THE CHECK
East Prussia again was frozen. The snow lay deep on the ground and the
ice rattled on the tree limbs as it had done in that year when Bettina
and Hans met the Queen on her flight to Memel. Never, the East Prussians
declared, had they known a winter so terrible. In the towns the women,
in their wadded cloaks, went still and sad, and the men, in the
high-runner sleighs with the breath frozen on their beards, talked in
mournful sentences, for they knew that the frozen Vistula held fast
beneath its icy crust a secret which, when spring should reveal it,
would turn them sick with horror and make fiercer than ever their hatred
of Napoleon.
Not that they did not hate him enough already. The Tugendbund had
carried the news of the poor Queen's suffering into every hamlet of
Prussia. Napoleon had killed her, the people cried out, and in secret
they were making ready to fight him. Never, they believed, had a country
been more cruelly treated. Villages had been destroyed, towns burned,
innocent men shot or mistreated. In the free city of Hamburg hundreds of
sick had been driven by Davoust from the hospitals, orphans expelled
from their asylums. Twenty thousand Hamburgers, ordered from the city,
shivering in the icy coldness, watched the French burn their country
houses, the flames blazing up against a winter sky and lighting a
blackened and desolate country. Near Dresden women were ordered out from
their homes and children, and with wheelbarrows, were compelled to bring
in the dead and the dying, while Napoleon enjoyed himself in the
theatre.
The check, however, had come in that icy winter of 1812-13.
Along the road from Russia, limping on frozen feet bound with straw, or
marking with blood the snow, came French and Prussian soldiers, dropping
here, dying there, sinking on land or into the Vistula. Five hundred
thousand French and the Germans forced to assist Napoleon in this war
against Russia, had marched with flying banners against Moscow. Instead
of Russians, flames met them, and now twenty thousand, for the others
had perished in the snow, or were frozen in the Vistula, were limping
back to Prussia. The horses had fallen like leaves before the icy blasts
of the Baltic, and their bodies marked the line of Napoleon's retreat
from Moscow. On they struggled, swords gone, their feet like clods,
their glory vanished. Half starved, there was nothing for them to eat,
for in Napoleon's own war against Prussia they had burned her
farmhouses, destroyed her crops and killed her farmers. They had sown
destruction and now were reaping famine.
"But God be praised," cried Otto von Stork, sitting at the campfire of
the German legion, "Napoleon is beaten."
"Ja wohl," cried his companions, flushed with their pursuit of the
flying. Then Otto lifted his voice and started a hymn Arndt had written
for German soldiers:
"What is the German's Fatherland?
Oh name at length this mighty land,
As wide as sounds the German tongue,
And German hymns to God are sung,
That is the land;
That, German, name thy Fatherland!
To us this glorious land is given;
Oh Lord of Hosts look down from Heaven,
And grant us Germans loyalty
To love our country faithfully;
To love our land,
Our undivided Fatherland!"
And, as they sang, Otto remembered Friedland and his brother, Wolfgang.
He remembered Queen Louisa and how she had often smiled at him in Memel,
he remembered his beloved hero, Shill, and brave Andreas Hofer. Suddenly
he interrupted his song with a laugh.
"Bettina was right," he thought. "Poor little maiden! Old Barbarossa has
waked up and his sword is the spirit of the German people."
And when war was over, one day he appeared in Koenigsberg, a great,
handsome soldier.
"Ach Himmel!" said his mother, "but I am glad to see my boy again." But
Otto had talk only for the future of Germany.
His father nodded when he declared that good fortune would come again to
Prussia. And then he told how, all over Prussia, and in the smaller
states, the people were refusing to speak French, wear French clothes,
or be anything but good Germans.
"God be praised!" he ended piously.
"Where is Bettina, mother?" asked Otto quite suddenly.
When he heard of the "Luisenstift" his face fell, for he had intended
teasing her about Frederick Barbarossa.
"And Hans?"
"Not a word has ever been heard of him," answered his father sadly.
"Shot, perhaps," said Otto. "Poor old man!" and he offered his arm to
his mother. Nothing pleased her more than to walk out with her fine
soldier boy. She forgot all the trouble he had caused her and remembered
only that he had returned a hero.
Carl followed him everywhere, and informed the family that he, too,
would be a soldier.
"No, no!" cried his mother, shrinking.
But the professor reproved her.
"All my sons," he said most solemnly, "I give freely to the Fatherland."
But Madame von Stork, remembering her Wolfgang, set hard her lips.
"If there comes a war against Napoleon, I shall go as a nurse. I am old
enough now, am I not, dear father?" and Marianne slipped her arm around
his neck.
The professor nodded.
"I agree willingly, dear daughter," and he pressed her hand.
Goethe was no longer Marianne's hero.
"He sat in his garden in quiet," she said, "when the cannon roared at
Jena, and never in all our trouble has he raised his voice for Germany.
He is the greatest poet, yes, but not a hero. He saw Napoleon, he
admired him, and says he has sympathy with him because of his great
dream of uniting Europe. I cannot forgive it."