“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.