Long live the King of Prussia! say I, who keeps up smart discipline in his army, and I fervently trust, that Court Martial may be thoroughly digested, and maturely considered; and the odds are in my favour that I’m off before it’s over.
What is it, I wonder, that makes the inhabitants of fortified towns always so stupid? Is such the fact?—first of all, asks some one of my readers. Not a doubt of it—if you ever visited them, and passed a week or two within their walls, you would scarcely ask the question. Can curtains and bastions—fosses and half-moons, exclude intelligence as effectually as they do an enemy? are batteries as fatal to pleasure as they are to platoons? I cannot say; but what I can and will say, is, that the most melancholy days and nights I ever passed, have been in great fortresses. Where the works are old and tumbling, some little light of the world without, will creep in through the chinks and crevices, as at Antwerp and Mentz; but let them be well looked to—the fosses full—no weeds on the ramparts—the palisades painted smart green, and the sentry boxes to match, and God help you!
There must be something in the humdrum routine of military duty, that has its effect upon the inhabitants. They get up at morning, by a signal gun; and they go to bed by another; they dine by beat of drum, and the garrison gives the word of command for every hour in the twenty-four; There is no stir, no movement; a patrol, or a fatigue party, are the only things you meet, and when you prick up your ears at the roll of wheels, it turns out to be only a tumbril with a corporal’s guard!
Theatres can scarcely exist in such places; a library would die in a week; there are no soirées; no society. Billiards and beer, form the staple of officers’ pleasures, in a foreign army, and certainly they have one recommendation, they are cheap.
Now, as there was little to see in Erfurt, and still less to do, I made up my mind to start early the next day, and push forward to Weimar, a good resolution as far as it went, but then, how was the day to be passed? People dine at “one” in Germany, or, if they wish to push matters to a fashionable extreme, they say “two.” How is the interval, till dark, to be filled up—taking it for granted you have provided some occupation for that? Coffee, and smoking, will do something, but except to a German, they can’t fill up six mortal hours. Reading is out of the question after such a dinner,—riding would give you apoplexy—sleep, alone, is the resource. Sleep “that wraps a man, as in a blanket,” as honest Sancho says, and sooth to say, one is fit for little else, and so, having ordered a pen and ink to my room, as if I were about to write various letters, I closed the door, and my eyes, within five minutes after, and never awoke till the bang of a “short eighteen” struck six.
CHAPTER XXXIV. THE HERR. DIRECTOR KLUG.
“Which is the way to the theatre?” said I to an urchin who stood at the inn door, in that professional attitude of waiting, your street runners, in all cities, can so well assume; for, holding a horse, and ringing a bell, are accomplishments, however little some people may deem them.
“The theatre?” echoed he, measuring me leisurely from head to foot, and not stirring from his place.
“Yes,” said I, “they told me there was one here, and that they played to-night.”