XXV _DIE WAFFEN NIEDER_ How the plan for the book originated · Study of sources · The model of my hero · Satisfaction in writing the word “End” · Unanimously rejected by the editors · The publisher’s scruples · Publication · How the book was received · Favorable and hostile criticisms · Personal contact with the peace movement resulting from the novel · The peace congress of 1889 in Paris · Founding of Interparliamentary Union But I no longer had “The Age of Machinery” and its fate so much at heart. I had on the stocks another work, which had taken possession of me; to this all my thoughts and purposes were turned. I wanted to be of service to the Peace League, and how could I better do so than by trying to write a book which should propagate its ideas? And I could do it most effectively, I thought, in the form of a story. I should certainly find a larger public for that than for a treatise. In treatises one can only lay down abstract appeals to the reason, can philosophize, argue, and dissertate; but I wanted something else: I wanted to be able to put into my book not only what I thought but what I felt, felt passionately; I wanted to give expression to the pain which the image of war burned into my soul; I wanted to present life, palpitating life, reality, historical reality; and all this could be done only in a novel, and best in a novel written in the form of an autobiography. And so I went ahead and wrote _Die Waffen nieder_, “Away with Weapons.”[20] It was to be the history of a young woman whose fate was closely involved with the wars fought in our own day. But in order that the historical events introduced should correspond to the reality, that the descriptions of the battle scenes should be truthful, it was requisite for me to make preliminary studies and collect material and documents. This I did conscientiously, as well as I could. I read up in big-volumed histories, I rummaged in old newspapers and archives, to find reports of war correspondents and military surgeons; I got such acquaintances of mine as had been in the field to relate episodes of battles; and during this period of study my horror of war waxed to the most agonizing intensity. I can certify that the sufferings through which I led my heroine were actually experienced by me while I was working on it. What a woman must suffer when she knows that a beloved husband is engaged in war I could now more easily imagine, for the depth of my own conjugal love sufficed to put me mentally in such a situation. And the portrayal of a noble personality, as I attempted it in drawing the figure of my hero, was rendered the easier by the fact that my own husband sat as model for this character. What a feeling of relief and satisfaction when I wrote the word “End” at the bottom of the second volume!