THE PRUSSIAN GRENADIER.
"There was a criminal in a cart
A-going to be hanged;
Respite to him was granted,
And cart and crowd did stand,
To know if he would marry a wife
Or rather choose to die;
''Tother's the worst, drive on the cart,'
The criminal did reply."--_Old Ballad._
You have all heard I presume (the captain began), of the singular
predilection which the late King of Prussia had for tall swinging
grenadiers, how he raked all Germany and Pomerania to procure them,
and had them formed into corps and companies, sparing nothing in
their equipment to add to their vast stature and warlike
aspect--giving them the highest of heels to their boots, the tallest
bearskin caps, and the longest and largest feathers that could be
worn with safety to the neck and vertebral column. Those
cross-belted Goliaths were quite a passion with him, and the first
battalion of his Foot Guards, which my worthy father had the honour
to command, was, no doubt, the most gigantic regiment in the Prussian
army, perhaps in Europe; and to see its twelve companies of giants
marching past in review order, and in open column, on that little
meadow near Halle, which, from the time of the old Dessauer,* has
been the training ground of the Prussian infantry, was truly a sight
to marvel at and remember.
* Prince Leopold, of Anhalt Dessau, born there in 1676, the bravest
of three generations who held the highest rank in the Prussian
army.--_General Seydlitz's Life_.
The Battalion Von Warriston was, to Frederick the Great, his pet
band--the flower and pattern corps of his carefully-trained and
well-developed army!
Now it chanced that one day, about the year 1780, he had been riding
in the environs of Berlin, attended only by Strutzki, his old
Putkammer orderly, with the gunpowder-spotted visage. As he pottered
along on his old shambling horse, with a pair of large spectacles on
his nose--the royal nose, I mean--one eye was fixed on his bridle and
the other on Herr Doctor Johann Georg Zimmerman's then famous but
dreary work on Solitude, with his flap pockets stuffed with letters
from Voltaire and Hume, general orders, proof-sheets of plays, and
other rubbish, he suddenly saw something in the opinions of the Herr
Doctor which displeased him, and jotting off a note on the subject,
he despatched it by Strutzki.
Then resuming his meditations he rode on alone into the fields,
smoking a pipe which had belonged to his old and faithful comrade,
Seydlitz, and which he had picked up on the field of Rosbach, when
that general gave his usual signal for the Hussars to charge by
flinging his pipe into the air.
In a lonely place he came suddenly upon a peasant girl who possessed
remarkable beauty, but that which he greatly preferred, astonishing
stature. She was fully six feet, and so splendidly proportioned that
Frederick reined up his horse and slung his pipe at his button-hole
to observe her, which he could do for some time unobserved, as she
was busy twining creepers and flowers over the front paling of a
cottage named the Wild Katze, a wayside tavern.
"Bey'm Henker!" thought he, "could I but get you married to one of my
grenadiers, my long-legged Fraulein, what sons you might have! What
recruits--what a progeny of giant children to recruit the next
generation of my guards!"
The tall girl now perceived the king observing her, and curtseyed and
laughed, for she had no idea of his rank. His horse furniture was
shabby, and his own appearance was far from being stately or
imposing. He stooped about the shoulders, and had a snuffy drop at
the end of his nose. Over his uniform and decorations he wore a
greasy old military surtout-coat of blue cloth, lined with white
merino, its buttons, sleeves, and all of the plainest kind; an old
battered cocked-hat, with what had once been a white feather binding
the edge of it, and its rim being perforated by musket-shot; a pair
of common dragoon pistols in holsters without flaps, and a pair of
rusty spurs on long jack-boots that had never been blackened since
they left the maker's hands, though they were greased by Strutzki
every morning.
"What is your name, my handsome fraulein?" he inquired, while lifting
his hat.
"Gretchen Viborg," replied the tall beauty.
"Are you married?" he asked with increasing suavity.
"No, mein herr."
"But anxious to be, doubtless," said Frederick, perpetrating a wink.
Then the girl, supposing that this funny old man was about to make
some proposal to her, burst into a fit of laughter, in which the king
good-humouredly joined, and then asked,
"How old are you?"
"Nearly twenty, mein herr."
"Good. Are you the keeper of the Wilde Katze?"
"No--my father is."
"Would you like to earn easily a rix-dollar?"
"That will I do readily, mein herr," said the girl, coming briskly
forward, for a rix-dollar was then about the value of four of our
guineas.
"Then you must deliver a note for me?"
"Where?"
"In the city."
"And to whom, mein herr?
"To the Colonel von Warriston at the palace near the Wiesse Saal.
The girl, little suspecting what was in store for her, curtseyed and
signified her readiness, while the king, drawing forth his tablets,
and using his holster for a desk, wrote to my father in this manner:--
"MY DEAR COLONEL VON WARRISTON,
"On receipt of this order, you are to marry _the tallest_ of your
grenadiers to the bearer thereof, taking particular care to have the
ceremony performed in your own presence; and for the execution of
this, I hold you responsible.
"FRIEDRICH."
"P.S.--If he refuse, to Spandau with him, until further orders."
"Can you read, fraulein?" asked he, while folding this remarkable
order.
"No, mein herr."
"Good; then there is the less use for a seal, which I have not here."
He placed the note and the rix-dollar in the large fair hand of the
girl, and added, "I have noted this place--the Wilde Katze in my
tablets, and I trust to your honesty and fidelity, Gretchen, in
delivering my note without delay, as the matter is of great
consequence to me, and may not prove unpleasant to yourself." And
giving her a look that somehow impressed her, he put spurs to his old
charger, and shambled off.
As ignorant of the contents of the letter as of the exalted rank of
its writer, Gretchen Viborg was hurrying along the road towards
Berlin, when she suddenly remembered that she had to keep an
appointment with her lover, a remarkably jealous little fellow, who
had a mill on the Spree--an assignation which the delivery of this
note would completely mar! While pausing to consider this dilemma,
honesty impelling her forward, and love or fear staying her steps,
she met an old crone who was employed by her at the Wilde Katze, to
till the ground, carry wood and do other out-door work; and supposing
it was all one _who_ delivered the note, provided that it safely
reached its destination, she offered her a ducat to bear it to the
palace near the White Hall.
Now this old crone could read; she scanned the note, saw the whole
bearings of the case, and knew who the writer was in an instant. She
grinned a horrible grin of intense satisfaction, undertook the
mission, and already beheld in prospect her victim--the tallest
grenadier!
This cunning hag was past fifty years of age, and one of her legs was
shorter than the other leg at least by half an inch; she stooped in
gait and was not much more than four feet high, and was remarkably
hideous, even for a continental woman, her face being a mass of
wrinkles, her pointed chin covered with wiry sprouts of grey hair,
while her teeth were reduced to a few yellow fangs; thus, great was
my father's astonishment, when he perused the note which she gave him
faithfully at the palace-gate, just as he was mounting his charger to
join the evening parade of his boasted battalion of the Guards.
He was too familiar with the handwriting of the great Frederick to
doubt for a moment the authenticity of the note; but he could by no
means reconcile its singular contents with the extreme years and
appalling aspect of the old witch who brought it, and he surveyed
them alternately for some time, in utter bewilderment, till the
"P.S." about Spandau, that formidable state prison in Brandenburg,
made him dread a trip there in person, if the king's orders were
trifled with or delayed; so turning with repugnance from the woman,
who continued to grin and drop endless curtsies by his side, he
summoned the sergeant-major.
"Who is the tallest of our grenadiers?" he asked.
"Otto Vogelwiede," replied the sergeant, with a profound salute.
"How tall is he?"
"Six feet, eight inches and a quarter."
"Is he on parade with his company?"
"No, Herr Colonel--on duty."
"Where?"
"With the guard at the Zeug-haus." (This was the arsenal on the
narrow bridge over the Spree.)
"Have him relieved by the next file for duty, and brought here
immediately."
Private Vogelwiede, a sturdy Silesian campaigner, who had been
wounded at Cunnersdorf, and had served under my father in all the
great battles of the Seven Years' War, soon appeared at the palace,
with a mingled expression of surprise and alarm on his large visage,
supposing that some misdemeanour was to be alleged against him; but
this soon changed into downright horror, when my father, with a
manner oddly indicative of half comicality and entire commiseration,
read the king's peremptory order, and pointed to the blooming bride.
"Sturm und Gewitter!" swore the luckless grenadier in great wrath;
"do you mean to say, Herr Colonel, that I am to marry this old bag of
bones--this very shrivling?"
"My poor Vogelwiede, it is marry, or march to Spandau."
"Ach Gott, what an old vampire it is!" said Vogelwiede, shuddering.
"I am utterly bewildered, comrade," said my father.
"In mercy to me, Herr Colonel, tell me _what_ I have done that I am
to be punished thus?"
"I can't say, my poor fellow, that I understand the affair in any
way; but we all know our father Frederick, and that the dose, however
nauseous, must be swallowed. You must either be chained to her, or
to a thirty-six pound shot in Spandau--a companion you will not get
rid of, even by day."
"Der teufel! der teufel!" groaned the grenadier, who was actually
perspiring with the idea of the whole affair, while the old woman,
with her grey hairs, yellow fangs, and grimy wrinkles, grinned like
some gnome sent by the Ruberzahl, or a witch from the Blocksberg; and
to him it seemed as the sentence of death when my father said,--
"Send for the chaplain of the brigade, and desire him to bring his
prayer-book and surplice."
"Oh, Colonel, remember Cunnersdorf, and how when a boy I held
Velt-marshal Keith dying in my arms at Hochkirchen--I was his
favourite orderly," urged poor Vogelwiede, melted almost to tears;
but it was espouse or Spandau, and he was married in the military
chapel, to his own intense misery, to the utter bewilderment of his
comrades, who knew not what to make of the affair, and to the
exulting joy of the hideous old crone.
Six months after, Frederick returned from the reviews at Halle to
Berlin, and desired my father to bring before him the couple who had
been married by his orders.
"Ach Gott!" he exclaimed, on seeing the grinning hag and the
miserable grenadier, who already looked grey and worn; "what the
devil is this you have done, Herr Colonel?"
"I obeyed your majesty's singular command," replied my father,
haughtily.
"Is this the woman to whom you have married Otto Vogelwiede, the
premier grenadier of my Guards?"
"'Tis the woman who bore your majesty's somewhat peremptory order, as
all the corps can testify."
"Der teufel! she is no more to compare to the one who received it,
than a cup of Dresden dima is to a bowl of Bunzlau clay! But I shall
find her out yet, and married she shall be to the next tallest man in
the battalion, so sure as Heaven hears me! and as for you,
Colonel--dummer teufel--as for you----"
"No more dummer teufel (blockhead) than yourself, Frederick of
Prussia," exclaimed my father, furiously. "This to me? Have you
forgotten my services, and that day at Amoneburg, when side by side
we built up breastworks of the fallen dead, and fired over them?"
"I have not Herr Colonel; but potztausend!--"
"Remember that I am the well-born Warriston von Warriston, which in
plain Scottish means _of that ilk_, and I shall not be sworn at even
by a king of Prussia."
Frederick danced with rage in his old jackboots, and dashed his
Rosbach pipe upon the floor, exclaiming--
"Out of my sight, sir! Begone to your Bergschotten.* I have done
with you!"
* Scots Highlanders; this is a true anecdote of Frederick's caprice.
Whether Gretchen Viborg was married to the next tallest grenadier, or
to the miller on the Spree, I know not, for that very day my father
doffed the uniform of which he was so proud--the trappings of the 1st
Guards--the same uniform in which Frederick was buried six years
after at Potsdam, and resigned his commission, in which he was
succeeded by Peter Schreutzer, the king's new favourite. Entering
the service of the States General, he was made Colonel-in-Chief of
their Scots Brigade, then consisting of six battalions, in one of
which I obtained a cadetship; so you may perceive the strange chain
of events by which--because Gretchen Viborg had to meet her miller,
and her note found another bearer--I ultimately find myself a captain
in His Britannic Majesty's 94th Foot, and in the service of my native
country."
We shall have other marches of more importance to detail than the
first essay of our young volunteer, who, though cheered from time to
time by the merry music of the drums and fifes (which, in fact, are
more inspiring and martial than any brass band can ever be), found
the route weary enough by the pre-macadamite roads of those days,
which were somewhat like the dry beds of mountain burns. So marching
was rough and weary work, yet Quentin never flinched, as they
proceeded by the dark, heathy, and solitary hills of the
Muirkirk-of-Kyle, by Carnwath, where a party of the Gordon
Highlanders, under Logan of that ilk, joined them, and by Kirknewton,
where, from an eminence over which the roadway wound, he saw, for the
first time, the wooded expanse of the beautiful Lothians, with the
swelling outline of Arthur's Seat, the blue Firth, widening to a sea,
the fertile hills of Fife, the lordly Ochil mountains, and those of
thirteen counties, stretching far away even to the distant
Lammermuirs, and in the middle distance, grey, dim, and smoky, the
"Queen of the North, upon her hilly throne."
Then the soldiers hailed her with a cheer and a roll on the drums,
announcing that there ended their last day's march.