“You must not excite yourself so,” my father preached to me, as he took leave of me, “or else you are sure to get a relapse again. Two days without news—what is there in that? There is really no reason at all for anxiety. There are not letter-boxes or telegraph stations all over the field of battle: leaving out of the question that a man during the march and the battle and the bivouac is in no condition to write. The field post does not always act regularly, and so one may easily remain a fortnight without news, and still that signify nothing bad. In my time I have often been even longer without writing home; but no one was anxious about me on that account.”
“How do you know that, papa? I am sure that your relations trembled for you just as much as I am trembling for Frederick. Did you not, aunt?”
“We had more trust in God than you have,” she replied. “We knew that a merciful Providence would so order it, that, whether we got any news or none, your father would come back to us.”
“And if I had never come back, but had got smashed to bits, you would have had enough love for your country to allow that so small a thing as the life of an individual soldier quite vanishes in the great cause for which he has parted with it. You, my daughter, have not for a long time been patriotic enough. But I will not scold you now. The main point is that you should get well again, and preserve yourself for your Rudi, to make a brave man of him, and bring him up to be a defender of his country.”
I did not get well so quickly as was hoped at first. The continued absence of news threw me into such excitement and misery that I never really got out of a feverish condition. My nights were filled with horrible phantoms and my days passed in weary longing or troubled stupor, so that it was difficult to get my strength up again.
Once, after a night in which I had had peculiarly terrifying visions—Frederick, alive, but buried under a heap of corpses of men and horses—a relapse actually set in which again brought me in danger of my life. My poor Aunt Mary had a hard time of it. She thought it a duty to preach comfort and resignation to me unceasingly, and her reason for it, the “destiny” which was constantly coming in again, had the effect of irritating me to the extreme, and instead of letting her quietly prose away I set myself to contradict her passionately, to complain of my fate in defiance of her, and to assure her in plain terms that her “destiny” seemed to me folly. All this, of course, sounded blasphemous, and my good aunt not only felt herself personally insulted, but she trembled also for my rebellious soul, so soon, perhaps, to appear before the judgment seat. There was only one means to quiet me for a few minutes. That was to bring little Rudolf into my bedroom. “You beloved child of mine! You are my comfort, my stay, my future!” This is what I cried out in my inward soul to the boy whenever I saw him. But he did not like staying long in the darkened sickroom. It struck him as uncanny to see his mamma who used to be so gay now lying constantly in bed, pale and exhausted with weeping. He became himself quite out of spirits, and so I only kept him with me for a few minutes at a time.
Frequent inquiries and news came from my father. He had written to Frederick’s colonel and to several other people besides, but “had no answer as yet.” When any list of killed and wounded came in he would send me a telegram: “Frederick not there.” “Oh! perhaps you are deceiving me,” I once asked my aunt, “perhaps the news of his death has arrived long ago and you are concealing it from me—”
“I swear to you—”
“On your honour, on your soul?”
“On my soul.”
Such an assurance as this did me more good than I can tell; for I clung with all my might to my hope; every hour I was expecting the arrival of a letter—of a telegram. At every noise in the next room I fancied that it was the postman, almost continually my eyes were turning towards the door with the constant picture of someone coming in with the blessed message in his hand. When I look back on those days they seem to present themselves to my memory as a whole year filled with torture. The next gleam of light for me was the news that a suspension of arms had again been agreed on; this must surely this time be the presage of peace. On the day after the receipt of this intelligence I sat up for a little while for the first time. Peace! what a sweet, what a happy thought! Perhaps too late for me. No matter. I felt myself anyhow unspeakably calmed; at any rate I had no need to fancy every day, every hour, the raging battle going on in which Frederick might at that moment be killed.
“Thank God! now you will soon be well,” said my aunt one day after helping me to seat myself on a couch which had been moved to the open window for me. “And then we can go to Grumitz.”
“As soon as I have strength for it, I am going to Alsen.”
“To Alsen? My dear child, what are you thinking about?”
“I want to find the place there where Frederick was either wounded or—” I could not finish the sentence.
“Shall I fetch little Rudolf?” said my aunt after a pause. She knew that this was the best way
