really give you such a mission, he would break his own principles.
- No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Martha and Friedrich are known peace activists by the year 1870. Nevertheless, this raises certain suspicions regarding them among the French, especially since they both have German as their first language. Friedrich ends up Shot at Dawn as a Falsely Accused spy.
- The Plague: The “Cholera Week”. In a timespan of seven days, ten inhabitants of the Althaus estate die directly or indirectly of a cholera epidemic that started in the barracks of the Prussian army the Austrians were fighting recently.
- Politically Motivated Teacher: More Politically Motivated Teaching. Martha recalls that her curriculum was written with the goal to raise her to develop a militaristic mindset, showing her many pictures to teach her that war is not just necessary, but glorious, and instilling the idea that attractiveness in men is best created by wearing a military uniform and the wish to marry a soldier in her. When she was a teen, she was angry that there was only such a small number of women who were great in military history, and wanted to die in a war. The boys, since they would become soldiers for real, had even more of that.
- Prayer of Malice: Martha starts to regard prayers in churches for victory in war as this, since losing a war means much more suffering than winning it and the enemy is also human and will want revenge.
- Rape, Pillage, and Burn: Witnessing this in his very first war turned Friedrich into a pacifist. In the German War, he witnesses an incident how his troops burn a village besides not every civilian having left and pillaging the leftovers.
- Royals Who Actually Do Something: Most countries in Europe are still monarchies, so the political life is dominated by them.
- Second Love: Friedrich von Tilling is this for Martha, after her first husband Arno Dotzky died in the Battle of Solferino.
- Shell-Shocked Veteran: Inverted with Martha’s father, who has grown to like war not just a little too much.
- Shot at Dawn: That's how Friedrich von Tilling dies in the end.
- Sinister Minister: Priests and pastors tend to be quite the biggest militarists out there in the book, although they should be supposed to be the loudest pacifists out there.
- Straw Character:
- Martha’s father is a Straw Militarist: a war-crazy old General Ripper who views war as a good form of therapy for young men, just natural in this world and important for population control and mainly there to be proven wrong.
- Martha's aunt is essentially fully described with the phrase "Straw Fatalist".
- Textile Work Is Feminine: Many women who stay at home while their husbands are off to war are plucking charpie to make bandages for the military hospitals. Martha and her friends participate in this themselves. Truth in Television for wars up into the 20th century.
- Together in Death: Klaus Althaus invokes this trope by killing himself on his cousin’s (and lover’s) fresh grave.
- Tragic Stillbirth: Martha miscarries while Friedrich is off to war and nearly dies herself.
- Victorian Novel Disease: Averted. Ten members of Martha’s family die of cholera, seeing them wasting away in a short timespan isn’t beautiful at all, nothing of the
Squick is undescribed, the mourning of the survivors is very real and even able to drive them to suicide, a literal epidemic is going on all around them and Martha and Friedrich only stay healthy by dumb luck. - War Comes Home: In different manners. From a very different daily life in comparison to peacetime up to imprisoning you in a besieged city, this trope has many, many ways.
- War Is Glorious: Deconstructed. Martha remembers being raised to believe in this trope and wanting to die in a war as a teen as a result, and many around her believe in it too. Nevertheless, war is shown to damage anyone around: Civilians in rather peaceful places have to fear for their loved ones every day, hard work only for the war effort even for rather privileged civilians, children being orphaned are only the surface of this. Really nothing that is a normal or even glorious career.
- War Is Hell: The main Aesop of the novel, and also the driving trope. The darkness and evil of war is shown from different perspectives throughout Martha’s life: First, her first husband goes to war and she has to stay at home alone with their young child, war makes her a widow at nineteen, Rape, Pillage, and Burn is just a reality, civilians are slain the same as soldiers, it spreads nasty diseases, she is subject to possible starvation while Paris is besieged, and although they did their best to stay out of the Franco-Prussian War and even made public appearances as peace activists, the mistrust of the French towards Friedrich and her as Germanophones is too strong, and it isn’t over with a peace treaty, since the hatred and mistrust it leaves behind lead to Friedrich being Falsely Accused and shot as a German spy after the war.
- You Can't Fight Fate: Deconstructed. Martha’s aunt Marie believes that everything is predestined, including everyone’s deaths, and by this reason, soldiers who died in a battle had no chance to have a longer life to begin with. But Arno Dotzky had had a good chance to survive if he hadn’t volunteered, and so many accidents couldn’t happen in a day to kill every soldier killed in a battle also in peacetime. In the epilogue, Martha also views her fight during the last decades as quite successful and believes that bloodshed was already prevented by the spread of pacifistic ideals.
