Habits and men, with remnants of record touching the makers of both

by Dr. Doran

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.