If it be true that most great men are slightly “cracked” surely this
fact is proved by the peculiarities of Frederick the Great. I propose
to defend the memory of this most illustrious of Prussian soldiers and
minor poets from the infamous slander that he died of syphilis. Frederick
had the misfortune to win his glory in fighting against three women: the
Empress Maria Theresa, the Empress Elizabeth of Russia, and Madame de
Pompadour; and, most unwisely, he tried to fight them, not only with guns
and bayonets, but with jibes and flouts and jeers. His father, as is well
known, was King Frederick William Hohenzollern of Brandenburg, who was
famous for his regiment of giants. These colossal creatures averaged well
over six feet high, and to find them Europe, Asia, Africa and America
were ransacked at vast expense. Frederick William must have been at heart
a man of scientific mind, for he experimented in breeding with these
human cattle; and doubtless his experience, had it been recorded with
true Prussian accuracy, would have been the forerunner of those results
of the Abbé Mendel which have laid the foundation for the science of
eugenics. Unhappily his cattle were less submissive than Mendel’s peas or
the Chillingham bulls, for, in spite of all the floggings and bribings
to which Frederick William resorted, he was not always successful in
securing his results. One day, when he was going from Potsdam to Berlin,
he saw a fine strapping Saxon girl, a very giantess, whom he at once saw
would be a fit wife to produce more gigantic toys if coupled with one of
his guards; so he stopped her and entered into conversation with her.
“Art thou married, mädchen?” he asked her in his hearty Prussian way.
“No, kingly majesty,” she curtsied.
“Take thou then this letter to the commandant at Potsdam,” he said,
“and there shall be for thee a dollar. Here it is, in thy hand, girl”;
and putting a letter and a dollar in the girl’s great hand, he resumed
his journey to Berlin. The blue-eyed girl knew Frederick William’s
ways, and, running on toward Potsdam, met an ancient crone sitting by
the wayside. To this old hag, therefore, she gave the king’s gracious
letter with strict injunctions to give it to the commandant himself, and
thereupon made the best of her way towards home without calling into
Potsdam at all. When the commandant read the letter he found that it was
an imperative order to marry the bearer to a certain private soldier,
and at his peril fail not; experience had shown the commandant that his
portion would be the cane or the royal boot should the king return and
find Private Schmidt still unwed. The ancient crone, naturally, did not
object, but Schmidt, who probably had another fräulein in his mind’s
eye, sobbed and made a great moan. Still, there were His Majesty’s royal
orders, and they must be obeyed, so the marriage duly took place. When
the king returned to Potsdam, he found Schmidt still blubbering in a
truly Prussian ecstasy, and the lady still rejoicing that at the end of
a doubtless ill-spent life she had at length found a husband. As it was
obvious that this experiment in Mendelism would be unlikely to be really
successful, there was ultimately nothing to do but to divorce the couple,
and the maiden returned home still a maid, while the soldier ceased his
lamentations.
This was the kind of father that fate had given to Frederick the Great;
and his discipline seems, from all accounts, to have been terribly
severe. At the age of about twenty his father forced him to marry a young
lady, Christina-Elizabeth of Brunswick-Bevern, apparently against his
will. It is said that Frederick really wanted to marry an English girl;
and, according to Lord Dover, who took his account from the Princess of
Bareith, the marriage was never consummated, for, hardly had the candles
been put out when an alarm of fire was raised in the castle. Frederick
hastily got out of bed, rushed to the help of the fire-fighters, and
never returned to his bride. The reason of this very unusual action has
been the subject of endless conjecture. The princess from whose memoirs
Lord Dover drew his account was quite sure of it, because the queen, her
mother, told her so for a fact more than a year after Frederick had run
from his bride. It is suspected that Frederick had syphilis, and that he
did not wish to give it to the young lady; this, of course, is possible,
though it would seem to be rather unlike the usual conduct of an
eighteenth-century soldier; and again, it is said that it was really she
who had syphilis, because some time later she developed a trouble in her
leg and was in danger of her life. Needless to say, that by itself would
be no evidence whatever of syphilis. Another explanation of the desertion
was that there may have been some physiological or anatomical trouble
with the unwilling husband himself; many years afterwards, when he was
lying dead at Sans Souci, the gallant fellows, whose unpleasant duty it
was to wash his body, took advantage of the opportunity to examine his
royal person, and issued a special announcement that His Late Majesty
was as complete as any other man. But Frederick really loved his wife of
an hour. He showed it by visiting her once a year on her birthday, and,
such was the honour in which he held her, that he took off his boots for
the occasion, and visited her in his stockings. He kept a special pair of
black silk stockings just to visit his wife in, and, as he would never
permit these to be held up with garters, they were always hanging down
his shrunken shanks in great creases. Undoubtedly he must have loved her,
and what is more important, undoubtedly she must have loved him, for he
never washed himself, and yet she stood him.
The only portrait of the young lady that I have seen shows her to have
been apparently a rather stupid and ordinary German girl; and it is said
that she once boasted of having had a miscarriage to her husband. On
the whole, perhaps a good deal of unnecessary sympathy has been poured
out upon her, and doubtless that was part of the penalty that Frederick
had to pay for having jibed at three women whom he had made his enemies
even without the jibes. Catherine of Russia was certainly not a woman to
insult; and Madame de Pompadour was quite able to take care of herself in
a battle of tongues. As for poor Maria Theresa, she was probably too high
and mighty, too utterly hurt at the saints for forsaking her in her hour
of need, to condescend to answer Frederick in the bitter way that suited
himself. But Marie Antoinette held, in common parlance, her end up. Like
Maria Theresa, her mother, she was a Habsburg, and no doubt, like all
the Habsburgs, despised these upstarts of Hohenzollerns. It was probably
through her, or somebody equally pure-minded, that many of the stories
of Frederick’s abominable and unnatural vices first arose. Well has the
daughter defended her mother in the combat of slander that has signalised
Frederick the Great and his Prussia.
As it is vastly important to know his _real_ habits, I draw a description
of them from his latest English biographer, Mr. Norwood Young.
“In later years Frederick gave up shaving, and merely clipped at his
beard with scissors. He seldom washed any part of his person, even
his hands and face. In that respect he was very different from his
father,[15] who used soap and water freely, and often complained of his
son’s dirtiness. One of his valets concluded from his master’s dislike of
water that he must be afflicted with a kind of hydrophobia. His height
has been variously stated, the extreme ranges being 5 feet 4 inches
and 5 feet 7½ inches. He was neither thin nor fat; in his youth he was
rather inclined to stoutness, but he became very thin before he died.
His complexion was tanned—doubtless because it was seldom washed, like a
tramp’s to-day; but unlike a tramp’s, it was touched up with red paint.
His eyes were prominent and blue-grey.”
People who never wash themselves acquire a curious complexion which is
distinguishable to a doctor at a glance, for it is quite different from
the healthy tan of sun and air.
Hardly had he come to the throne when he attacked Maria Theresa, and
marched his army into Silesia without warning. The iron ramrod of the
Prussians proved successful, giving Frederick’s troops a far greater
rapidity of fire than was possible to the wooden ramrod of the Austrians.
But I am not now concerned with Frederick’s glories, and if you are
interested in them you will get a far more vivid account of them from
Lord Macaulay than I would care to write, even if I could; a later writer
has referred scoffingly to “Macaulay’s lurid style.” All that I set out
to prove was that this great man did not die of syphilis, as wicked
slanders have said of him.
Maria Theresa humbled, and Prussia for the first time on the map as a
war-state, Frederick returned home to a well-deserved rest, and built
himself the palace of Sans Souci, where he settled down to form a great
centre of literature and arts on the lines of the French Academy.
He was hardly a German in many ways; his favourite language was French,
and his great ambition was to be a poet. Although he could speak three
languages he could spell none; and a writer in the _Quarterly_ for 1847
gives some instances of his peculiarities in that respect.
When writing a letter he used to add, in his own handwriting, some
words often of bitter jibe or of sardonic humour; and these words
were generally wrongly spelt. Thus, he used to spell “winter” hiverd,
“actress” actrisse, “old” vieu, and “pay” peyer. That he never learned to
spell “pay” properly was doubtless because he hated to think of such a
thing; throughout his life, economy was his ruling passion.
To improve his spelling, grammar, and poetical construction, he invited
Voltaire to stay with him at Sans Souci, and everyone knows that the
two poets did not get on well together. Macaulay took the squabble too
seriously, and worked himself up into a rage over it, with much about
Voltaire’s “withering irony,” and other early Victorian and exaggerated
phrases. It has been left for Mr. Lytton Strachey, the man who told us
the truth about Queen Victoria, to tell us the truth about the famous
Voltaire-Frederick squabble, and he makes it possible to compress it
into a phrase. They were two poets, each trying to overreach the other.
Frederick, in the eyes of the world, won, because he had the greater poet
arrested, thus winning by the only way he knew—by force of arms; also
he dared to call Voltaire a monkey. In our war-hospital, I remember,
we had a monkey as a pet, which used to live at the top of one of the
entrance gate-posts. When the descendants of Frederick the Great used
to emulate him by letting loose poison gas, it was the duty of the
quartermaster-serjeant to put the poor little shivering beast into a
gas-helmet. At about that time Lytton Strachey’s book came out, and I
sometimes read it as I looked at the monkey and heard the incessant
tramp of feet that, to me, is the chief remembrance of the war, apart
from the disgusting nature of the wounds and the thundering noise. And
as the tramping men, marching to death in interminable thousands, looked
up astonished at the monkey, I used to wonder at the effrontery of the
king who would compare one of the greatest intellects that ever lived
in France to that of a monkey. Voltaire got his revenge, more deadly
than Marie Antoinette’s. In 1759, the most glorious year of Frederick’s
life, he published _Candide_, which, though a joyful satire on Leibnitz’
philosophy that this was the best of all possible worlds, contained, if I
am not much mistaken, a far more deadly description of the new style of
civilised warfare introduced by the Great Frederick. Listen (I quote from
Mr. Philip Littell’s translation):
“No,” said Dr. Pangloss, “Miss Cunegonde was ripped open by the Bulgarian
soldiers, after having been violated by many; they broke her father’s
head for attempting to defend her; my lady, her mother, was cut in
pieces; my poor pupil was served just the same as his sister; and, as
for the castle, they have left not one stone upon another, not a barn,
nor a sheep, nor a duck, nor a tree.” For “Bulgarian” read “Prussian,”
and you will see the great improvements that Frederick made in war.
Voltaire, like Anatole France, had an unrivalled power for saying the
utmost possible in the fewest words; and yet some blockheads try to
deceive themselves by saying that Anatole France is not of the school of
Voltaire! I suppose they do so because they have made up their minds that
Voltaire was a wicked man and an atheist, whereas Anatole France is at
least now an accepted wit and therefore can say what he likes.
But two years after Voltaire died, Frederick used to pray to his
God—if he had any—“Divin Voltaire, ora pro nobis!” that is to say, he
acknowledged that Voltaire had triumphed. This to me seems characteristic
of the man who bullied Maria Theresa.
Of course the Seven Years’ War was a very wonderful feat of endurance for
the Prussian people, just as was the Great War; and in it Frederick won
a reputation which was marvellous till a yet greater arose in the art of
slaughter. The history of it is repulsive, in that it shows the triumph
of unscrupulous burglary against people who only wanted to be left in
peace. The results of our own war were better at least on paper, though
fortunately it did not produce any man so great as Frederick.
But now I come to the purpose of this essay: to show the real cause of
this extraordinary man’s death.
On August 4th, 1784, he attended a review in Silesia in the midst of six
hours of driving rain, during the progress of which he refused to put on
a coat and became drenched to the skin. Arriving home he felt ill and
shivery with a constant cough. During the autumn of that year his fever
left him, but was succeeded by a harsh dry cough which never left him.
His strength diminished, and his legs began to swell; he had constant
oppression in his chest—that is to say, his heart began to fail him—and
he could not breathe if he lay in bed, but had to spend his days and
nights in an arm-chair; that is to say, he probably had what we now call
“cardiac asthma.”...
As the summer of 1786 gradually returned he began to improve, so he
went from Potsdam to Sans Souci, which he never left alive. He was then
under the care of the Court physicians, Selle and Cothenius, and the
surgeon Frese. Unfortunately for Dr. Selle he hinted that the great man
probably had dropsy, so Frederick flew into a rage, dismissed him, and
wrote to Hanover, where there dwelt an eminent man of the name of Dr.
Zimmermann, who arrived at Potsdam on June 26th, 1786. When Frederick saw
him he asked at once, “Doctor, can you cure me?” To which Zimmermann,
being evidently a courtly fellow, answered, “I can relieve you, sir.”
Zimmermann, it strikes one, must have known that men like Selle and
Cothenius would know enough about their patient to render it dangerous
for any outsider to offer an opinion carelessly. The first thing for
Zimmermann to do was evidently to try to gain his patient’s confidence,
because never was there a more unruly man, especially where eating and
drinking were concerned. The doctor found that Frederick would talk on
literature and poetry as long as he would allow him, although it made him
cough violently; and his first line of treatment was to get Frederick to
promise to read through _The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_. No
doubt he thought that that gigantic book would be a good way of keeping
his patient quiet for a very long time. Then the conversation would
shift to other sovereigns; and Zimmermann was able to give Frederick
some of the truth about the health of Empress Catherine of Russia, whose
surprising immorality must have been an attractive feature to a soldier.
“But,” said Zimmermann, “she boasts that her health costs her only
eighteenpence a year!” “Wonderful!” applauded the aged emperor, “I always
said she was a woman of supreme genius.”
Then Zimmermann, seeing that Frederick was really ill, asked that he
might be allowed to have a consultation with the dismissed Selle. This
threw Frederick into a passion; his face flushed beneath the paint,
and his eyes glowed with a deepened fury; his voice roared with anger;
one fit of violent coughing after another came upon him, so that
Zimmermann thought it wiser to desist, and return to his talk of scandal
or literature. But he had already gained sufficient information to
leave us a valuable report as to the king’s physical condition. “His
legs were swollen with dropsy, which also extended up on to the skin
of the abdomen, and, though he was not feverish, his pulse was hard
and violent.” That is to say, he was probably suffering from a high
blood-pressure with failing heart, which was causing his dropsy.
Next day Zimmermann was able cautiously to approach the question of
treatment, which indeed needed much tact, for Frederick obstinately
refused to try any of the doctor’s remedies, especially any suggestion
that he should moderate his gigantic appetite. Zimmermann suggested
taraxacum; and after a good deal of discussion the gallant soldier agreed
to try it. Taraxacum, or dandelion, used sometimes to be given as a
purgative that was supposed to act specially on the liver; and no doubt
Zimmermann thought that if he could get the king’s bowels to act freely
the dropsy might be relieved.
But next day the doctor had once again to go over the whole arguments.
Of the three doses of taraxacum that he had carefully measured out with
his own hands for the king, only one had been consumed; and Frederick sat
looking with horror-stricken eyes upon the medicine glass as though it
had been a piece of artillery.
Frederick said enthusiastically, “I assure you that though my legs are
swelled I am not dropsical. The only thing that is the matter with me
is that I am a little asthmatical.” Zimmermann must have begun to
suspect that to give taraxacum to his unruly patient would be very much
like firing a pistol at the Rock of Gibraltar, but he persevered with
a tenacity equal to Frederick’s own, and ultimately got him faithfully
to promise to take his medicine. In the morning Frederick started on
his medicine cautiously little by little, and by a miracle began to
improve. Then nothing could be too good for the Herr Doktor with his
wonderful taraxacum. It was saving the royal life. But Zimmermann added
another condition. Majesty must eat less, and not so much of eel-pies.
Then all the glory departed out of Zimmermann. That ignorant fellow
Selle, with his balderdash about dropsy, was a better doctor after all,
and Zimmermann, who really seems to have tried to act in as decent a
manner as was possible towards his colleagues, allowed Selle to write
and receive reports concerning the patient’s progress even though he
was in disgrace. Frederick was a sworn enemy to all medicines, except
a powder of his own, consisting of rhubarb and Glauber’s salts. At any
moment the taraxacum might be thrown to the dogs, and the king’s own
powder substituted behind the physician’s back. (Between ourselves it was
not a bad powder.) “And,” groaned Zimmermann, “no idea could be formed
of the excess which His Majesty allowed himself in his diet; his cooks
were obliged to season his food in a manner sufficient to destroy his
stomach; those dishes which were the most difficult of digestion were his
favourites, especially Prussian peas, which were certainly the hardest
in the world. This was the cause of all those attacks of vomiting and
violent pain in the stomach which attacked him after every meal, and of
the severe colic from which he suffered every week, and nobody durst
remonstrate with him about it.”
Next day, when Zimmermann was sent for hastily to see the king he found
him attacked with a terrible fit of coughing so violent that he spat
blood. This is not uncommon in cases of very high blood-pressure, and
frequently puts an unobservant physician off the scent. Still, under the
purgative effect of the taraxacum, he began to get gradually better,
and as he felt himself the subject of a miracle he ate more and more,
until he devoured a pie of eels so hot and so highly seasoned that, to
use the words of a fellow-sufferer, it seemed as if it had been baked
in hell. After this he got an unusually violent attack of colic which
he attributed to the taraxacum; and, to use Shakespeare’s words,
“Zimmermann’s cake was dough.” Zimmermann forecasted that Frederick
would soon suffer from bleeding hæmorrhoids, “And how will Your Majesty
like that, please?” Majesty did not like the prospect at all, but on
July 12th, when Zimmermann left, his prophecy came to pass, which was
perhaps a good thing for the gluttonous patient. Then Selle tried to
get rid of some of the dropsy by making incisions in his right leg; and
the ancient ingrained dirt in his skin took a hand in the game; the cut
suppurated and became intolerably offensive. Even Selle began to lose
heart when he made a second incision and the wound became violently
inflamed and erysipelatous. But Frederick never lost heart: if he found
that he had a more violent indigestion than ever after his overeating,
he simply took a double dose of his own powder; and on August 4th the
erysipelatous inflammation spread all over the leg and on to the abdomen;
blisters arose and burst, and from them leaked a quart of fluid a day,
by which treatment the dropsy slowly abated, until, after a struggle
worthy of his struggles in the Seven Years’ War, he gradually sank
under a slow pneumonia, which is the natural end of man. But it is a
cruel slander upon this mighty king to say that he died of syphilis,
though occasionally syphilis is said to cause high blood-pressure. He
was seventy-five years of age, and therefore there were seventy-five
excellent reasons for his death. If to them you add years of gluttony and
sepsis, caused by a lifetime of dirt, you get the real cause of the death
of Frederick the Great. Did I not say rightly that Frederick the Great,
like most other great men, was a trifle “cracked?”
The poet Campbell, in the last volume of his life of Frederick, gave a
detailed account of some of the horrors of his death-bed, but, though
interesting, they are too disgusting for my clean pages, and I shall
not inflict them on the reader. They are chiefly concerned with the
difficulty that his friends found in getting his body in a fit state of
cleanliness for the grave. A lifetime of ingrained dirt! No wonder the
startled washers found it necessary to get the water out of him somehow
in that hot summer weather.
This is the truth that lies behind the demure paragraph of the ordinary
English biographies: “Frederick died after a long illness (which he bore
with exemplary fortitude), contracted, such was his sense of duty, by
prolonged exposure to the rain while reviewing his troops in the province
which he had rescued from the Queen of Hungary owing to his wonderful
genius.”
The Children’s Crusade and “The Pied Piper”
Which of us can remember a time when he did not know “The Pied Piper
of Hamelin?” Which of us can remember a time when he thought it
merely funny, or could not recite the joyous thing by heart like his
schoolfellows? If the gliding years have stolen the detailed memory, at
least they have not stolen the enormous impression that the poem made
upon children; for we can still see the piper with his pin-point pupils
and his light hair without tuft on cheek nor beard on chin, and his
queer parti-coloured clothes: just like a Chinaman he seemed to us—like
the poor mysterious “John” from whom we used to steal bananas and evoke
torrents of uncouth gibberish. Perhaps he too was trying to tell us in
his mildly explosive way how he had talked with the Cham of Tartary or
the Nizam of Asia; perhaps he was telling us of some other mysterious
potentate for whom he had contracted to bewitch vermin, though to be
sure we had never observed any great love for music in him, nor did his
fingers itch to do anything more than heave his stave on to his shoulders
or pick out faulty vegetables for the cook. And how deliciously the piper
had piped the rats from that little mediæval town: “O rats! rejoice, for
the world is grown to one vast drysaltery!” We did not quite know what
a drysaltery was, but to use Australian slang, it must contain things
positively “bosker” to eat. The rough and tripping metre appealed to
boyhood, and the queer words that we did not quite understand, though
we felt that in a minute we should; such as “nuncheon” and “justling.”
It seemed quite right and proper to say that salt sprinkled on a candle
flame would burn green; and it savours of the “knowledge of good and
evil” to know that it really burns yellow. It is good fun to try to
reread the poem with a boy’s mind. But it is impossible; you cannot
fully surrender yourself to the poet’s magic as a boy can, and you catch
yourself wondering how much of it is really true; and, not content with
the jolly way in which the story is told, you wonder whether it is
“founded on fact” like so many other boys’ stories. That is the real
tragedy of life, that a time comes when you cannot be contented with
simple faith in good stories.
Probably there is really some foundation for the legend, which was not
uncommon and was told of several other towns in the Middle Ages when
grown men were really more like children than little boys are to-day.
That, I take it, is the only way to study the Middle Ages—to remember
that the world had not yet quite grown up and men were not as gods, but
in many ways like children. Otherwise how can you explain many very
wonderful things that undoubtedly happened? (Not that we are particularly
godlike to-day except some men in their own estimations; but at least
some of us are beginning to have the germs of common sense.)
The true foundation is much more pathetic than Browning’s poem, which
to us boys seemed so funny, for we were not old enough to sympathise
or to see the tragedy upon which it dances. That came later, when we
learnt that “nuncheon” is not the funniest thing in the world and life
has forced upon us a knowledge of things other than “good and evil.”
The Koppelberg into which the children danced is not a “mighty top”; no
crowded little bones have been unearthed from it; it is just so high that
a child would be hidden from sight as it danced on its way to Cologne.
Of course one naturally accuses the gipsies, for there were certainly
gipsies in Europe even so early as the twelfth century, let alone the
thirteenth; three centuries were to pass before they reached their
climax. According to the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ the legend of the
Pied Piper dates from 1284, though Browning in the poem dates it _July
22nd, 1376_. I believe the reason for his error is not definitely known;
but I think it is possible to guess. On either date there were plenty of
gipsies about, and no doubt they would be quite prepared to pick up an
odd child or two if they saw money in the abduction. But it is impossible
to believe that they would dare to try any such mighty abduction as
was achieved by the Pied Piper. Europe would have gone mad with rage;
probably every gipsy would have had his throat cut by infuriated parents
and the race would have been exterminated.
Nor is it likely that the so-called “Dancing Mania” was more than in part
a solution, because that was really a spiritual reaction from the Black
Death of 1348; probably people were so glad to have remained alive that
they danced firstly for joy, afterwards from “mass-suggestion.” It is a
partial solution of our difficulty because it began in Aix-la-Chapelle
in 1374; as Hecker says, “Hardly had the graves of the victims of the
Black Death been covered in”; which is a somewhat excitable way of saying
“a few years.” The dancing neurasthenia lasted a long time, and recurred
all over Europe in several epidemics. Just so, after a terrible war, do
we dance to-day, though few of us, looking at our gloomy and barbaric
dances, would dream that these short-frocked maidens are dancing for joy.
In 1375 it had spread the thirty-six miles to Cologne, and in _1376_ the
few miles to Hamelin.
I do not attempt to explain the episode of the rats, beyond saying that
the story is not uncommon, that there is to this day a “Ratfanger’s
Haus” in the ancient town of Hamelin, and that according to the original
legend the piper was accused of sorcery. Any man who studied the habits
of rats and learned how to catch them did so in peril of being accused of
sorcery; and quite likely Browning, writing for children, made the mayor
and corporation more ridiculous by saying that they had spent all their
money in gluttony and could not pay the rat-catcher his fee. “A thousand
guilders! Come, take fifty!” With what shuddering delight did we hear
the absurd and obese old mayor brave the vengeance of the piper in those
awful words. How could he ever have had the courage to do it? The real
legend of Hamelin says that the piper was accused of being a sorcerer.
But it is the children who most interest us to-day. We must find a motive
which could excuse an atrocious crime and hold it for righteousness. That
motive we find in the Crusades; and it has been often suggested that in
the “Children’s Crusade” we find the real foundation of the episode.
Although we nowadays number the Crusades in a charming regularity and
order, probably the people who took part in them did not realise that
they were anything but episodes in a furious and weary struggle which,
up to 1212 at least, had had little more result than disaster and
destruction. Children saw their fathers dragged away to the East, and,
lost in a gloomy fog of war and despair, mostly disappear for ever.
Their mothers and their priests told them that daddy had gone to get
back the tomb of Christ and save it from wicked men; and the world was
sunk in misery and poverty and despair; up to 1212 at least, the war had
had no further result than the capture of Acre in 1191, the elevation
of Saladin to a pinnacle of romantic glory, the barbarous quarrels
among Christians, and the frightful attack upon Constantinople which had
led to the destruction in hideous circumstances of that once glorious
city in 1204. In 1212 the grown men of Europe had become heartily sick
of the weary struggle, and it occurred to the clergy that, since it
seemed likely that the tomb of Christ could never be recovered by sinful
men—and if you read Gibbon you will see that many of the Crusaders
were exceedingly sinful, Cross and all—it was only right to try if the
innocence of little boys might not be able to prevail over the powers
of evil. It is not suggested that the clergy really encouraged the
“Children’s Crusade,” though some people seem to think that they did. All
the authorities that Hecker was able to consult show that the saner of
the clergy were as much horrified by this result of the neurasthenia of
the time as the parents.
In Germany a little boy named Nicholas, of whom we know nothing but his
name, appeared in _July, 1212_, and gave out that he was sent directly
from God to lead the children to the Holy Land. Vast numbers crowded to
follow him in spite of everything that the parents could do to keep the
little people at home. Finding that the boys were determined to go, the
parents, with true German forethought, provided them with “harlots” to
keep them company and entertain them on the way. Personally I believe
that for this unpleasant word we should read “nurses,” for the average
age of the boys seems to have been rather under twelve than over. There
was a considerable number of older men and women, whose morals suffered
sadly. They crossed the Alps in straggling swarms dignified by the name
of armies; they wore Crusaders’ uniform and bore themselves as soldiers
of the Cross; some little girls joined them in boys’ clothes—even then
they couldn’t keep the girls from following the boys into mischief, just
as to-day we cannot keep them from playing that most dangerous game for
girls, Rugby football; the total number of the children was at least
30,000; their real starting-point was Cologne, which you reach from
Hamelin, as I have said, after you cross the Koppelberg. Many of them
starved in the Alps or were eaten by wolves; crowds of robbers infested
them and ate their substance and seized their clothing; they reached
Genoa and were mocked at by the sensible Italians, who were sadly wanting
in that faith which should lead little boys to victory against black
men who rode about on horses and carried big swords and shouted to Allah
as they fought. The armies scattered, and it is possible that stragglers
reached Transylvania and formed the basis for one verse of the “Pied
Piper.” Some certainly settled in Genoa and became ultimately rich and
prosperous, but some of them tried to return home through the wolves and
mountains, only to find their friends as mocking as the Italians, for
nothing fails like failure. Some reached Innocent III, the pope, and
after having been made by that astute statesman to swear that they would
become Crusaders when they grew up, were told to go back home again.
A few sturdy little fellows reached Brindisi and found that the sea
would not divide before them; they were sold as slaves to the Saracens,
and thus reached the Holy Land, but in far other guise than that of
conquerors. Very few of them all ever saw their mothers again.
This is what many people now believe to have been the real basis of
Browning’s poem, though it is quite possible that he did not know it
himself but intended it to refer to one of the idle legends of sorcery
that I have mentioned. If he had known it was a thing so tragic would he
have treated it in so jocular a vein?
Even more pitiful was the tragedy of the French children in the same
year when the world really seems to have gone mad. The leader was a
little shepherd boy of twelve, named Stephen. Matthew Paris in ponderous
language calls him a bad little boy—I suppose he had stolen some cleric’s
apples or done something else equally atrocious. The children in their
madness called him St. Stephen; and he worked miracles. One morning in
_July_, 1212, he thought he saw Christ, who not only accepted a piece of
bread from Stephen’s grubby hand, but gave him a letter to the king, and
told him to lead an army of children to the Sepulchre. The king of France
ordered Stephen not to be silly, and forbade other little girls and boys
to attend his meetings, and the parents, so far as they could, put them
under lock and key. Just so and with as little success might we confine
behind a feeble mediæval lock to-day a little boy who wanted to go
swimming. Very few little girls joined Stephen. The heart-broken parents
did everything that they knew to keep their little sons at home, and some
of the boys were killed in a mad crush to get a lock of Stephen’s hair;
in response Stephen promised that the Mediterranean would open before
them and allow them to reach the Holy Land dry-shod. The richer parents
sent guides; the poorer boys found their own way to the sea. The unhappy
mothers could not tell us their feelings when they saw their sons thus
dragged away by suggestion; because they could not write; but one would
like to know what clerk it was whom Stephen saw and thought to be Christ.
He, apparently, was the direct cause of Stephen’s delusion; he, and his
letter.[16]
At length they reached Marseilles and found the Mediterranean as blue
as ever and as treacherous. Two shipowners met them while they were
wondering why the sea had not even a tide, far less showed signs of
opening for little boys. Let us give these shipowners their glorious
names; they were William Porcus and Hugh Ferreus. They welcomed the
boys and joined in their services, behaving, to the boys’ eyes, as true
Christians. Stephen rejoiced in them, for all through the south of France
he had met nothing but robbers and most unchristian men. William the Pig
and Iron-hearted Hugo offered to take them to Palestine on shipboard for
sheer love of God, as it seemed unlikely that the sea would open to give
them passage as Stephen had promised. The little boys filled seven large
ships and set forth joyfully and with cheerful shouts, singing hymns of
victory. Two of the ships were wrecked in a storm off St. Pierre’s Rock,
near Sardinia, and every boy on board was drowned. They were the lucky
ones, because in time the survivors reached a strange and savage land
which was not Holy, but was Egypt, where black men came on board and
bought them all as slaves; and not one of those little boys ever reached
France again. The usual stories were set afoot that some of them had
been martyred rather than turn Moslem; but all that is known for certain
is that eighteen years later seven hundred of them were still alive—but
no longer little boys. It does not require much knowledge of Egypt to
picture the tree of knowledge of which those little boys had been forced
to eat. The extraordinary thing is that neither French nor German boys
seem to have known of the deeds of the others.
The only light in the gloom is that the free-thinking Emperor Frederick
II afterwards laid hands upon William and Hugo and hanged them
ingloriously with several other scoundrels. Probably he did this on
general principles, and not on account of the little boys.
Of course the frightful episode of the Children’s Crusade is merely an
instance of the extraordinary suggestibility of children. You can do
anything with a little boy if you work upon his imagination and subject
him to “mass-suggestion.”
I believe that the date in the “Pied Piper of Hamelin” is that of the
dancing neurasthenia when it attacked that town; the rat episode is a
distorted recollection of some rat-legend attributed to Hamelin but which
may have referred to other places; the theft of the children refers
to the German branch of the Children’s Crusade, whose Hamelin members
crossed the Koppelberg to reach Cologne.
And the leader’s name was Nicholas—Old Nick?