P. N. Dedeaux
The Prussian Girls
Prologue
The year was 1729. The winter on the plain north of Rathenow already promised particular severity, even in October. It was sixteen years since Friedrich Wilhelm I, the “Royal Drill Sergeant” as he was called in the courtyards and corridors of European Ministries, had become the first Hohenzollern ruler of Brandenburg and established such rigorous discipline as the keynote of his State that it was now widely known as “the land of the Corporal's stick.” As for the Army, he had initiated a severity unknown since Roman times; one of his first ordinances was to decree that any soldier resisting discipline should run the gauntlet thirty times.
But this atmosphere of drill and discipline, in which the individual existed only for the State, by now permeated every institution, including the family. Of his son, this new and self-styled King of Prussia had fulminated-“That snot-nose, he shall have the whip before he has a wife.” And he would have him tried as a common deserter, for leaving his country. It was, in fact, in the year in which our story opens that the young Prince Friedrich's supposed love-affair with Dorothea Elizabeth Ritter, the demure daughter of a Potsdam Rector, had been discovered. The result? The following official decree:
“His Majesty orders Klinte, Councillor of the Court, to have the daughter of the teacher who is here under arrest whipped tomorrow… She will be whipped first before the Town Hall, then before her father's house, then in all corners of the town.”
She was at that time sixteen and a half.
Thus the Hohenzollern territories were united in little less than a mystique of the rod. Schloss Rutenberg, of which this story tells its tale, was but one of several such ladies' seminaries, where daughters of the highest families in the land were sent for training as mothers-to-be of the new State which was determined to take the smile off the face of a Europe that despised it, largely for being no more than thirteenth in size of population. Procreation was encouraged. Almost the only offense unpunished in the Army was that of drunkenness. The maxim that no one asked of an inferior anything he would not face himself meant not only the celebrated tours de baton in the Royal household itself, but that upper-class seminarists such as those of Schloss Rutenberg were treated, for this brief training period of their lives, virtually pitilessly. No less than total stoicism was demanded of them and, firm in the conviction of their country's eventual glory and their King's, they asked no quarter. Indeed, their parents were grateful for this rigor for which they themselves might have lacked both time and taste.
The school itself was set on flat land, whipped by easterly winds, though its walls were thick enough to stand a series of sieges. This outer wall was topped with a bed of mortar and broken glass and spiked gaffs, a prison-like rampart that formed the limit of the girls' domain for three terms a year, one they left only for brief walks in military formation under the attendance of a mistress and two Prefects, or Praelictors. Entry was by a ponderous gate, studded with iron bolts and again surmounted with jagged iron spikes. The whole place, from its bell-turret trellised in iron to its bare, barred cellars and even the gigantic, gnarled trees of its grounds, was calculated to inspire awe and stamp into its denizens that rigid regulation of the passions which had become the new Draconian Law of the land. This solid structure, with its massy, creaking doors, monotonous corridors, and the barren arrangement of its schoolrooms, was calculated to break and bend, an academy founded on control-and it is to one of these last that our historian's eye conducts us.
Genius of Flagellation,
O Incline Thy countenance, severe and yet benign,
On us thy worshippers!
Do Thou infuse Our spirits with lusty vigour to abuse
All weaker beings plac'd beneath our sway!
Grant us yet more occasion, night and day,
To wreak fresh torments whereso'er we may;
Inform our wits with cunning to invent
Still new varieties of punishment:
Bless Thou our arms, hallow each instrument!
Provide more helpless victims, fair and fresh,
To feel the greedy and insatiate lash;
Till the whole world acknowledges Thy power,
And multitudes agree in a blest hour
To let the host of humankind become
A kind of universal naked b-m,
Gross, like the measure of all natural crime,
Naked, as Nature form'd it in her prime,
And destin'd only to be lash'd thro' space and time!
Enthrone on high Thy flagellant elite,
Lap them in joy forever keen and sweet,
And all the rest cast down beneath their feet.
Mid fire and smoke and exhalations foul
Confounded all together in a common howl.
Chapter One
It was a long, high room with pointed windows, barred on the inside and a vaulted oaken ceiling. Ranged in seemingly endless regularity across this space were a number of desks, at which worked girls of various ages between, approximately, fourteen to seventeen. At the far end, under a large oil lamp, stood a mistress, behind a pulpit desk of impressive proportions. Over her head-or rather behind it-reigned a colossal clock, and by her side was a bucket, in which steeped long birch-rods.
In actual fact, there were no more than some thirty-four pupils under her care tonight, this being the Evening Preparation period for the Junior, or Vorschule, class in the school. This term the Schloss Rutenberg had swollen, under parental pressure for admittance, to as many as seventy-one girls, who were divided into three classes- Senior, Junior, and Schaum (or scum) as the new girls, in their first year, were known. This term there were exactly a dozen Schaum; there were fifteen Senior girls, and ten Praelictors. There were eleven mistresses, excluding the school Matron and Head, or Direktrice. Excluding these two, they were all single, young, active and vigorous. Fraulein Katte, the evening Monitor, or Mahner, of Junior Prep was quite typical of these. Twenty-eight years old, dark and broad-browed, she had been at the college-if such it could be called-some seven years already, having graduated from its ranks. She wore her on-duty uniform of soft black leather becomingly. This was no longer than a three-quarter man's Court coat. It fitted her closely to the bosom, was drawn in by a wide leather belt from which hung, at one side, a bunch of keys, and at the other a ritualistic black leather switch, and its skirt swung its hem higher than her knees. But the mistresses at Schloss Rutenberg did not suffer from cold. They wore thigh-high
