Lay Down Your Arms

"Both Beecher Stowe and von Suttner were neither simply writers of popular entertainment nor authors of tendentious propaganda... They used entertainment for idealistic purposes.." --Leo Tolstoy

Lay Down Your Arms--The Autobiography of Martha von Tilling, originally published as Die Waffen nieder , is a novel in which Bertha von Suttner challenged the belligerent nationalism of her native Austro-Hungarian Empire. After it was translated into English by the eminent Victorian medical scholar Timothy Holmes (1825-1907), it became an international anti-war bestseller of the nineteenth century, and contributed to the growth of the peace movement in the period before World War I.