“NEVER was such a thing heard of—defeat after defeat. First the village of Podol, barricaded by Clam-Gallas, carried by storm, taken in the night by moonlight, and by the light of the conflagration. Then Gitchin conquered. The needle-gun, the cursed needle-gun, mows our troops down by whole ranks at a time. The two great army corps of the enemy, that commanded by the Crown Prince and that under Prince Fr. Karl, have joined, and are pressing forward against Münchengrätz.” Thus sounded the terrible news, and my father communicated it with as great a degree of lamentation as he had shown joy in telling us the victorious news from Custozza. But his confidence was not yet shaken.
“Let them come, all of them, all, into our Bohemia, and be annihilated there, to the last man. There is no escape there, no retreat for them; we hem them in, we encircle them, and the enraged country folks themselves will give them the finishing stroke. It is not altogether so advantageous as you might suppose to operate in an enemy’s country; for in that case you have not only the army but the whole population against you. The people poured boiling water and oil on the Prussians from the windows of the houses at——.”
I uttered a low sound of disgust.
“What would you have?” said my father, shrugging his shoulders. “It is horrible, I grant, but it is war.”
“Then at least never assert that war ennobles men. Confess that it unmans them, makes them tigers, devils. Boiling oil! Uh!”
“Self-defence, which is enjoined on us, and righteous retribution, my dear Martha. Do you think that our people like the bullets of their needle-guns? Our brave fellows have to be exposed, like defenceless cattle in a slaughter-house, to this murderous weapon. But we are too numerous, too disciplined, too warlike, not to conquer these ‘tailors’ for all that. At the beginning one or two failures have taken place; that I admit. Benedek ought to have crossed the Prussian frontier at once. I have my doubts whether this choice of a general was quite a happy one. If it had been determined to send the Archduke Albert there and give Benedek the Army of the South—but I will not despond too soon. Up to the present there have really been only some preliminary engagements which have been magnified by the Prussians into great victories. The decisive battles are still to come. We are now concentrating on Königgrätz; there we shall await the enemy, a hundred thousand strong. There our northern Custozza will be fought.”
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 note-book 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 camp-stool. 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.