In Gustavus the second self (his friend) dwelt almost under one and the same roof with the first, under the skull and skin of the brain; I mean, he loved in others less what he saw than what he conceived; his feelings, in fact, were nearer and more compact about his ideas than about his senses; hence the flame of friendship which streamed up so high before the image of a friend, was often bent and blown aside by his bodily presence. Hence he received his Amandus (since in general an arrival creates less glow than a departure) with a warmth which did not quite reach from his inner to his outer man--but Oefel, who observed it, wormed out the secret with six glances: that the new cadet was proud of his nobility.
Of all military catechumens Gustavus had the most thorny time. From a still Carthusian monastery he had been banished to a lumber-room, where the three cadets bombarded his ears all day long with thrusts of rapiers, slaps of cards and curses--from a country castle he had been thrown into a Louvre, where the drum was the organ of speech and the speaking machine, through which the mastership talks with the scholars, as the grasshopper makes all his noise with an inborn drum attached to his belly. To eating, to sleeping and to waking, they were, like the pit of a village player, drummed together. In march-time and following the word of command this militia mounted the dining-hall as their wall and brought nothing away from the fortification but their portion of victuals for half a day. The gesture of command started them up from their seats and led them out again from the citadel. One could at night count the steps of a single cadet, and one knew those of all the rest, because the word of command like a blast drove all these wheels at once.--For this very reason, I mean because grace before meat was regularly commanded, the whole corps had the same devotions, no one spoke with God a second longer than another. I know not to which of the Scheerau regiments the fellow belonged who once, at a church parade, when the officer for once commanded the souls to go to God, which he generally ordered to go to the Devil, so flagrantly rebelled against reasonable subordination, as to crook his pious knee before Heaven at least four minutes longer than the file-leader;--I mention it for this reason, that I afterward, when the pray-er got a whipping for it, publicly propounded the question, whether in this same way one might not train the companies in logic, which is as necessary to them as the mustache and even more useful, since the latter, but not the former, needs brushing. Might not one give the command, only leaving out the word "make": "make the major proposition--make the minor--make the conclusion?" Thus no one could blame me, if I should buy me a company, and make them go through the three parts of the Penance somewhat in this way: Repent--Believe--Reform--namely yourselves, or else the ---- shall strike you--as younger officers add.
The Austrian soldiers had, until the year 1756, seventy-two manual movements to learn, not for smiting the enemy, but Satan.
While in this mood towards war and his comrades, Gustavus wrote a letter to me, of which I omit the beginning, because in that part our correspondent used always to be as cold as at the reception of a friend.
* * * * *
"---- Exercising and studying make me quite another man, but not a happier one. I am often vexed myself at my weakness, at my eyes, from which I privately seek to wipe away all traces of emotion, and at my heart, which, at offences such as I now frequently experience, though certainly without the intention of the offenders, does not boil up with passion, but compresses itself as if into a great tear over the wicked world. My chums, among whom I hear nothing but rapier-thrust and curses, ridicule me in everything. Even this writing I am not doing in their sight, but under the open heavens in the Silent Land[[57]], at the feet and on the pedestal of a flower-goddess, whose arm and flower-basket have been broken off. The worthy Herr von Oefel is meanwhile at the Resident Lady's, in the old palace.
"Whenever I am not at work, every room, every house, every face confines and oppresses me. And yet when I resume it--that is, when it is foul weather, as it was last week, I open my case of mathematical instruments as fondly as if it were a casket of jewels; but when a fiery morning, amidst the screaming of all the birds, even the imprisoned ones, pours down from the roofs into our streets, when the postillion reminds me with his horn that he has just come out from the angular, dingy, dilapidated, unorganically glued-together rubbish heaps of killed nature, which they call a city, into the pulsing, swelling, budding fullness of unmurdered nature, where one root clambers about another, where all things grow together and into each other, and all lesser lives twine together into one great infinite life; then every drop of blood in my heart recoils from the pitch-hoops, trench-cavaliers, and from the sponges with which the artillery stuff and stifle our blue morning hours. Nevertheless, I forget blooming nature and the counter-mines wherewith they are learning to blow it up into the air, and see merely the long crapes which stream out on high from the poles at the house of a dyer opposite, even as nights hang over the faces of poor mothers, that the dew of grief may fall in the dark behind the corpses which we are learning to make on the morrow.----Ah! since I have learned there is no longer any dying for, but only against the fatherland; since I have learned that if I sacrifice my own life, I save none but only enslave one; since that I have been compelled to wish that when war one day shall draw me into the work of killing, it will first burn my eyes blind with powder, that I may not see the breast I stab, nor pity the fair form which I mutilate, and may only die, but not kill.... Oh, while I still looked out into the world from the monastery, from your study chamber, then did it expand before me in fairer and grander dimensions with waving woods and flaming capes and meadows painted in thousandfold colors--now I stand upon that same earth and see the bold needle-pine with miry roots, the black boggy pond and the pasture of one mowing full of yellow grass and draining ditches.
"Perhaps, however, I might still better realize my dreams of being useful to men, if I should strike into another path, and were permitted to choose, instead of the battle-field, the session-table, and so ennoble the object of sacrifice.[[58]] The red sun stands before my pen and besprinkles my paper with running shadows. O thou workest standing, heavenly diamond! and illuminatest like the lightning, but without its murderous knell! All nature is mute when it creates and loud when it destroys. O great Nature, standing in evening's fire! man should imitate only thy stillness and be merely thy feeble child, carrying forth thy blessings to the needy!
"If you look up to-day from Auenthal at the windows of our castle flickering in the summer-gold, so does my soul also at this moment look over, but with a sigh," etc....
The officers see clearly that Gustavus never will be one; but he has against him the whole of his father, who loves only the storming warrior and scorns more quiet business-men, as they in their turn despise the still more quiet businessless scholar.