Luckily there were tidings of a later date in the packet than the letter above quoted. After the great battle predicted in the last Frederick had been able to tell me:— “The day is ours. I am unhurt. These are two pieces of good news, the first for your papa, the second for you. But I cannot overlook the fact that the same day has brought numberless griefs to numberless others....”
In another letter Frederick related how he had met with his cousin Godfrey.
“Picture to yourself my astonishment. Whom should I see riding before me at the head of a detachment, but Aunt Cornelia’s only son! How the poor woman must be trembling for him.... The young man himself is all eagerness and love of battle. I saw it in his proud, joyful bearing, and he has also told me so. We were in camp together the same evening and I invited him into my tent. ‘It is indeed splendid,’ he cried out in rapture, ‘that we are fighting in the same cause, cousin, and together. Am not I in luck, that war should have broken out in the first year of my lieutenancy? I shall gain the Cross of Merit.’ ‘And my aunt, how did she take your departure?’ ‘Oh! in the mother’s way, with tears—which she did all she could to hide, so as not to damp my spirit—with blessings, with grief, and with pride.’ ‘And what were your feelings when you first got into the melée?’ ‘Oh, delightful! ennobling!’ ‘You need not use falsehood to me, my dear boy. It is not the staff officer who is asking about your feelings as a lieutenant bound to duty, but a man and a friend.’ ‘I can only repeat, delightful and ennobling. Awful, I grant, but so magnificent. And the consciousness that I am fulfilling, with God’s help, the highest duty of a man to king and country! And further, that I see Death, the spectre elsewhere so feared and shunned, so close and busy all round me, his very breath breathing over me—the thought raises me to a mood of mind so elevated above the common, so epic that I feel the muse of history hovering over our heads and lending our swords the might of victory. A noble rage glows in me against the presumptuous foe, who would have trampled on the rights of the German countries, and it is to me an enthusiasm to have the power of gratifying this hatred. It is a curious, mysterious thing, this power of killing—nay, this compulsion to kill—without being a murderer—with a fearless exposure of one’s own life.’
“So the boy chattered on. I let him talk. I had similar feelings when my first battle was raging round me. ‘Epic!’—yes, there you hit on the right word. The heroic poems and the heroic histories by whose means our schools bring us up to be warriors, these are what are set vibrating in our brains by the thunders of the cannonade, the flash of naked weapons, and the shouts of the combatants. And the freedom from ordinary circumstances, the inexplicable freedom from law in which one finds oneself all of a sudden, makes one feel as if transported into another world—it is like an outlook beyond this trumpery earthly existence, with its peaceful domestic quiet, into a titanic struggle of infernal spirits. But this giddiness soon passed over with me, and it is only with an effort that I can bring back to my mind the sensations which young Tessow sketched to me. I recognised too soon that the desire for battle was not a super-human but an infra-human feeling, no mystic revelation from the realms of the morning, but a reminiscence of the realm of the animal, a re-awakening of the brutal. And a man who can intoxicate himself into a savage lust for blood, who—as I have seen several of our men do—can cut down with uplifted sabre an unarmed enemy, who can sink into a Berserker, or lower still, a blood-thirsty tiger—that is the man who, for the moment, revels in the ‘joy of battle’. I never did this. Believe me, my wife; I never did.
“Godfrey is delighted that we Austrians are united in fighting for the ‘right cause’ (how does he know that? As if every cause is not always represented as the ‘right’ one by its own side!) with the Prussians: ‘Yes, we Germans are all one united people of brothers!’ ‘That was seen long ago in the Thirty Years’ War, and also in the Seven Years’ War,’ I struck in half-aloud. Godfrey missed what I said, and went on: ‘For each other and with each other we can conquer every foe’. ‘What will you say then, my young friend, if to-day or to-morrow the Prussians and Austrians quarrel, and we two shall be ranged as foes, one against each other?’ ‘Not conceivable, now, after the blood of both of us has flowed for the same cause. Now surely we can never more——’ ‘Never more? I would warn you not to use the expressions “never” or “for ever” in political matters. What ephemerides are in the scale of living beings, such are the friendships and enmities of nations in the scale of historical phenomena.’
“I write all this down, Martha, not that I think it can interest you, poor sufferer, nor because I want to make reflections to you upon it, but I have an idea that I shall fall, and in that case I do not wish my sentiments to sink into the grave with me unuttered. My letter may even be found and read by others, if not by you. That which is coming up in the minds of soldiers who think freely, and feel like men, shall not remain for ever unspoken and concealed. ‘I have dared it’ was Ulrich v. Hutten’s motto. ‘I have spoken it,’ and with this to quiet my conscience, I can depart this life.”
The most recent news that had reached me had been sent off five days, and arrived two days previously. What was to show that in five days—five days of war—anything might not have taken place? Anxiety and fear seized me. Why had no line come yesterday? Why none to-day? Oh, this longing for a letter—or, better, a telegram! I believe no one in the tortures of fever can so long for water as I then was longing for news. I was saved; he would have the great joy of finding me alive, if—always this “if” which nips every hope for the future in the bud.
My father was obliged to depart. He could now leave me with a quiet mind. The danger was over, and he had now pressing business at Grumitz. As soon as I had got the needful strength, I was to follow him there with my little Rudolf. A stay in the fresh country air would in the first place restore me entirely, and would also do good to the little boy. Aunt Mary stayed behind. She was to keep on nursing me and then to travel with us to Grumitz where Rosa and Lilly had already gone on before. I let them talk and make plans for me. Without saying anything I had made up my mind, as soon as I was even half able to do so, to set off for Schleswig-Holstein.
Where Frederick’s regiment might be at this moment, we knew not. It was impossible to get any despatch forwarded to him, or I should have liked to telegraph to him every hour, and to ask: “Are you alive?”
“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.”