CHAPTER XXVI
THE CHECK
East Prussia again was frozen. The snow lay deep on the ground and the ice rattled on the tree limbs as it had done in that year when Bettina and Hans met the Queen on her flight to Memel. Never, the East Prussians declared, had they known a winter so terrible. In the towns the women, in their wadded cloaks, went still and sad, and the men, in the high-runner sleighs with the breath frozen on their beards, talked in mournful sentences, for they knew that the frozen Vistula held fast beneath its icy crust a secret which, when spring should reveal it, would turn them sick with horror and make fiercer than ever their hatred of Napoleon.
Not that they did not hate him enough already. The Tugendbund had carried the news of the poor Queen's suffering into every hamlet of Prussia. Napoleon had killed her, the people cried out, and in secret they were making ready to fight him. Never, they believed, had a country been more cruelly treated. Villages had been destroyed, towns burned, innocent men shot or mistreated. In the free city of Hamburg hundreds of sick had been driven by Davoust from the hospitals, orphans expelled from their asylums. Twenty thousand Hamburgers, ordered from the city, shivering in the icy coldness, watched the French burn their country houses, the flames blazing up against a winter sky and lighting a blackened and desolate country. Near Dresden women were ordered out from their homes and children, and with wheelbarrows, were compelled to bring in the dead and the dying, while Napoleon enjoyed himself in the theatre.
The check, however, had come in that icy winter of 1812-13.
Along the road from Russia, limping on frozen feet bound with straw, or marking with blood the snow, came French and Prussian soldiers, dropping here, dying there, sinking on land or into the Vistula. Five hundred thousand French and the Germans forced to assist Napoleon in this war against Russia, had marched with flying banners against Moscow. Instead of Russians, flames met them, and now twenty thousand, for the others had perished in the snow, or were frozen in the Vistula, were limping back to Prussia. The horses had fallen like leaves before the icy blasts of the Baltic, and their bodies marked the line of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. On they struggled, swords gone, their feet like clods, their glory vanished. Half starved, there was nothing for them to eat, for in Napoleon's own war against Prussia they had burned her farmhouses, destroyed her crops and killed her farmers. They had sown destruction and now were reaping famine.
"But God be praised," cried Otto von Stork, sitting at the campfire of the German legion, "Napoleon is beaten."
"Ja wohl," cried his companions, flushed with their pursuit of the flying. Then Otto lifted his voice and started a hymn Arndt had written for German soldiers:
"What is the German's Fatherland?
Oh name at length this mighty land,
As wide as sounds the German tongue,
And German hymns to God are sung,
That is the land;
That, German, name thy Fatherland!
To us this glorious land is given;
Oh Lord of Hosts look down from Heaven,
And grant us Germans loyalty
To love our country faithfully;
To love our land,
Our undivided Fatherland!"
And, as they sang, Otto remembered Friedland and his brother, Wolfgang. He remembered Queen Louisa and how she had often smiled at him in Memel, he remembered his beloved hero, Shill, and brave Andreas Hofer. Suddenly he interrupted his song with a laugh.