Frederick was to fight there too. His last letter, arrived that morning, brought the news: “We are bound for Königgrätz.”
Up to this time I had had tidings regularly. Though in his first letter he had prepared me for his being able only to write little, yet Frederick had made use of every opportunity to send me a word or two. In pencil, on horseback, in his tent, in a hasty scrawl only legible by me, he would write on pages torn out of his notebook letters destined for me. Some he found opportunities for sending, and some did not come into my hands till the campaign was over.
I have kept these memorials up to the present hour. They are not careful, polished descriptions of the war, such as the war correspondents of the papers offer in their despatches, or the historians of the war in their publications; no sketches of battles worked up with all the technicalities of strategical details; no battle-pictures heightened with rhetorical flights, in which the narrator is always occupied in letting his own imperturbability, heroism, and patriotic enthusiasm shine out. Frederick’s sketches are nothing of this sort, I know. But what they are, I need not decide. Here are some of them:—
“In bivouac. Outside the tent, it is indeed a mild, splendid summer night; the heavens, so great and so indifferent, full of shining stars. The men are lying on the earth, exhausted by their long, fatiguing marches. Only for us, staff officers, have one or two tents been pitched. In mine there are three field-beds. My two comrades are asleep. I am sitting at the table, on which are the empty grog glasses and a lighted candle. It is by the feeble, flickering light of this (a draught of wind comes in through the open flap) that I am writing to you, my beloved wife. I have left my bed to Puxl, he was so tired, the poor fellow! I am almost sorry I brought him with me; he too is, as our men say the Prussian Landwehr are, ‘not used to the hardships and privations of a campaign.’ Now he is snoring sweetly and happily—is dreaming, I fancy, very likely, of his friend and patron, Rudolf, Count Dotzky. And I am dreaming of you, Martha; I am silly, I know, but I see your dear form as like you as the image of a dream sitting in yonder corner of the tent on a campstool. What longing seizes me to go thither and lay my head on your bosom. But I do not do so, because I know that then the image would disappear.
“I have just been out for an instant. The stars are shining as indifferently as ever. On the ground a few shadows are gliding—those of stragglers. Many, many men are left behind on the road; these have now slipped in here drawn on by the light of our watch-fires. But not all; some are still lying in some far-off ditch or cornfield. What a heat it was during this forced march! The sun flamed as if it would boil your brains, add to that the heavy knapsack and the heavy musket on their galled shoulders; and yet no one murmured. But a few fell out and could not get up again. Two or three succumbed to sunstroke and fell dead at once. Their bodies were put on an ambulance wagon.
“This June night, however illuminated by moon and stars, and however warm it may be, is still disenchanted. There are no nightingales or chirping crickets to be heard, no scents of rose and jasmine to be breathed. All the sweet sounds are drowned by the noise of snorting or neighing horses, by the men’s voices and the tramp of the sentries’ tread; all sweet scents overpowered by the smell of the harness and other barrack odours. Still all that is nothing; for now you do not hear the ravens croaking over their feast, you do not smell gunpowder, blood, and corruption. All that is coming—ad majorem patriae gloriam. It is worth noting how blind men are. In looking at the funeral piles which have been lighted ‘for the greater glory of God’ in old times, they break out into curses over such blind, cruel, senseless fanaticism, but are full of admiration for the corpse-strewn battlefields of the present day. The torture chambers of the dark middle ages excite their horror, but they feel pride over their own arsenals. The light is burning down—the form in that corner has disappeared. I will also lie down to rest, beside our good Puxl.”
“Up on a hill, amidst a group of generals and high officers, with a field-glass at his eye—that is the situation in a war which produces the greatest aesthetic effect. The gentlemen who paint battle pieces and make illustrations for the journals know this too. Generals on a hill reconnoitring with their glasses are represented again and again; and just as often a leader pressing forward at the head of his troops on a horse, as white and light-stepping as possible, stretching his arm out towards a point in the background all in smoke, and turning the head towards those rushing on after him, plainly shouting ‘Follow me, lads!’
“From my station on this hill one sees really a piece of battle poetry. The picture is magnificent, and sufficiently distant to have the effect of a real picture, without the details, the horrors, and disgusts of the reality; no gushing blood, no death-rattles, nothing but elevated and magnificent effects of line and colour. Those far-extended ranks of the army corps winding on, that unbounded procession of infantry regiments, divisions of cavalry, and batteries of artillery, then the ammunition train, the requisitioned country wagons, the pack horses, and, bringing up the rear, the baggage. The picture comes out still more imposing if, in the wide country stretched out beneath the hill, you can see, not merely the movements of
