GEORGE DÖRFLING, THE MARTIAL TAILOR.
“Of stature tall, and straightly fashion’d;
Like his desire, lift upwards, and divine.”
Marlowe: Tamburlaine.
George Dörfling was born in Bohemia, in the year 1606. It is popularly said in that country, that when a child is born there, a fairy presents herself at his side and offers him a purse and a violin, leaving to him to choose which gift most pleases him. According as he makes his selection, is his future character determined. If he takes the fiddle, he turns out a musician. If he grasps at the purse, he invariably becomes a thief. Every Bohemian is declared to be either the one or the other. I may add, that under the shadow of the Hradschin, I have met with “Czeks” who were both, and with very many who were neither.
I fancy that at Dörfling’s birth there was much confusion, both in the domestic and the magic circle. In the former there must have been something peculiarly wrong. George could make no Shandean calculations touching his birth, for he never knew his parents’ names; and as he turned out neither player nor robber, except on a very heroic scale, the fairies do not appear to have afforded him the usual exercise of judgement which they commonly permitted to discriminating infants.
There was one thing, however, of which young George would not doubt. He felt quite sure that he was born. He had no hesitation upon that question; and he was a philosopher of the Descartes school, without ever having heard anything of the Cartesian philosophy. He soon gave himself, or had given to him, a name. He had first seen light in a village; and he was accordingly called George Villager, or Little Villager. “Dorf” implies village, and “Dörfling,” villager; and accordingly the little Bohemian took that humble name,—nobody having the slightest idea that he would ever make it famous, and upon it place a baron’s coronet.
The village authorities had no coronets wherewith to grace his head, and in place thereof they put a thimble on his finger and a needle in his hand. Greatness could hardly have begun with smaller pretensions. The boy was apprenticed to a tailor, and a very excellent tailor he made.
But what he did not make was money. In his village he could acquire little cash and no fame. The boy was ambitious, and he declared that he would walk to Berlin, and build wide-skirted coats for the army generals. The villagers thought him mad; and the melancholy sexton’s laughing daughter ceased to laugh when the handsome lad spoke of his resolve. He was not to be turned from his resolution by Katinka the fair; and so, with a light bundle, a lighter heart, and a purse lighter than all, he kissed his Ariadne, with the easy air of a dragoon leaving garrison, and with hope in his heart, turned his face towards Berlin.
He walked on uninterruptedly until he reached the banks of the Elbe; there he found the waters out, and his purse in the same condition. And yet not in the same condition; for the waters had overflowed, and his purse had not. He had reckoned upon fording the stream, but if he would cross he must needs ferry it. The Styx itself is not to be traversed without a fee, and in that respect the Elbe was like the Styx. Charon was inflexible. Dörfling solicited aid from a group of young officers. Like Lieutenant Perry, he was called “a fool for his pains.” The police standing near, finding him penniless, deemed him disreputable. They asked for his papers; and when one little official, a mere starveling, read aloud that the stalwart lad was only a tailor, the crowd pushed him aside with contempt, and bade him stand out of the way of better men.
One of the officers nevertheless approached him, with more of a seductive than a contemptuous look about him. “At your age,” said he, “a handsome fellow like yourself should have handsome clothes to help his looks, and a well-furnished purse to give dignity to his clothes. If you want to starve, by all means continue tailoring; but if you would become a man, and a gay one too, throw away that accursed bundle of rags, and cross the ferry in a better service.”
“Well,” said Dörfling, “here have I been dreaming of nothing more than sewing button-holes in Berlin, and now have I a prospect of a marshal’s bâton. It’s a long road however from a recruit’s barracks to a marshal’s saddle. I doubt I had better stick to the needle.”
The fact however was that he had little or no doubt about the matter. He did not fling his bundle away, as he was enjoined to do. He turned its contents into a knapsack that was offered to him, and in five minutes he was crossing the ferry, a recruited soldier in the service of the Elector of Brandenburg. He was quick-witted, docile, and zealous; and the handsome and able recruit was not only speedily noticed, but he made himself worthy of the observation devoted to him. He performed every duty of his station without a demur; was the first on parade after réveillé, and the last in the military class of instruction as long as teaching was going on there. That he was the neatest man of his corps was his least merit, for his old habit helped him to keep tidiness in his new. Therewith was his good humour unimpeachable and unruffled. Like all truly brave men, he was of a sunny disposition, loved children and music, and, if he had a somewhat dangerous tongue and rather too winning ways on some occasions, why the Fräuleins never complained of either; and if they who were the most concerned did not, I do not know that any one else has a right to reproach him.
Promotion was rapid, and with promotion he gained celebrity. He was talked about near other watchfires than those of Brandenburg, and in other camps than the one in which the once private soldier now served as captain. His merit may be judged of when I say that the great Count Thurn solicited his co-operation; and that, under that renowned leader, the ex-tailor in epaulettes fought like a lion at Prague, and won golden opinions, not only from friends who witnessed, but from foes who suffered by his bravery.
He was not a mere fire-eater; he had a clear head as well as a heavy hand, and was as apt in planning enterprises sure of success, as he was ready to serve in the enterprises projected by others. There was a spice of Major Dalgetty about him too. He loved, next to a good cause, touching which the major was indifferent, good living; and knowing that he should find the one, and hoping to enjoy the other, under the banner of the great Gustavus, he served as “General-Major” in the Swedish army, in 1642, and never once sheathed his sword during the Thirty Years’ War.
At that time he certainly possessed the advantage of shedding his blood on the righteous side of the quarrel; but, as for good living, why, if by that be meant light diet, he had that daily. Visionary theories he said he could endure well enough, but visionary dinners were an abhorrence. It often happened that in his own quarters there was not even the vision of a dinner: in that case he had no objection to head a species of razzia, and carry off the supplies from the commissariat of the enemy. On one of these occasions the hungry foragers encountered strong opposition, and in the struggle which ensued Dörfling’s lieutenant was shot dead by an arquebusier. He was the most nearly famished of the lot, and had contended for the meal with all the ardour which appetite can give. “Young Naumann is dead,” remarked an aide to Dörfling. “Poor fellow!” rejoined Dörfling, “he would have cared for it less had it only been after he had dined.”
The swiftly slain got but scanty epitaphs and shallow graves in those times; and if any mourned the loss of the lieutenant, they found consolation in the fact that his absence from the mess left one share more to be divided among the hungry members. They drank out of the enemies’ flasks to the memory of their ill-fated comrade, who had perished before dinner; and that done, they hurried to a work the issues of which prevented several of them from ever again seeing supper-time. Dörfling however was not among the missing. He was ever active, happy, and energetic; most at home where the fire was thickest and the fray hottest, and too busy to be unhappy, until the Peace of Westphalia, which put so many notched swords that need never have been drawn back into their scabbards, and laid down temporary arrangements, which might have been permanent had the parties concerned used reason before resorting to ramrods.
In rusty inaction however neither could Dörfling nor his sword ingloriously lie. To cut throats was accounted a more honourable occupation than to cut cloth, and the “General” was not at all disposed to retire as yet from business; particularly as his renown increased with the number of his fields. He was absent from scarcely one, if from one, of Frederick William’s great battles, fought up to the year 1695, against Swedes, Poles, and French. As he grew old He grew less nice as to the complexion of the quarrel in which he was engaged; nor would the circumstances of the time admit of this. At the best a soldier is but a legalized and hired bravo, bound to sustain all the quarrels of the master whose livery he wears. Such servants must serve and be silent; strike hard, and speak little, except to the purpose in hand. To do Dörfling justice, he performed this sort of duty after a most exemplary fashion. He preferred feeling that the cause in which he fought was a good one; and if it were not, he threw the responsibility on his employers, and took his share of the plunder with an easy conscience. His share was often to a very considerable amount; and long before he died, he was accounted as rich as all the retired tailors and living field-marshals in Europe put together.
As morality then went, he had fairly earned it all; and truth to tell, it had not all been won on the battle-field, or in towns given up to plunder, or at hearths devoted to devastation. He gained no inconsiderable portion by diplomacy; that is, not by mendacity in courteous phrases and elegant circumventing of the truth, but by serving the monarch by whom he was accredited with honest fidelity, irrespective of how he might offend those to whom he was commissioned.
Not that he ever gave offence to man or woman, prince or peasant girl, willingly or knowingly. The gentle tailor lad of the remote Bohemian village was ever gentle, yet not undetermined, at the council boards and levées of kings. Never was there man more gallant. It is said of the late Duke of Wellington that, at past fourscore, he, in one day, attended early morning prayer, gave away two brides, transacted business at the Horse Guards, took his usual rides, made his ordinary visits, was present at a council and a “Drawing-room,” looked in at one or two exhibitions, entertained forty people at dinner, gave a ball after it, and escorted the last of the fair dancers to her carriage, gallantly saluting her as she stepped therein at sunrise! This was a well-spent day for a veteran; and it was just such a day as Dörfling loved to pass, full of mingled pastime and business. For it was his maxim, as it was the Duke’s, that a man must be doing something, unless he wished to become the devil’s man. And so, at various courts, the gallant old Dörfling was an example of activity courteously performed, to all who cared to profit by it. As ambassador, he was highly welcome whithersoever his credentials took him; and it was said of him that his suavity was such, that an unwelcome missive delivered by him fell less harshly on the ears, than a compliment from the lips of messengers not so exquisitely trained in the school of bienséance. Not that Dörfling lacked language to apply properly to acts which displeased him. Had the Czar stolen his “carpet-bag,” as that stupendous felon did Sir G. H. Seymour’s, the German soldier would have called him an arrant knave, and not a “gracious sovereign,” as the British diplomatist did, in his excessive good-nature.
Dörfling lived to enter his ninetieth year! When he passed from the shop-board to the barracks, people accounted of him as a man who, in abandoning a peaceful calling for a perilous vocation, had committed a sort of early suicide. There were plenty of old tailors, it was said, but very few aged soldiers,—at least, sound ones. It may be doubted however, humanly speaking, whether he would have lived half so long as a quiet, meditative tailor, as he did by exposing himself to be shot at, moderately computated, once an hour during nearly three-quarters of a century of his subsequent life.
During that term he never met reproach but once. It was at the hands of the officer who had induced him to enter the army, and who could never forgive the recruit for rising to a very superior greatness to that achieved by the recruiter. They were both old men, when the officer in question sneeringly alluded to Dörfling’s origin. “True!” roared the hearty veteran, not a bit ashamed of the fact (the less perhaps that it was known to everybody),—“True! I have been a tailor, and have cut cloth; but harkye, the sword at my side is the instrument with which I shall cut the ears of those who are audacious enough to make of that fact a ground for mockery or reproach!”
Well said, brave tailor! nobody raised a sneer at thy expense after that, I warrant! No wonder that at thy grave tailors, soldiers, and honest men yet repair, as to the shrine of a saint whose memory is worthy of respect.
But if Germany has one, we have a hundred of such heroes. When the Spanish Armada was threatening our shores, the tailors were among the first to enrol themselves among the patriotic defenders of the country. They are said to have been mounted on mules, and, when intelligence was once brought to Queen Elizabeth,—intelligence as false as though it had come by Electric Telegraph,—that a brigade of tailors and their mules had been destroyed, “Let us be consoled,” said the royal lady, “we have lost neither man nor horse.”
I may also again notice the fact, that, at the siege of Gibraltar, the brigade which did Elliott best service against the enemy consisted almost exclusively of tailors from London. Really the profession is overdone with heroes! It has its one in the navy, and of him I will now speak, though more briefly than of his predecessors.