THE GIANT IN THE SPIKED HELMET
In January of 1870, having decided to teach rather than preach, I
embarked for Germany to enjoy a year of foreign study. Like Western
professors in general (to borrow the witticism of President Eliot)
I occupied not so much a chair as a sofa, and felt that I needed
enlargement for the performance of my functions.
I think I saw a certain caricature first in Munich at the end of July,
then in two or three Swiss cities, then in Paris at the end of August,
then in Brussels and London; for it was popular, and the print-shops
had it everywhere. It was a map of Europe where the different
countries were represented by comical figures, each meant to hit off
the peculiarities of the nation it stood for, according to popular
apprehension. For Prussia there was an immense giant, one of whose
knees was on the stomach of Austria represented as a lank figure
utterly prostrate, while the other foot threatened to crush
South-western Germany. One hand menaced France, whose outline the
designer had managed to give rudely in the figure of a Zouave in
a fierce attitude; and the other was thrust toward Russia, a huge
colossus with Calmuck dress, and features. The most conspicuous thing
in the giant's dress was a helmet with a spike projecting from the
top, much too large for the head of the wearer, and therefore falling
over his eyes until they were almost blinded by it. The style of the
helmet was that of the usual head-dress of the Prussian soldier. The
caricature generally was not bad, and the hit at Prussia, half crushed
and blinded under the big helmet, was particularly good. Throughout
her whole history Prussia is either at war, or getting ready for war,
or lying exhausted through wounds and recovering strength. In Prussia
you found things of pugnacious suggestion always, and in the most
incongruous connections. Study the schools, and there was something
to call up the soldier. Study the church, and even there was a burly
polemic quality which you can trace back from to-day to the time when
the Prussian bishops were fighting knights. Study the people in their
quietest moods, in their homes, among their recreations, indeed, among
the graves of those they honour as the greatest heroes, and you found
the same overhanging shadow of war. This predominant martial quality
showed itself in ways sometimes brutal, sometimes absurd, sometimes
sublime.
I visited Prussia at a time of entire peace, for at my departure I
crossed the frontier (or that of the North German Confederation, the
whole of which, for convenience's sake, we will call Prussia) on the
very day when King William was shouldering aside so roughly at Ems
Benedetti and the famous French demands. The things to which I gave
attention for the most part were the things which belong to peace;
yet as I arrange my recollections I find that something military runs
through the whole of them. As one's letters when he has read them are
filed away on the pointed wire standing on the desk, so as regards my
Prussian experiences everything seems to have been filed away on the
spike of a helmet.
Going out early one May morning to get my first sight of Berlin, I
stood presently in a broad avenue. In the centre ran a wide promenade
lined with tall, full-foliaged trees, with a crowded roadway on each
side bordered by stately buildings. Close by me a colossal equestrian
statue in bronze towered up till the head of the rider was on a level
with the eaves of the houses. The rider was in cocked hat, booted and
spurred, the eye turned sharp to the left as if reconnoitring, the
attitude alert, life-like, as if he might dismount any moment if he
chose. In the distance down the long perspective of trees was a lofty
gate supported by columns, with a figure of Victory on the top in a
chariot drawn by horses. Close at hand again, under the porch of a
square strong structure, stood two straight sentinels. An officer
passed in a carriage on the farther side of the avenue. Instantly
the two sentinels stepped back in concert as if the same clock-work
regulated their movements, brought their shining pieces with perfect
precision to the "present," stood for an instant as if hewn from
stone, the spiked helmets above the blond faces inclining backward at
the same angle, then precisely together fell into the old position.
The street was "Unter den Linden." The tall statue was the memorial
of Frederick the Great. The gate down the long vista was the
Brandenburger Thor, surmounted by the charioted Victory which Napoleon
carried to Paris after Jena and which came back after Waterloo. The
solid building was the palace of iron-grey old King William; and when
the clock-work sentinels went through their salute, I got my first
sight of that famous Prussian discipline, against which before
the summer was through supple France was to crush its teeth all to
fragments, like a viper that has incautiously bitten at a file.
There never was a place with aspect more military than Berlin even
in peaceful times. In many quarters towered great barracks for the
troops. The public memorials were almost exclusively in honour of
great soldiers. There were tall columns, too, to commemorate victories
or the crushing out of revolutionary spirit; rarely, indeed, in
comparison, a statue to a man of scientific or literary or artistic
eminence. Frederick sits among the tree-tops of Unter den Linden, and
about his pedestal are life-size figures of the men of his age whom
Prussia holds most worthy of honour. At the four corners ride the
Duke of Brunswick and cunning Prince Heinrich, old Ziethen and fiery
Seydlitz. Between are a score or more of soldiers of lesser note, only
soldiers, spurred and sabre-girt,--except at the very back; and there,
just where the tail of Frederick's horse droops over, stand--whom
think you?--no others than Leasing, critic and poet, most gifted and
famous; and Kant, peer of Plato and Bacon, one of the most gifted
brains of all time. Just standing room for them among the hoofs and
uniforms at the tail of Frederick's horse! Every third man one met in
Berlin was a soldier off duty. Batteries of steel guns rolled by at
any time, obedient to their bugles. Squadrons of Uhlans in uniforms of
green and red, the pennons fluttering from the ends of their lances,
rode up to salute the king. Each day at noon, through the roar of
the streets, swelled the finest martial music; first a grand sound of
trumpets, then a deafening roll from a score of brazen drums. A heavy
detachment of infantry wheeled out from some barracks, ranks of strong
brown-haired young men stretching from sidewalk to sidewalk, neat in
every thread and accoutrement, with the German gift for music all, as
the stride told with which they beat out upon the pavement the rhythm
of the march, dropping sections at intervals to do the unbroken guard
duty at the various posts. Frequently whole army corps gathered to
manoeuvre at the vast parade-ground by the Kreuzberg in the outskirts.
On Unter den Linden is a strong square building, erected, after the
model of a Roman fortress, to be the quarters of the main guard. The
officers on duty at Berlin came here daily at noon to hear military
music and for a half-hour's talk. They came always in full uniform, a
collection of the most brilliant colours, hussars in red, blue, green,
and black, the king's body-guard in white with braid of yellow and
silver, in helmets that flashed as if made from burnished gold,
crested with an eagle with out-spread wings. The men themselves
were the handsomest one can see; figures of the finest symmetry and
stature, trained by every athletic exercise, and the faces often so
young and beautiful! Counts and barons were there from Pomerania and
old Brandenburg, where the Prussian spirit is most intense, and no
nobility is nobler or prouder. They were blue-eyed and fair-haired
descendants perhaps of the chieftains that helped Herman overcome
Varus, and whose names may be found five hundred years back among the
Deutsch Ritters that conquered Northern Europe from heathendom, and
thence all the way down to now, occurring in martial and princely
connection. It was the acme of martial splendour.
"But how do you bear it all?" you say to your Prussian friend, with
whom you stand looking on at the base of Billow's statue. "Is not this
enormous preparation for bloodshed something dreadful? Then the tax
on the country to support it all, the withdrawing of such a multitude
from the employments of peace." Your friend, who had been a soldier
himself, would answer: "We bear it because we must. It is the price
of our existence, and we have got used to it; and, after all, with the
hardship come great benefits. Every able-bodied young Prussian must
serve as a soldier, be he noble or low-born, rich or poor. If he
cannot read or write, he must learn. He must be punctual, neat,
temperate, and so gets valuable habits. His body is trained to be
strong and supple. Shoemaker and banker's son, count, tailor, and
farmer march together, and community of feeling comes about. The great
traditions of Prussian history are the atmosphere they breathe, and
they become patriotic. The soldier must put off marrying, perhaps half
forget his trade, and come into life poor; for who can save on nine
cents a day, with board and clothes? But it is a wonder if he is not
a healthy, well-trained, patriotic man." So talked your Prussian; and
however much of a peace-man you might be, you could not help owning
there was some truth in it. If you bought a suit of clothes,
the tailor jumped up from his cross-legged position, prompt and
full-chested, with tan on his face he got in campaigning; and it is
hard to say he had lost more than he gained in his army training. If
you went into a school, the teacher, with a close-clipped beard and
vigorous gait, who had a scar on his face from Königgrätz, seemed none
the worse for it, though he might have read a few books the less and
lost his student pallor. At any rate, bad or good, so it was; and so,
said the Prussian, it must be. Eternal vigilance and preparation! I
went in one day to the arsenal. The flags which Prussian armies had
taken from almost every nation in Europe were ranged against the
walls by the hundred; shot-shattered rags of silk, white standards of
Austria embroidered with gold, Bavaria's blue checker, above all the
great Napoleonic symbol, the N surrounded by its wreath. This was the
memorable tapestry that hung the walls, and opposite glittered the
waiting barrels and bayonets till one could almost believe them
conscious, and burning to do as much as the flintlocks that won
the standards. There was a needle-gun there or somewhere for every
able-bodied man, and somewhere else uniform and equipments. When I
landed in February on the bank of the Weser, the most prominent
object was the redoubt with the North German flag. When in midsummer
I crossed the Bavarian frontier among a softer people, the last marked
object was the old stronghold of Coburg, battered by siege after siege
for a thousand years. It was the spiked helmet at the entrance and
again at the exit; and from entrance to exit, few places or times were
free from some martial suggestion. It was a nation that had come to
power mainly through war, and been schooled into the belief that its
mailed fists alone could guarantee its life.
I visited a primary school. The little boys of six came with knapsacks
strapped to their backs for their books and dinners, instead of
satchels. At the tap of a bell they formed themselves into column
and marched like little veterans to the schoolroom door. I visited
a school for boys of thirteen or fourteen. Casting my eyes into
the yard, I saw the spiked helmet in the shape of the half-military
manoeuvres of a class which the teacher of gymnastics was training for
the severer drill of five or six years later. I visited the "prima,"
or upper class of a gymnasium, and here was the spiked helmet in a
connection that seemed at first rather irreverent. After all, however,
it was only thoroughly Prussian, and deserved to be looked upon as
a comical incongruity rather than gravely blamed. A row of cheap
pictures hung side by side upon the wall. First Luther, the rougher
characteristics of the well-known portrait somewhat exaggerated. The
shoulders were even larger than common. The bony buttresses of the
forehead over the eyes, too, as they rose above the strong lower face,
were emphasised, looking truly as though, if tongue and pen failed to
make a way, the shoulders could push one, and, if worse came to worst,
the head would butt one. Next to Luther was a head of Christ; then in
the same line, with nothing in the position or quality of the pictures
to indicate that the subjects were any less esteemed, a row of royal
personages, whose military trappings were made particularly plain.
It was all characteristic enough. The Reformer's figure stood for the
stalwart Protestantism of the Prussian character, still living and
militant in a way hard for us to imagine; the portraits of the royal
soldiers stood for its combative loyalty, ready to meet anything for
king and fatherland; and the head of Christ for its zealous faith,
which, however it may have cooled away among some classes of the
people, was still intense in the nation at large. I visited the best
school for girls in Berlin, and it was singular to find the spiked
helmet, among those retiring maidens even, and this time not hung upon
the wall nor outside in the yard. The teacher of the most interesting
class I visited--a class in German literature--was a man of
forty-five, of straight, soldierly bearing, a grey, martial moustache,
and energetic eye. He told me, as we walked together in the hall,
waiting for the exercise to commence, that he had been a soldier, and
it so happened that among the ballads in the lesson for that day was
one in honour of the Prussian troops at Rossbach. Over this the old
soldier broke out into an animated lecture, which grew more and more
earnest as he went forward; he showed how the idea of faithfulness to
duty had become obscured, but was enforced again by the philosopher
Kant in his teaching, and then brought into practice by the great
Frederick. The veteran plainly thought there was no duty higher than
that owed to the _schwarzer Adler_, the black eagle of Prussia.
Then came an account of the French horse before Rossbach; how they
rode out from Weimar, the troopers, before they went, ripping open the
beds on which they had slept and scattering the feathers to the wind
to plague the housewives,--a piece of ruthlessness that came home
thoroughly to the young housekeepers; then how _der alte
Fritz_, lying in wait behind Janus Hill, with General Seydlitz and
Field-marshal Keith, suddenly rushed out and put them all to rout.
The soldier was in a fever of patriotism and rage against the French
before his description was finished, and the faces of the girls
kindled in response. "They will some time," I thought, "be lovers,
wives, mothers of Prussian soldiers themselves, and this training will
keep alive in the home the national fire."
Admirable schools they all were, the presence of the spiked helmet
notwithstanding, and crowning them in the great Prussian educational
system came the famous universities. That at Berlin counted its
students by thousands, its professors by hundreds. There was no branch
of human knowledge without its teacher. One could study Egyptian
hieroglyphics or the Assyrian arrow-head inscriptions. A new pimple
could hardly break out on the blotched face of the moon, without
a lecture from a professor next day to explain the theory of its
development. The poor earthquakes were hardly left to shake in peace
an out-of-the-way strip of South American coast or Calabrian plain,
but a German professor violated their privacy, undertook to see whence
they came and whither they went, and even tried to predict when they
would go to shaking again. The vast building of the University stood
on Unter den Linden, opposite the palace of the king. Large as it was,
its halls were crowded at the end of every hour by the thousand or two
of young men, who presently disappeared within the lecture-rooms.
Here in past years had been Hegel and Fichte, the brothers Grimm, the
brothers Humboldt, Niebuhr, and Carl Ritter. Here in my time, were
Lepsius and Curtius, Virchow and Hoffman, Ranke and Mommsen,--the
world's first scholars in the past and present. The student selected
his lecturers, then went day by day through the semester to the plain
lecture-rooms, taking notes diligently at benches which had been
whittled well by his predecessors, and where he too most likely
carved his own autograph and perhaps the name of the dear girl he
adored,--for Yankee boys have no monopoly of the jack-knife.
Where could one find the spiked helmet in the midst of the scholastic
quiet and diligence of a German university? It was visible enough in
more ways than one. Here was one manifestation. Run down the long list
of professors and teachers in the _Anzeiger_, and you would find
somewhere in the list the _Fechtmeister_, instructor in fighting,
master of the sword exercise, and he was pretty sure to be one of
the busiest men in the company. To most German students, a sword, or
_Schläger_, was as necessary as pipe or beer-mug; not a slender
fencing-foil, with a button on the point, and slight enough to snap
with a vigorous thrust, but a stout blade of tempered steel, ground
sharp. With these weapons the students perpetrated savageries,
almost unrebuked, which struck an American with horror. Duels were
of frequent occurrence, taking place sometimes at places and on days
regularly set apart for the really bloody work. The fighters were
partially protected by a sort of armour, and the wounds inflicted were
generally more ghastly than dangerous; though a son of Bismarck was
said to have been nearly killed at Bonn a few years before, and there
was sometimes serious maiming. Perhaps one may say it was nothing but
very rough play, but it was the play of young savages, whose sport was
nothing to them without a dash of cruel rage. The practice dates from
the time when the Germans wore wolf-skins, and were barbarians roaring
in their woods. Perhaps the university authorities found it too
inveterate a thing to be done away with; perhaps, too, they felt,
thinking as it were under their spiked helmets, that after all it had
a value, making the young men cool in danger and accustoming them to
weapons. We, after all, cannot say too much. Often our young American
students in Germany take to the _Schläger_ as gracefully and
naturally as game-cocks to spurs. The most noted duellist at one of
the universities that winter was a burly young Westerner, who had
things at first all his own way. A still burlier Prussian from
Tübingen, however, appeared at last, and so carved our valiant
borderer's face, that thereafter with its criss-cross scars it looked
like a well-frequented skating-ground. Football, too, in America
probably kills and maims more in a year than all the German duels.
To crown all, the schools and University at Berlin were magnificently
supplemented in the great Museum, a vast collection, where one might
study the rise and progress of civilisation in every race of past ages
that has had a history, the present condition of perhaps every people,
civilised or wild, under the sun. In one great hall you were among the
satin garments and lacquered furniture of China; in another there was
the seal-skin work of the Esquimaux stitched with sinew. Now you sat
in a Tartar tent, now among the war-clubs, the conch-shell trumpets,
the drums covered with human skin of the Polynesians. Here it was
the feathery finery of the Caribs, here the idols and trinkets of the
negroes of Soudan. There too, in still other halls, was the history
of our own race; the maces the Teutons and Norsemen fought with, the
torcs of twisted gold they wore about their necks, the sacrificial
knives that slew the victims on the altars of Odin; so, too, what our
fathers have carved and spun, moulded, cast, and portrayed, until
we took up the task of life. In another place you found the great
collection made in Egypt by Lepsius. The visitor stood within the
facsimile of a temple on the banks of the Nile. On the walls and
lotus-shaped columns were processions of dark figures at the loom,
at the work of irrigation, marching as soldiers, or mourners at
funerals,--exact copies of the original delineations. There were
sphinx and obelisk, coffins of kings, mummies of priest and chieftain,
the fabrics they wore, the gems they cut, the scrolls they engrossed,
the tomb in which they were buried. Stepping into another section, you
were in Assyria, with the alabaster lions and plumed genii of the men
of Nineveh and Babylon. The walls again were brilliant, now with the
splendour of the palaces of Nebuchadnezzar; the captives building
temples, the chivalry sacking cities, the princes on their thrones.
Here too was Etruria revealed in her sculpture and painted vases; and
here too the whole story of Greece. Passing through these wonderful
halls, you reviewed a thousand years and more, almost from the epoch
of Cadmus, through the vicissitudes of empire and servitude, until
Constantinople was sacked by the Turks. The rude Pelasgic altar, the
sculptured god of Praxiteles, then down through the ages of decay to
the ugly painting of the Byzantine monk in the Dark Ages. So too the
whole history of Rome; the long heave of the wave from Romulus until
it becomes crested with the might and beauty of the Augustan age;
the sad subsidence from that summit to Goth and Hun. There was
architecture which the eyes of the Tarquins saw, there were statues of
the great consuls of the Republic, the luxury of the later Empire. You
saw it not only in models, but sometimes in actual relics. One's
blood thrilled when he stood before a statue of Julius Caesar, whose
sculptor, it is reasonable to believe, wrought from the life. It was
broken and discoloured, as it came from the Italian ruin where it had
lain since the barbarian raids. But the grace had not left the toga
folded across the breast, nor was the fine Roman majesty gone from the
head and face,--a head small, but high, with a full and ample brow, a
nose with the true eagle curve, and thin, firm lips formed to command;
a statue most subduing in its simple dignity and pathetic in its
partial ruin. And all this was free to the world as the air of heaven
almost. No fee for admission; the only requisitions, not to handle,
orderly behaviour, and decent neatness in attire. Here I saw too, when
I ascended the steps between the great bronze groups of statuary as I
entered, and again the last thing as I left, the spiked helmet on the
head of the stiff sentinel always posted at the door.
The German home was affectionate and genial. The American, properly
introduced, was sure of a generous welcome, for it was hard to find
a German who had not many relatives beyond the Atlantic. There were
courteous observances which at first put one a little aback. Sneezing,
for instance, was not a thing that could be done in a corner. If the
family were a bit old-fashioned, you would be startled and abashed
by hearing the "_prosits_" and "_Gesundheits_" from the
company, wishes that it might be for your advantage and health
sonorously given, with much friendly nodding in your direction. This
is a curious survival of an old superstition that sneezing perhaps
opened a passage through which an evil spirit might enter the body.
As you rose from the table it was the old-fashioned way, too, to go
through with a general hand-shaking, and a wish to every one that the
supper might set well. The Germans are long-lived, and almost every
domestic hearthstone supports the easy-chairs of grandparents.
Grandfather was often fresh and cheerful, the oracle and comforter of
the children, treated with deference by those grown up, and presented
to the guest as the central figure of the home. As the younger ones
dropped off to bed and things grew quieter, grandfather's chair was
apt to be the centre toward which all tended, and, of course, the old
man talked about his youth. Here are the reminiscences I heard once at
the end of a merry evening, and at other times I heard something not
unlike: "Children and grandchildren and guest from over the sea, when
I was a boy, Prussia was struggling with the first Napoleon; and
when I was eighteen I marched myself under Blücher beyond the Rhine.
Sometimes we went on the run, sometimes we got lifts in relays of
waggons, and so I have known the infantry even to make now and then
fifty miles a day. Matters were pressing, you see (_sehen Sie
'mal_). At last we crossed at Coblentz, and got from there into
Belgium the first days of June. We met the French at Ligny,--a close,
bitter fight,--and half my battalion were left behind there where they
had stood. We were a few paces off, posted in a graveyard, when the
French cavalry rode over old Marshal Vorwärts, lying under his horse.
I saw the rush of the French, then the countercharge of the Prussian
troopers when missed the General and drove the enemy back till they
found him again; though what it all meant we never knew till it was
over. Then, after mighty little rest, we marched fast and far, with
cannon-thunder in our ears in a constant mutter, always growing
louder, until in the afternoon we came at a quickstep through a piece
of woods out upon the plain by Waterloo, where they had been fighting
all day. Our feet sucked in the damp ground, the wet grain brushed our
knees, as our compact column spread out into more open order and went
into fire. What a smoke there was about La Haye Sainte and Hougomont,
with now lines of red infantry, or a column in dark blue, or a mass
of flashing cuirassiers hidden for a moment, then reappearing! It was
take and give, hot and heavy, for an hour or so about Planchenoit. A
ball grazed my elbow and another went through my cap; but at sunset
the French were broken, and we swept after the rout as well as we
could through the litter, along the southward roads. We were at a halt
for a minute, I remember, when a rider in a chapeau with a plume, and
a hooked nose underneath, trotted up, wrapped in a military cloak,
and somebody said it was Wellington." Grandfather was sure to be at
a white heat before he had finished, and so, too, his audience. The
athletic student grandson, with a deep scar across his cheek from a
_Schläger_ cut, rose and paced the room. The _Fräulien_,
his sister, to whom the retired grenadier has told the story of the
feather-beds at Weimar, showed in her eves she remembered it all.
"Yes, friend American!" breaks in the father of the family, "and it
all must be done over again. Sooner or later it must come, a great
struggle with France; the Latin race or the Teutonic, which shall be
supreme in Europe? We are ready now; arsenals filled, horses waiting,
equipments for everybody. Son Fritz there has his uniform ready, and
somewhere there is one for me. _Donnerwetter_! If they get into
Prussia, they'll find a tough old _Landsturm_! Only let Vater
Wilhelm turn his hand, and to-morrow close upon a million trained and
well-armed troops could be stepping to the drum." It was an evening at
the end of June. Napoleon was having the finishing touches put to the
new Opera House at Paris, thinking, so far as the world could tell,
of nothing more important than how many imperial eagles it would do to
put along the cornice. King William was packing for Ems, designing
to be back at the peaceful unveiling of his father's statue the first
week in August. Bismarck was at his Pomeranian estate, in poor health,
it was said, plotting nothing but to circumvent his bodily trouble.
In less than a month full-armed Prussia was on the march. I could
understand the readiness, when I thought of the spiked helmet I had
seen in the Prussian home that quiet summer night.
The German _Friedhof_, or burying-ground, had never the extent or
magnificence of some American cemeteries. Even near the cities it was
small and quiet, showing, however, in the well-kept mounds and stones
there was no want of care. Every old church, too, was floored with
the memorial tablets of those buried beneath, and bare upon walls and
columns monuments in the taste of the various ages that have come
and gone since the church was built. Graves of famous men, here as
everywhere, were places of pilgrimage, and here as everywhere to
see which are the most honoured tombs, was no bad way of judging the
character of the people. Among the scholars of Germany there have been
no greater names than those of Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, brothers not
far apart in the cradle, not far apart in death, who lived and worked
together their full threescore years and ten. They were two wonderful
old men, with faces--as I saw them together in a photograph shown me
by Hermann Grimm, the well-known son of Wilhelm--full of intellectual
strength, and yet with the sweetness and innocence of children. They
lie now side by side in the Matthäi Kirchhof at Berlin, in graves
precisely similar, with a lovely rose-bush scattering petals
impartially on the turf above both, and solid twin stones at their
heads, meant to endure apparently as long as their fame. Hither come a
large and various company of pilgrims,--children who love the brothers
Grimm for their fairy-tales, young students who have been kindled by
their example, and grey old scholars who respect their achievements
as the most marvellous work of the marvellous German erudition. The
little North German city, Weimar, is closely associated with the
great literary men of the last hundred years. Here several of them
accomplished their best work under the patronage of an enlightened
duke, and finally found their graves. An atmosphere of reverend
quiet seemed to hang over it as I walked through its shaded
streets,--streets where there is never bustle, and which appear to
be always remembering the great men who have walked in them. In the
burying-ground in the outskirts I found the mausoleum of the ruling
house, a decorated hall of marble with a crypt underneath in which
are the coffins. The members of the Saxe-Weimar family for many
generations are here; the warlike ancestor with his armour rusting on
the dusty lid, grand-duke and duchess, and the child that died before
it attained the coronet. But far more interesting than any of these
are two large plain caskets of oak, lying side by side at the foot of
the staircase by which you descend. In these are the bones of Goethe
and Schiller. The heap of wreaths, some of them still fresh, which lay
on the tops, the number on the coffin of Schiller being noticeably the
larger, showed how green their memory had been kept in the heart of
the nation. I was only one of a great multitude of pilgrims who are
coming always, their chief errand being to see the graves of these
famous dead within the quiet town. In the side of the Schloss Kirche,
in the city of Wittenberg, is an old archway, with pillars carved as
if twisted and with figures of saints overhead, the sharpness of the
cutting being somewhat broken and worn away through time. It is
the doorway which rang loud three hundred years ago to the sound of
Luther's hammer as he nailed up his ninety-five theses. Within the
church, about midway toward the altar and near the wall, the guide
lifts an oaken trap-door and shows you, beneath, the slab which covers
Luther's ashes. Just opposite, in a sepulchre precisely similar, lies
Melancthon, and in the chancel near by, in tombs rather more stately,
the electors of Saxony that befriended the reformers. A spot worthy
indeed to be a place of pilgrimage! attracting not only those who
bless the men, but those who curse them. Charles V. and Alva stood
once on the pavement where the visitor now stands, and the Emperor
commanded the stone to be removed from the grave of Luther. Did the
body turn in its coffin at the violation? It might well have been so,
for never was there fiercer hate. For three centuries the generations
have trooped hitherward, more often drawn in reverence, but sometimes
through very hatred, a multitude too mighty to be numbered. But there
is a grave in Prussia, where, if I mistake not, the pilgrims are
more numerous and the interest, for the average Prussian, deeper than
scholar or poet or reformer call out. The garrison church at Potsdam
has a plain name and is a plain edifice, when one thinks of the
sepulchre it holds. Hung upon the walls are dusty trophies; there are
few embellishments besides. You make your way through the aisles
among the pews where the regiments sit at service, marching from their
barracks close by, then through a door beneath the pulpit enter a
vault lighted by tapers along the wall. Two heavy coffins stand on the
stone floor,--the older one that of Frederick William I., that despot,
partially insane, perhaps, who yet accomplished great things for
Prussia; the other that of his famous son, Frederick the Great, whose
sword cut the path by which Prussia advanced to her vast power. On the
copper lid formerly lay that sword, until the great Napoleon when
he stood there, feeling a twinge of jealousy perhaps over the dead
leader's fame, carried it away with him. Father and son lie quietly
enough now side by side, though their relations in life were stormy.
About the great soldier's sleep every hour rolls the drumbeat from the
garrison close by. The tramp of the columns as they come in to worship
jar the warrior's ashes. The dusky standards captured in the Seven
Years' War droop about him. The hundred intervening years have
blackened them, already singed in the fire of Zorndorf, Leuthen, and
Torgau. The moth makes still larger the rent where the volleys passed.
The spiked helmet is even here among the tombs; and schooled as the
Prussians are among the din of trumpets and smoke of wars, no other
among the mighty graves in their land holds dust, in their thought, so
heroic.
Seven hundred years ago Frederick's ancestor Conrad, the younger son
of a family of some rank, but quite undistinguished, riding down from
the little stronghold of Hohenzollern in Swabia, with nothing but a
good head and arm, won favour with the Emperor Barbarossa and became
at last Burggraf of Nuremberg. I saw the old castle in which this
Conrad lived and his line after him for several generations. It rises
among fortifications the plan for which Albert Dürer drew, with narrow
windows in the thick masonry of the towers, the battlements worn by
the pacing to and fro of sentinels in armour, and an ancient linden in
the court-yard, planted by an empress a thousand years ago it is said,
with as green a canopy to throw over the tourist to-day as it threw
over those old Hohenzollerns. Conrad transmitted to his descendants
his good head and strong arm, until at length becoming masters of
Baireuth and Anspach, they were Margraves and ranked among important
princes. Their seat now was at Culmbach, in the great castle of the
Plessenburg. I saw one May morning the grey walls of the old nest high
on its cliff at the junction of the red and white Main, threatening
still, for it is now a Bavarian prison. The power of the house grew
slowly. In one age it got Brandenburg, in another the great districts
of Ost and West Preussen; now it was possessions in Silesia, now again
territory on the Rhine. Power came sometimes through imperial gift,
sometimes through marriage, sometimes through purchase or diplomacy
or blows. From poor soldiers of fortune to counts, from counts to
princes, from princes to electors, and at last kings. Sometimes
they are unscrupulous, sometimes feeble, sometimes nobly heroic
and faithful; more often strong than weak in brain and hand.
The Hohenzollern tortoise keeps creeping forward in its history,
surpassing many a swift hare that once despised it in the race. I
believe it is the oldest princely line in Europe. There is certainly
none whose history on the whole is better. Margraf George of
Anspach-Baireuth was perhaps the finest character among the Protestant
princes of the Reformation, without whom the good fight could not have
been fought. When Charles V. besieged Metz in the winter (which, with
Lorraine, had just been torn from Germany by the French), and was
compelled by the cold to withdraw, it was a Hohenzollern prince, one
of the first soldiers of the time, who led the rear-guard over ground
which another Hohenzollern, Prince Frederick Charles, has again made
famous. Later, in Frederick the Great, the house furnished one of the
firmest hands that ever held a royal sceptre. His successors have been
men of power.
They are good types of their stock, and Prussia is worthy of the
leadership to which she is advancing. In the cathedral of Speyer stand
the statues of the mighty German Kaisers, who six hundred years ago
wore the purple, and, after their wild battle with the elements of
disorder about them, were buried at last in its crypts. They are
majestic figures for the most part, idealised by the sculptor, and
yet probably not far beyond nature; for the imperial dignity was not
hereditary, but given to the man chosen for it, and the choice was
often a worthy one. They were leaders in character as well as station,
and it is right to give their images the bearing of men strong in war
and council. I felt that if the ancient dignity was to be revived in
our own day, and the sceptre of Barbarossa and Rudolph of Hapsburg to
be extended again over a united Germany, there had been few princes
more worthy to hold it than the modern Hohenzollern.
In speaking of this great people so as to give the best idea of them
in a short space, I have seized on what seemed to me in those days
the most salient thing, and described various phases of their life as
pervaded by it. The fighting spirit was bred in their bones. They were
a nation of warriors almost as much as the Spartans, and stood ready
on the instant to obey the tap of the drum calling to arms. Such
constant suggestions of war were painful. The spiked helmet is never
an amiable head-dress; "but," said the representative Prussian,
"there is no help for it. We have been a weak people wedged in between
powerful unscrupulous neighbours, and have had a life-and-death
struggle to wage almost constantly with one or the other of these, or
all at once. And in what way is our situation different now? Is Russia
less ambitious? How many swords has France beaten into ploughshares?
What pruning-hooks have been made from the spears of Austria? Let
us know on what conditions we can live other than wearing our spiked
helmets, and we will embrace them." It was not an easy matter to argue
down your resolute Prussian when he turned to you warmly, after you
had been crying peace to him.
As I pondered, I thought perhaps it is a necessity, since the world is
what it is, that Europe should still be a place of discord. America,
however, is practically one, not a jarring company of nations
repeating the protracted agony of the Old World. We have no question
of the "balance of power" coming up in every generation, settled only
to be unsettled amid devastation and slaughter. We can grow forward
unhindered, with hardly more than a feather's weight of energy taken
for fighting from the employments of peace. America stands indeed a
nation blessed of God; and there is nothing better worth her while to
pray for than that a happier time may come to her giant brother over
the sea; that the strength of such an arm may not always waste itself
wielding the sword; that the sensibilities of such a heart may not be
crushed or brutalised in carnage that forever repeats itself; that
the noble head may some time exchange the spiked helmet for the olive
chaplet of peace.