Soldiers were nothing new to Bettina. She had seen them all her life. But the Emperor of the French! That was another thing, and an awful one. She shuddered as her grandfather muttered his name.
He was a dreadful man. Her mother always said so. At the mention of his name every child in Germany behaved itself. And to think that she, Bettina Weyland, had seen this monster on the white horse everybody talked so about.
Remembering the night before, Bettina trembled. Then, too, it seemed to her that she kept hearing a queer sound of roaring—not loud, but far away towards Jena, a rumble which frightened her.
But old Hans seemed to hear nothing. His mind, as old minds will, had travelled into the past and he had forgotten the Thuringian Wood, the bright-eyed red squirrels, the deer, and even little Bettina chatting so innocently as she trotted along behind him.
In his day the world had changed greatly, old things were passing away and no one knew what was coming.
In America, the Colonies under Washington had won their independence and founded a Republic. In France, there had been a dreadful Revolution, and Louis the Sixteenth and Marie Antoinette had been guillotined. A Corsican soldier first had become France's first consul, and now he was the Emperor Bettina so dreaded. The Holy Roman Empire, whose Emperor had lived in Vienna and ruled Germany, was no more, and France's Emperor, Napoleon, had brought war all over the world. Europe had been fighting during Hans' whole lifetime, and all the small countries had belonged so to first one big one and then another, that it was hard sometimes to exactly know who was one's ruler.
"And now," said Hans aloud, "the French have come into Thuringia, and our troubles begin."
How dreadful these troubles were to be the old man had not even an idea. Little did he think as he walked along with Bettina that before twenty-four hours should have passed, a nation should fall, his own home be no more, and Thuringia blood-stained and overrun with soldiers.
What he did know was that the King of Prussia and the Duke of Brunswick were at Auerstädt, Prince Hohenlohe at Jena, and Napoleon, with the French, in the same neighbourhood.
"But there will be no battle; nonsense," the Prussians had all told him in Jena. "And if there should be, who, tell us, would be victors but the soldiers of Frederick the Great? Was not his army invincible?"