And yet it was the summer of 1859, i.e. the battles of Magenta and Solferino were being fought. Austria, our country, was suffering defeats. Great bloody fights were heard of. But I know perfectly that at that time the event was as indifferent to me, as little existent, as it would to-day be indifferent to me to learn that a volcano had broken out in a West Indian island whose name I had never heard. An elemental event at a great distance, that is what the war in Italy was to me. I did not read the newspapers much either; to be sure we often went into the reading-room where the papers lay open, but there it was not the political but the literary papers that attracted us; all the more as Elvira had written some novelettes which were accepted by family magazines, and I had in mind the idea of _also_ writing one.—For in the preceding summer, in the white heat of emotion, I had put into rhyme three stanzas to the object of my affections. But in my case the next to the last line did not rhyme with Hadeln (one really must not be so utter an ape), but with Friedrich. In the illustrated papers pictures of “the theater of the war” did strike my eye from time to time, but I did not pause over them: soldiers and horses lying about, broken cannon, or confused scrimmages, such as I have seen a great many of in history textbooks, do not make pretty pictures. I turned over the leaf quickly. We did not have in the war anybody nearly connected with us, for whom we might have trembled. My brother, who in the year 1854 had been commissioned as lieutenant, had left the service a year before the war, because he had spit blood and because the service in general was in the highest degree repugnant to him. He was living with us. Mother was jubilant over her only son’s not being still in the army when the war broke out.