ILL-TREATMENT OF A WAR-CORRESPONDENT BY THE GERMAN HUSSARS.
THE BIVOUAC AT THORN.
SIGNIFICANT REMARK OF THE EMPEROR.
(By Post from our Special Correspondent, Mr. Charles Lowe.)
Thorn, April 27.
Following the route taken by the Emperor, I arrived here this morning, thanks to the courtesy of Baron von Tauchnitz (a son of the great Leipzig publisher of the well-known Continental edition of our English classics), who kindly allowed me a place (it was only a standing one) in the train conveying to the front the Magdeburg Artillery Regiment of his command, as well as the Train, or Army Service, Battalion of the 4th Corps.
While crossing the bridge from the railway station to claim the quarters that had been assigned me at the ‘Black Bear,’ my eye and ear were suddenly struck by a strange hubbub going on below. A troop of red-tunic’d Zieten Hussars (‘Duke of Connaught’s’) were watering their horses in the Vistula, which has here a broad, placid, and majestic course; and while these thirsty animals were revelling in delicious draughts of the first water they had tasted since leaving Rathenow (their garrison townlet, near Bismarck’s native place), their riders were amusing themselves by roaring and laughing at the frantic efforts of what seemed to me to be a big Newfoundland dog to extricate himself from the stream. Presently the poor brute, which to my great astonishment gradually assumed human shape, struggled, spluttering and gasping, on to the shelving bank; and then it was that I recognised in this buffeted and bedraggled creature, Solomon Hirsch, the well-known correspondent of the Berliner Tageblatt, whose shock head of hair, all touzled and dishevelled, had given him the semblance of canine form and feature alluded to. It appears that poor Hirsch, fulfilling his functions with more zeal than discretion, had already made himself an object of universal execration at the front by communicating to his paper most minute details as to the massing and position of the German troops towards the Russian frontier, and that being recognised by these rollicking and resentful Zieten Hussar fellows, to whom he had, in an evil moment for himself, appealed for information as to their ultimate destination, this ‘curse of modern armies’ was at once set upon, hilariously tossed in a horse-rug, and then contemptuously heaved into the Vistula. I have made a point of dwelling on this serio-comic incident, which I myself was quick to take to heart, as it will serve to explain the absence from my telegrams of all but the most meagre and general references to the positions and movements of the German troops; and, indeed, I should be worthy the fate of my hapless colleague did I abuse the hospitality which has been so graciously extended to me by revealing unexecuted plans.
Indeed, I have only been promised the use of the field and other telegraph wires on the strict condition that my messages never exceed a limited number of words, which will necessarily restrict my reports to the briefest and barest, yet, I trust, sufficient summaries.
The Emperor (who was accompanied by the King of Saxony and other high general officers) has just returned from a rapid ride round the circle of the outer forts, within which the troops are all lying under canvas; and from the top of the Garrison Church Steeple, the highest point in this mighty fortressed town, nothing can be seen but endless vistas of tented bivouacs. Never before has the German soldier been allowed any other night covering in the field but the canopy of heaven, though, indeed, in a country like France, which is, in truth, a land flowing with milk, wine, and honey, and teeming with villages and other opportunities of cantonment, he had comparatively little need of tents. But it is quite a different thing in Russia, with its raw and rigid climate, its vast, uncultivated, and uninhabited spaces; and it was in view of the probable contingency of a campaign in such a foodless and roofless wilderness that the General Staff, with that remarkable foresight and wisdom which has always distinguished it, resolved to equip all the Army Corps lying nearest the Eastern frontier with the very best tents procurable—namely, such as were at once waterproof, windproof, and even fireproof. For otherwise what ruin might not a spark from a bivouac fire entail upon the tented fields which stretch away in every direction towards the horizon, both here and at Posen, at Neisse, and at Königsberg, reminding one of the hosts, countless as the sands on the sea-shore, of the five kings who encamped over against Gibeon.
But I must not omit to record a curious incident which happened as the Emperor was riding past the statue of Copernicus, whose birthplace was Thorn. Just when abreast the monument of that immortal astronomer, His Majesty remarked to his suite: ‘Ja, meine Herren, there you see the man who first opened the eyes of the world to the true nature of the solar system; and I think that with God’s help we shall equally be able to assign Russia her proper place in the system of nations.’