The schoolmaster and the garrison would have been happy but for the fact that their chief necessities, food and drink, were insufficient. Their quarters were dry, the air was bracing, and their clothes appeared to be imperishable.
This calm was broken by bad news. With November of 1757 the tide of war came in upon them. From the watch-towers they heard the distant roar of cannon, while the fugitive peasants could see the Prussian soldiers foraging not far away. What could Neideck do? The men of the garrison held a council; the sergeant suggested blowing up the castle; one of the soldiers counseled honorable surrender; the other advised immediate flight. The schoolmaster, who had been invited to the council, urged resistance to the death; resistance to the point of annihilation.
During the evening of November 13 a chasseur galloped up the mountainside with orders to “Retire to the other side of the Schwarzach, and there join the imperial army! Take all arms and commissary stores; destroy everything that can not be transported!”
The orders pleased the garrison; there was little to take away and nothing to destroy. But the cannon! What could they do with that? It had no wheels; they could not draw it after them; and, as there were no oxen in the village, they could not haul it.
“Let us spike it!” said the sergeant; “that is done in wartime.” But how? He did not know. To blow it up might be dangerous. Finally they followed the advice of the schoolmaster. The well was two hundred feet deep, and within the memory of man it had never held water. They dropped the cannon into the well.
When they were setting out, the sergeant asked the schoolmaster where they should find the Schwarzach. The schoolmaster gave the desired information; critical pedagogy is supposed to follow the principle that it is better to give any answer than to confess ignorance.
The schoolmaster refused to abandon the fortress: he watched the soldiers sorrowfully as they marched down the hill and disappeared like phantoms in the silence and the darkness. “They will not return,” he mused; “I am now the sole keeper of the fort!” He drew the bridge, barred the gates, and went into his lodge.
For a long time he had been laying in provisions: apples, nuts, prunes, bread, bacon, and smoked beef. These, with an old dressing gown and “Gottsched’s Critical Art of Poetry,” he carried to the western slope of the hill. He waited an instant, listening, turning his head in all directions, to make sure that he was alone, for the night was dark and he could see nothing; then he climbed over a broken wall, parted the thick branches of a thorn-bush, and crawled through an opening into an underground passage choked with rubbish.
This passage was known only to Burg Balzer. He had found it in his youth. In a place where the passage widened he had made a bed of leaves, and, lying there on rainy days, many an hour, for many years, he had dreamed his dreams. He loved to dream of the days of knighthood; and the dim light of his hiding-place gave atmosphere to his illusions. At times he had worked hard to clear away the rubbish and penetrate deeper under ground. Philip thought he might find wine here. Strange things had been found before this in secret passages! In the abandoned cellar of a castle in Alsatia ancient wine had been found; the casks had rotted and dropped apart, but the old wine had formed a skin. As he went alone, Philip decided to hide in his grotto and wait for the first shock of war to pass; he should be safer down there than with the fugitive peasants in the woods. It was romance as well as common sense that led him to hide there. Philip Balzer was a German schoolmaster. “I am Burg Balzer,” he said to himself; “this is my castle! I must be faithful; I must stand or fall with this stronghold. I am the real warder, and to guard Neideck is my heritage. Let the Prussians blow it up and me with it! Better, far better, to wing my flight thus than to forsake my trust!”
To tell the exact truth, Burg Balzer was not at all afraid that he should be blown up; from an old legend he had learned that destiny had marked him for important work; he was to restore prosperity to Neideck. Neideck, the ancestral home of the princes of Westerau, had been occupied by the family until the Thirty Years’ War broke out. But on the approach of the imperial army the princes had escaped, leaving a strong garrison, and the peasants of the whole country had taken refuge there. From that time onward Neideck had been known as a stronghold. “And, in truth,” said the schoolmaster, “it has always been a fortress; it has never been a robbers’ nest.”