Pictures of German Life in the XVIIIth and XIXth Centuries, Vol. II.

by Gustav Freytag

The enlisting in the interior was carried on with every kind of violence; the officers and recruiting sergeants seized and carried off only sons who ought to have been exempt; students from the Universities, and whole colonies of villeins whom they settled on their own properties. Whoever wished to be exempt, was obliged to bribe, and was not even then safe. The officers were so protected in their violent extortions, that they openly despised all legal restraints. If there happened to be a great deficiency of men in time of war, all regard for law ceased. Then a formal, razzia was arranged, the city gates were beset by guards, and every one who went in or out subjected to a fearful examination, and whoever was tall and strong was seized; houses were broken into, and recruits were sought for from cellar to garret, even in families that ought to have been exempt. In the Seven Years' War, the Prussians even endeavoured to catch the scholars of the upper forms of the public schools in Silesia, for military service. In many families still lives the remembrance of the terror and danger occasioned to the grandfathers by the recruiting system. It was then a great misfortune for the sons of the clergy or officials to grow tall, and the usual warning of anxious parents was, "Do not grow, or you will be caught by the recruiting officer."

Almost worse were the illegalities practised by the recruiting sergeants seeking for recruits in foreign countries. The recruit was bound by the reception of the money; and the well-known manœuvre was to make simple lads drunk in jovial society, to press the money on them when intoxicated, take them into strict custody, and when, on becoming sober, they resisted, keep them by chains and every means of compulsion. Under escort and threatenings, the prisoners were dragged under the banners, and compelled to take the oath by barbarous punishments. Every other means of seduction was used besides drinking; gambling, prostitutes, lying, and every kind of deceit. Individuals considered desirable subjects were for days watched by spies. It was required of recruiting sergeants, who were paid for this purpose, to be especially expert in the art of outwitting. Advancement and presents of money depended on their knowing how to catch many men. Frequently they avoided, even where enlisting offices were allowed, showing themselves in uniform, and tried to seize their victims in every kind of disguise. Horrible were the basenesses practised in this man-hunting, and connived at by the governments. It was, in fact, slave-hunting; for the enlisted soldier could only perform his service in the great machine of the army, when he closed with all the hopes and wishes of his former life. It is a melancholy task to represent to oneself the feelings which worked in these victims; destroyed hopes, faintheartedness under violence, and heart-rending grief over a ruined life. It was not always the worst men who were hunted to death by running the gauntlet for repeated desertions, or flogged on account of insolent disobedience, till they lay senseless on the ground. Whoever could overcome his own inward struggle and accustom himself to the rough style of his new life, became a complete soldier, that is, a man who performed his service punctually, showed a firm spirit in attack, honoured or hated as enjoined, and perhaps felt some attachment to his flag; and probably much greater to the friend which made him for a time forget his situation—brandy.

Enlistment in foreign countries could only take place with the consent of the Government of the country. Urgently did warlike princes seek for permission from their neighbours for an enlistment office. The Emperor, indeed, had the best of it, for each of his regiments had, according to custom, a fixed recruiting district throughout Germany. The others, especially Prussia, had to provide a favourable district for it. The larger Imperial cities were frequently courteous enough to grant permission to the more powerful Sovereigns; consequently, they were not always able to protect the sons of their own noble families. The frontiers of France, Holland, and Switzerland, were favourable districts for catching recruits; for there were always deserters to be found in the territory which was surrounded by foreign domains, especially when a foreign fortress, with burdensome garrison service, lay in the neighbourhood. Anspach, Baireuth, Dessau, and Brunswick, were always a good market for the Prussians.

The recruiting officers of the different governments were not in equal repute. The Austrians had the best character; they were considered in the soldier world, coarse, but harmless; only took those that willingly yielded themselves, and kept to the agreement strictly. They had not much to offer, only three kreuzer and two pounds of bread daily; but they never were deficient in recruits. The Prussian recruiting officers, on the contrary, it must be owned, were in the worst repute; they lived in the highest style, were very insolent and unscrupulous, and fool-hardy devils. In order to catch a fine lad, they contrived the most audacious tricks, and exposed themselves to the greatest dangers: one knows that they were sometimes soundly beaten, when they found themselves in a minority, that they were imprisoned by foreign Governments, and more than one of them stabbed; but all this did not frighten them. This evil report lasted till Frederic William II. made his new rules of enlistment.

One of the best recruiting places in the empire was Frankfort-à-M., with its great fair; Prussians, Austrians, and Danes, still, at the end of the century, dwelt together there; the Danes had hung out their flag at the "Fir-tree;" the Austrians had, from olden times, stopped phlegmatically at the inn "The Red Ox;" but the restless Prussian recruiting officers were always changing; they were at this time the most distinguished and most splendid. A kind of diplomatic intercourse was maintained between the different parties; they were, it is true, jealous of one another, and endeavoured mutually to intercept each other's news; but they continued to visit and took wine and tobacco together as comrades. But Frankfort had already, after the seventeenth century, become the centre of a special branch of the business for entrapping men for the Imperial army. The recruiting officers sought not only new men, but also for deserters; and the bad discipline and want of military pride of the small southern German countries, as well as the facility of desertion, made it alluring to every good-for-nothing fellow to obtain new earnest money. In the recruiting rooms, therefore, of the Prussians and those of the "Red Ox," there hung a great variety of wardrobes from the different territories of the empire, which the deserters had left behind. Besides the wish to gain more bounty, there was yet another reason which led even the better sort of soldiers to desert—the wish to marry. No government approved of their soldiers burdening themselves with wives when in garrison, but, reckless as the military rulers were, they had no power in this respect. For there was no better means of keeping hold of a recruit than by marriage. If permission was refused, it was certain in garrisons near the frontier, that the soldier would fly with his maiden to the nearest inn where there was a foreign recruiting officer; and it was equally certain that he would there be married on the spot; for at every such recruiting place, there was a clergyman at hand for these cases.

The result of this was, that by far the greater number of soldiers were married, especially in the small States, where they could easily reach the frontier. Thus the Saxon army of about 30,000 men, reckoned in 1790, 20,000 soldiers' children; in the regiment of Thadden at Halle, almost half the soldiers were provided with wives. The soldiers' wives and children no longer went into the field, as in the old Landsknecht time, under the sergeants, but they were a heavy burden on the garrison towns. The women, supported themselves with difficulty by washing and other work; the children roamed about wildly without instruction. The city schools were almost everywhere closed to them; they were despised by the citizens like gipsies. Even in wealthy Lower Saxony at the beginning of the French revolution, there was no school for soldiers' boys except at Annaberg; this undoubtedly was well regulated, but did not suffice. For the girls there were none; there were neither preachers nor schools with the regiments. Only in Prussia was the education of the children and the training of the grown-up men—through preachers, schools, and orphan houses—seriously attended to.

When a man received earnest-money from a recruiting officer, his whole life was decided. He was separated from the society of the citizens by a chasm which the most persevering could seldom pass. Under the hard pressure of service, under rough officers and among still rougher comrades, ran the course of his life; the first years in ceaseless drilling, the following ones with occasional relaxation which allowed him to seek for some small service in the neighbourhood, as day-labourer, or some little handicraft. If he was considered secure, he would have leave for months, whether he wished it or not; then the captain kept his pay, and he had meanwhile to provide for himself. The citizens regarded him with distrust and aversion; the honesty and morals of the soldiers were in such bad repute, that civilians avoided all contact with them, if a soldier entered an inn, the citizen and artisan immediately left it, and the landlord considered it a misfortune to have visits from soldiers. Thus he was in his hours of recreation confined to intercourse with comrades and profligate women. Severe was the usage that he met with from his officers; he was cuffed and kicked, punished with flogging for the slightest cause, or placed on the sharp pointed wooden horse or donkey, which stood in the open place near the guard-house; for greater misdemeanors he was confined in chains, put on wooden palings, or if the crime was great, he had to run the gauntlet of rods cut by the Provost, till he died.

If in Prussia the predilection of the King for uniforms, and under Frederic the Great the glory of the army reconciled the Brandenburg conscript to the King's coat, this was far less the case in the rest of Germany. To the citizen and peasant's son in Prussia who had to serve, it was a misfortune, but in the rest of Germany a disgrace. Various were the attempts made to evade it by mutilation, but the chopping off a finger did not exempt, and was besides as severely punished as desertion. In 1790, a rich peasant lad in Lower Saxony, who by the hatred of the bailiff had been forced into service, was ashamed to enter his native village in uniform. Whenever he obtained leave, he stopped outside the village and had his peasant's dress brought to him, and a maid carried the uniform through the village in a covered basket.

Desertions, therefore, did not cease; they were the common evil of all armies, and were not to be prevented by running the gauntlet the first and second time, nor even the third with shot. In the garrisons the roll-call, which was incessant, and quiet espionnage of individuals, were insufficient means. But when the cannon gave the signal that a man had escaped, the alarm was given to the surrounding villages, mounted foresters and troopers trotted along all the roads, detachments of foot and horse scoured the country as far as the frontiers, and information was given to the villages. Whoever brought in a deserter received in Prussia ten thalers, but whoever did not stop him, had to pay double that sum as a punishment. Every soldier who went along the high road, was obliged to have a pass; in Prussia, by the orders of Frederic William I., every subject, whether high or low, was bound to detain every soldier he met on the road to inquire after his papers. It was a terrible thing, for a little artisan lad to be brought to a standstill in a lonely street by a desperate six-foot grenadier, with musket and sword, who could not be passed. Still worse was it when whole troops prepared for flight, like those twenty Russians of the Dessauer regiment at Halle, who, in 1734, obtained leave to attend the Greek service at Brandenburg, where the King kept a patriarch for his numerous Russian Grenadiers. But the twenty were determined to make a pilgrimage back to the golden cross of the holy Moscow; they passed with great staves through the Saxon villages, and were with difficulty caught by the Prussian Hussars, brought back by Dresden to their garrison, and there mildly treated. But yet more grievous was it to the King, that even among his own Potsdamers a conspiracy broke out, when his tall Servian Grenadiers had sworn to burn the town, and to desert with arms in their hands. There were people of importance at the bottom of it; the executions, cutting off of noses, and other modes of punishment, occasioned the King a loss of 30,000 thalers. In the field, also, a system of tactical regulations were necessary to restrain desertion; every night march, every camp on the outskirts of a wood, produced losses; the troops, both on the road and in camp, had to be surrounded by strong patrols of Hussars and pickets; in every secret expedition it was necessary to isolate the army by means of troops of light cavalry, in order that deserters might not carry news to the enemy. This order was still given to the Generals by Frederic II. In spite of all, however, in every campaign, after each lost battle, and even after those which were won, the number of deserters was fearfully great. After unfortunate campaigns, great armies were in danger of entire dissolution. Many who ran away from one army, went in speculation to another, like the mercenaries in the Thirty Years' War; indeed this changing and deserting had rough jovial attraction for adventurers. An imprisoned deserter was, in the opinion of multitudes, anything but an evil-doer,—we have many popular songs which express the full sympathy of the village singer for the unfortunate, but the happy deserter passed even for a hero, and in some popular tales, the valiant fellow who has been compelled to help the fictitious King out of danger, and at last marries the Princess, is a runaway soldier.

This royal soldiery was considered, in accordance with the ideas of that period, even after the popular arming of the militia, as the private possession of the Prince. The German Sovereigns, after the Thirty Years' War, had, as once did the Italian condottieri, trafficked with their military force; they had leased it to foreign powers, in order to make money and increase their influence. Sometimes the smallest territorial princes furnished in this way many regiments for the service of the Emperor, of the Dutch, and of the King of France. After the troops became more numerous, and were for the most part supplied from the children of the soil, this abuse of the Prince's power began gradually to strike the people with surprise. But it was not until after the wars of Frederic II. had inspired the people with patriotic warmth, that such appropriation became a subject of lively discussion. And when, after 1777, Brunswick, Anspach, Waldeck, Zerbst, and more than all Hesse-Cassel and Hanau, let out to England a number of regiments for service against the Americans, the indignation of the people was loudly expressed. Still it was only a lyrical complaint, but it sounded from the Rhine to the Vistula; the remembrance of it still lives; still does this misdeed hang like a curse upon one of the ruling families who then, to the most criminal extent, bartered away the lives of their subjects.