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Vienna XIX, Berggasse 19
6. xi. 34
Dear Meister Arnold,
Pfeffers have just rung up about your ms. Naturally I read it with much enjoyment. As a character study it gave me great pleasure. I cannot judge whether it would be effective on the stage.
I have one criticism which I will not conceal from you: it seems to me too cruel, unjustifiably so inasmuch as it singles out a situation which manifests the horror and inhumanity of war itself rather than the guilt of any one individual. In one of Caesar's battles in Gaul it happened that the besieged (was it Alesia)1 and Vercingetorix2 had nothing more to eat. They then drove out their wretched women and children into the no-man's-land between the fortress and the besieging Roman army, and there the poor creatures starved miserably to death between their own people who could not give them anything to eat and the enemy who would not, or who perhaps had not much to eat either. It would have been more merciful to have killed them in the town. Faced with such decisions one recoils in horror without taking sides. It's like shipwrecked mariners deciding to slaughter one of their own comrades.
By the way, have I ever given you the analytic explanation of the phantastic expedition to Egypt? I do not want to repeat