Lay Down Your Arms

Lay Down Your Arms! (novel), English title of the 1889 novel "Die Waffen Nieder!" by the Austrian pacifist activist Bertha von Suttner, who received the 1905 Nobel Peace Prize for it. "We English-speaking people, whether in England, in the Colonies, or in the United States, being ourselves in no immediate danger of seeing our homes invaded, and our cities laid under contribution by hostile armies, are apt to forget how terribly the remembrance of such calamities, and the constant threat of their recurrence, haunt the lives of our Continental brethren." - T. Holmes Austrian novelist Bertha von Suttner who was one of the first notable woman pacifists. She is credited with influencing Alfred Nobel in the establishment of the Nobel Prize for Peace, of which she was the recipient in 1905. Her major novel, Die Waffen nieder! (1889; Lay Down Your Arms!), has been compared in popularity and influence with Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. The daughter of an impoverished Austrian field marshal, she was a governess to the wealthy Suttner family from 1873. She became engaged to Baron Arthur Gundaccar von Suttner (1850-1902), an engineer and novelist, seven years her junior. The opposition of his family to this match caused her, in 1876, to answer Nobel's advertisement for a secretary-housekeeper at his Paris residence. After only a week she returned to Vienna and secretly married Suttner.