CHAPTER XXV.
THE PRUSSIAN GRENADIER.
"There was a criminal in a cart
A-going to be hanged;
Respite to him was granted,
And cart and crowd did stand,
To know if he would marry a wife
Or rather choose to die;
''Tother's the worst, drive on the cart,'
The criminal did reply."—Old Ballad.
You have all heard I presume (the captain began), of the singular predilection which the late King of Prussia had for tall swinging grenadiers, how he raked all Germany and Pomerania to procure them, and had them formed into corps and companies, sparing nothing in their equipment to add to their vast stature and warlike aspect—giving them the highest of heels to their boots, the tallest bearskin caps, and the longest and largest feathers that could be worn with safety to the neck and vertebral column. Those cross-belted Goliaths were quite a passion with him, and the first battalion of his Foot Guards, which my worthy father had the honour to command, was, no doubt, the most gigantic regiment in the Prussian army, perhaps in Europe; and to see its twelve companies of giants marching past in review order, and in open column, on that little meadow near Halle, which, from the time of the old Dessauer,* has been the training ground of the Prussian infantry, was truly a sight to marvel at and remember.
* Prince Leopold, of Anhalt Dessau, born there in 1676, the bravest of three generations who held the highest rank in the Prussian army.—General Seydlitz's Life.
The Battalion Von Warriston was, to Frederick the Great, his pet band—the flower and pattern corps of his carefully-trained and well-developed army!
Now it chanced that one day, about the year 1780, he had been riding in the environs of Berlin, attended only by Strutzki, his old Putkammer orderly, with the gunpowder-spotted visage. As he pottered along on his old shambling horse, with a pair of large spectacles on his nose—the royal nose, I mean—one eye was fixed on his bridle and the other on Herr Doctor Johann Georg Zimmerman's then famous but dreary work on Solitude, with his flap pockets stuffed with letters from Voltaire and Hume, general orders, proof-sheets of plays, and other rubbish, he suddenly saw something in the opinions of the Herr Doctor which displeased him, and jotting off a note on the subject, he despatched it by Strutzki.
Then resuming his meditations he rode on alone into the fields, smoking a pipe which had belonged to his old and faithful comrade, Seydlitz, and which he had picked up on the field of Rosbach, when that general gave his usual signal for the Hussars to charge by flinging his pipe into the air.
In a lonely place he came suddenly upon a peasant girl who possessed remarkable beauty, but that which he greatly preferred, astonishing stature. She was fully six feet, and so splendidly proportioned that Frederick reined up his horse and slung his pipe at his button-hole to observe her, which he could do for some time unobserved, as she was busy twining creepers and flowers over the front paling of a cottage named the Wild Katze, a wayside tavern.
"Bey'm Henker!" thought he, "could I but get you married to one of my grenadiers, my long-legged Fraulein, what sons you might have! What recruits—what a progeny of giant children to recruit the next generation of my guards!"