¶ This terrible dragoon, master of the hounds, guzzler, companion and leader in all revels, was generally voted one of the amiable men in army circles. He was a noted shot. In one year of record his score was 154 red deer and 100 stag.
¶ At the Ihna bridge was a ducking stool, for army punishments; it took the amusing style of a wooden donkey, and was so called by the dragoons as a rude joke.
After one of his hard drinking bouts, it was often the colonel’s amusing habit to order his men to march to the bridge; on arriving the band struck up and the wooden donkey was thrown into the stream. “All offenders of my regiment are forgiven,” Bismarck would bawl, “the donkey dies today!”
Then with all manner of opera bouffe the offending donkey would be put overboard—only to be brought out next morning, ready for official business.
¶ But our fun-loving colonel’s good times were now over. As commander of the gallant Anspach-Bayreuth dragoons, Augustus fought for Frederick the Great and was severely wounded at Czaslau. Austrian hussars surprised the transport wagons carrying the wounded to the rear, and with brutality common to the soldier-business of that rude day killed the defenseless Prussians, among whom was our Colonel von Bismarck.
¶ Bismarck’s grandfather, Karl Alexander, leaned toward the namby-pamby intellectual rather than to the social and convivial. He is remembered for his affected poetical style. Karl, brave soldier, attracted the eye of no less a judge of valor than the Great Frederick, who appointed this Karl Alexander von Bismarck an attache of the Prussian embassy at Vienna.
¶ Karl, like other Germans of the sentimental period, aped the French poets; but when a German is sentimental, the mush-pots boil over. Karl’s writings show that peculiar over-inflated quality, “sentimentality,” so much admired in the rococo period.