Then the young man sprang lightly into the saddle.
"God grant, sir, I may soon come too!" Fritz Deyke cried after him, as, putting his horse to a gallop, he disappeared into the gathering night.
CHAPTER X.
[BERLIN].
The streets of Berlin, though, bright with sunshine, looked empty at eight o'clock on the morning of the 15th of June, 1866. Life in that city does not begin so early; and at this hour only a few of the lower orders hurried along under the lime trees, with here and there an employé or a merchant hastening to his office.
A troubled expression appeared on the face of every passer-by; acquaintances stopped and exchanged greetings and the news of the day, but the news was of an unpleasant and evil nature; the Austrian ambassador was recalled, and war was inevitable,--a war which no one desired, and which was entirely ascribed to the ambition of the minister, who, in order to retain office, was about to set Germany, nay Europe, on fire.
So thought and spoke the good people of Berlin, for they were accustomed to think and speak in the morning as Aunt Voss and Uncle Spener had caused them to read the day before; and these two long-established and highly privileged organs of public opinion daily maintained, in articles whole columns in length, that the disturbance in Germany was entirely owing to the restless ambition and criminal rashness of this Herr von Bismarck; and all the Müllers, all the Schultzes, all the Lehmanns, and all the Neumanns who had been brought up in the royal capital, firmly believed that nothing was needed to preserve the absolute peace of Europe under the parliamentary government, than that Herr von Bismarck should be sent about his business, either to Schönhausen, or to Kniephof, to cultivate his March Ukrain turnips, or his Pomeranian cabbages.
But when some of the Landwehr marched past on their way to the railway stations from whence they were to be sent off to join the different army corps, a very discontented expression was seen on the faces of the Berlin children, both old and young, as they stood about in knots at the side of the streets and roundly abused that "junker Bismarck," who brought such misery on families, and cost the country so much money. This did not hinder the kind-hearted inhabitants of Berlin from bestowing on "the sacrifice to Bismarck's policy," the "Blue Laddies" of the Landwehr Guards, who were being sent to this horrid fraternal war, many abundant tokens of their affection, in the shape of beer, cigars, sausages, and spirits. And "the sacrifice" itself appeared by no means discontented; for from its ranks resounded those merry old Prussian soldier songs, which are handed down unwritten from generation to generation, and transplanted from the bivouac to the home, where the boys learn them when they play at soldiers, and sing them later on in the bivouacs of the manœ uvres, or of the first war to which their king and country send them.
In the evening, all the Schultzes, Müllers, Lehmanns, and Neumanns went to their hereditary beer-shops, and sat round the table listening to the news from the mouth of the oracle of their different circles; and they heard how that very day a journalist had written, or a deputy had spoken, inculcating the great lesson that all the uneasiness, all the stagnation of trade, all the troubles of private families, were caused by one man, who sacrificed the happiness of the subject to his own mad notions and ambition; one man, who placed the crown and the country in danger, Herr von Bismarck, the aristocratic despot!
No wonder then that all the people who were hurrying along in the early morning looked on the world with dismal eyes, nor that when acquaintances met and discussed the news, a curse, not loud but deep, should be bestowed on that Bismarck who plunged the whole world, which would have been so happy without him, into grief and woe.