Rosa and the buffalo, 'my dear beloved brother'

Rosa Luxemburg was a very remarkable human being. The following is from a letter she wrote from her prison in Breslau to Sonia Liebknecht, in mid December, 1917: Sonichka, dear, I had such a pang recently. In the courtyard where I walk, army carriages often arrive, laden with haversacks or old tunics and shirts from the front; often they are stained with blood. They are sent to the cells to be mended and then loaded back up [onto the carts] and sent back to the army. The other day one of these carriages arrived, drawn by a team of buffaloes instead of horses. I had never seen the animals close at hand before. They are much more powerfully built than our cattle, with flattened heads and horns strongly recurved, so that their skulls are shaped more like our sheep’s skulls. They are all black, with large, soft, black eyes. They hail from Rumania and are war trophies ... The soldiers who drive the carriages say that it was very difficult to catch these wild animals and still more difficult to use these animals, who were accustomed to freedom, as beasts of burden. They were unmercifully beaten until they learned to understand that they had lost the war and that to them applies the sentence "vae victis" [Woe to the vanquished.] ... About a hundred of the animals are supposed to be in Breslau alone. In addition, they, who had been accustomed to the luxuriant Rumanian pastures, here receive miserable and scanty fodder. They are unsparingly exploited and have to tow all sorts of carriages, and under these circumstances they soon perish. So, the other day a carriage came in, laden with sacks. The load was piled up so high indeed that the buffaloes were unable to cross the threshold at the entrance gate. The accompanying soldier, a brutal fellow, started to belabour the animals in such a way with the butt end of his whip that the wardress indignantly took him to task, asking if he really had no compassion for the animals! 'No one shows compassion with us humans either', he answered with an evil smile, and beat down even harder [on the animals]... At length the animals pulled hard and got over the hill, but one of them was bleeding... Sonichka, the buffalo's skin is proverbial for its thickness and toughness, and this skin had been torn. While the carriage was being unloaded, the animals stood perfectly still, utterly exhausted, and the one that was bleeding stared into space and had an expression on its black face and in its soft black eyes like that of a tear-stained child. It was directly the expression of a child who has been severely punished and who does not know what for, why, and does not know how it should escape from the agony and raw violence. I stood in front of the carriage, and the animal looked at me. The tears welled from my eyes - and they were his tears. One cannot twitch more painfully for one's dearest brother than I twitched in my powerlessness in the face of this mute suffering. How far, how unreachable, lost forever the beautiful, free, green, lush meadows of Rumania! How different there the light of the sun, the breath of the wind. How different there the beautiful sounds of the birds that one could hear or the melodious calls of the herdsmen. And here - this foreign, hideous town, the dull stable, the nauseating and musty hay, mingled with rotten straw, the strange and terrible people, and – the beatings, the blood running from the fresh wound... Oh my poor buffalo, my dear beloved brother, we both stand here, so powerless and voiceless; and we are just one in pain, in powerlessness, in longing. Meanwhile the prisoners were busy, crowding around the carriage, and unloaded the heavy sacks and lugged them into the building; the soldier, however, stuck both of his hands in his trouser pockets, strolled across the courtyard with large strides, smiled and quietly whistled a popular song. And the whole glorious war passed me by. Write quickly, I embrace you, Sonichka. __________________ “I know that, for every human being, every creature, its own life is the one and only good it has; and each time we carelessly crush a tiny fly, its whole world comes to an end. To that fly’s fading eye, everything is just as utterly over as if the end of the world had wiped out all life.” -Rosa Luxemburg