The Complete Works of Stephen Crane (225 page)

After his return Skobeleff was in a state of excitement and fury. His uniform was covered with blood and mud. His Cross of St. George was twisted around over his shoulder. His face was black with powder. His eyes were bloodshot. He said, “My regiments no longer exist.”

The Russian assaults had failed at all points. They had begun this last battle with thirty thousand infantry, twelve thousand cavalry, and four hundred and forty guns, and they lost over eighteen thousand men. The multitude of generals again took counsel. There were fervid animosities, and there might have been open rupture if it were not for the presence of the czar himself, whose gentleness and goodnature prevented many scenes.

It was decided that the Turks must be starved out. The Russians sent for more troops as well as for heavy supplies of clothing, ammunition, and food. The czar sent for General Todleben, who had shown great skill at Sebastopol, and the direction of the siege was put in his hands.

The Turks had been accustomed to reprovision Plevna by the skilful use of devious trails. Todleben took swift steps to put a stop to it, but he did not succeed before a huge convoy had been sent into the town through the adroit management of Chefket Pasha. But the Russian horse soon chased Chefket away, and the trails were all closed.

For the most part the September weather was fine, but this plenitude of sun made the Turkish positions about Plevna almost unbearable. Actual thousands of unburied dead lay scattered over the ridges. At one time the Russian headquarters made a polite request to be allowed to send some men to enter Grivitza and bury their own dead. But this polite request met with polite refusal.

On October 19 the Roumanians, who for weeks had been sapping their way up to the Grivitza Redoubt, made a final and desperate attack on it. They were repulsed.

In order to complete the investment, Todleben found it necessary to dislodge the Turks from four villages near Plevna.

The weeks moved by slowly with a stolid and stubborn Turk besieged by a stubborn and stolid Russian. There was occasional firing from the Russian batteries, to which the Turks did not always take occasion to reply. In Plevna there was nothing to eat but meat, and the Turkish soldiers moved about with the hoods of their dirty brown cloaks pulled over their heads. Outside Plevna there were plenty of furs and good coats, but the diet had become so plain that the sugar-loving Russian soldiers would give gold for a pot of jam.

On the cold, cloudy morning of December 11, when snow lay thickly on all the country, a sudden great booming of guns was heard, and the news flew swiftly that Osman had come out of Plevna at last, and was trying to break through the cordon his foes had spread about him. During the night he had abandoned all his defences, and by daybreak he had taken the greater part of his army across the river Vid. Advancing along the Sophia road, he charged the Russian entrenchments with such energy that the Siberian Regiment stationed at that point was almost annihilated. A desperate fight went on for four hours, with the Russians coming up battalion after battalion. Some time after noon all firing ceased, and later the Turks sent up a white flag. Cheer after cheer swelled over the dreary plain. Osman had surrendered.

The siege had lasted one hundred and forty-two days. The Russians had lost forty thousand men. The Turks had lost thirty thousand men.

The advance on Constantinople had been checked. Skobeleff said, “Osman the Victorious he will remain, in spite of his surrender.”

THE
STORMING
OF
BURKERSDORF
HEIGHTS

WHEN, in 1740, Wilhelm Friedrich of Prussia died, the friends whom his heir had gathered about him at his pleasant country-house at Reinsberg were doomed to see a blight fall on their expectations such as had not been known since Poins and Falstaff congratulated themselves on having an old friend for their king.

When the young prince came to the throne as Frederick II., thought these trusting people, Prussia, instead of being a mere barracks, overrun with soldiers and ruled by a miser, would become the refuge of poets and artists. Its monarch would be a man of peace, caring for nothing beyond the joys of philosophy, poetry, music, and merry feasts — this, of course, providing for an indefinite extension of  the enchanted life he and his companions led at Reinsberg.

They had the best of reasons for this belief: the antagonism between the prince and his father had begun almost as soon as the rapture of having an heir had become an old story to Friedrich Wilhelm. The tiny “Fritz,” with a cocked hat and tight little soldier-clothes, drilling and being drilled with a lot of other tiny boys, — and frightfully bored with it all the time, — was a standing grievance to his rough, boorish father. “Awake him at six in the morning, and stand by to see that he does not turn over, but immediately gets up.... While his hair is being combed and made into a queue, he is to have his breakfast of tea.” This was the beginning of his father’s instructions to his tutors when, at seven, he passed out of his governess’s hands.

Notwithstanding the fine Spartan rigour of this programme, the boy came up a dainty, delicate little fellow, who turned up his nose at boar-hunting and despised his father’s collection of giants, and loved to play the flute and make French verses. Friedrich Wilhelm was anything but a bad monarch; he was moral in a century when nothing of the sort was expected of monarchs; he made the Prussian army the best army in the world; he even had affections; but for a man of these virtues he was the most intolerable parent of whom there is a record.

The brilliant Wilhelmina, Frederick’s dearly loved sister, whose young portraits show her as very like her brother, has this characteristic scene in her
Memoirs.
Their sister, Princess Louisa, aged fifteen, had just been betrothed to a margrave, and the king asked her — they were at table — how she would regulate her housekeeping when she was married. Louisa, a favourite, had got into the way of telling her father home-truths, which he took very well, as a rule, from her. On this occasion she told him that she would have a good table well served; “better than yours,” said Louisa; “and if I have children, I will not maltreat them like you, nor force them to eat what they have an aversion to.”

“What do you mean by that?” said the king. “What is there wanting at my table?”

“There is this wanting,” she replied: “that one cannot have enough, and the little there is consists of coarse potherbs that nobody can eat.” The king, who was not used to such candour, boiled with rage. “All his anger,” says the Princess Wilhelmina, “fell on my brother and me. He first threw a plate at my brother’s head, who ducked out of the way, then let fly another at me.” After he had made the air blue with wrath, directed at Frederick, “we had to pass him in going out,” and “he aimed a great blow at me with his crutch, — which, if I had not jerked away from it, would have ended me. He chased me for a while in his wheelchair, but the people drawing it gave me time to escape into the queen’s chamber.” One always imagines this charming young princess in the act of dodging some sort of blow from Friedrich Wilhelm, who was nicknamed “Stumpy,” privately, by his dutiful son and daughter. The habit of hating his son became an insanity; to “ kick him and pull his hair, break his flute, and take away his books and his brocaded dressing-gown — that was ordinary usage; it came to the point where he nearly strangled him, and later he condemned him to death for trying to run away to his uncle, George II., in England. When this sentence had been changed to a term of imprisonment, the poor young prince had a much better time of it: his gaolers were kinder than his father.

By the time he emerged from this captivity he had gained much wisdom — the cold wisdom of selfishness and dissimulation. In after years the father and son became profoundly attached to each other, but Frederick was always obliged to humour and cajole his pig-headed sire, to lie more or less, and generally adopt an insincere tone, in order to avert wrath and suspicion — a very hateful necessity to a natural truth-teller, for Frederick was by nature a great lover of facts. Although his training as a politician and a soldier included a thorough education in guile, the tutors of his childhood were simple, honest people, who gave him a good, truthful start in life.

Friedrich Wilhelm, now that his heir was twenty-one years old, thought it high time to put an end to various vague matrimonial projects, and get a wife for him straightway. Frederick having found that obedience was, on the whole, better than captivity, was submissive and silent — to his father; but his letters to his friends and his sister shrieked with protestations against a marriage in which his tastes and feelings were not so much as thought of. Above all things he wished to be allowed to travel and choose for himself, and he had a morbid horror of a dull and awkward woman. It did not much matter, he thought, what else his wife was if she were clever conversationally, with grace and charm and fine manners. Beauty was desirable, but he could get along without it, if only he could feel proud of his consort’s wit and breeding. The bride of his father’s choosing was the Princess Elizabeth of Brunswick-Bevern — a bashful and gawky young person, with as little distinction as a dairy-maid. But he subdued his rage and married her, and, indeed, seems always to have treated her with kindly deference, although he made no pretence of affection.

Still carrying out his father’s wishes, he served in a brief campaign, and afterwards regularly devoted a portion of his time to military and political business. Friedrich Wilhelm was now pleased with his son to the extent of buying for him a delightful residence — Reinsberg — and giving him a tolerable income; and Frederick revelled in his new freedom by building conservatories, laying out pleasure-gardens, playing his flute to his heart’s content, writing poor French verses, and solacing himself for the “coarse potherbs” of his childhood by exquisite dinners. They had the best musicians for their concerts at Reinsberg — the crown prince and his friends, with the crown princess and her ladies. It was here, in 1736, that Frederick began — by letter — his famous friendship with Voltaire, that survived so many phases of illusion and disillusion.

It must be said of Frederick’s friends — who were mostly French — that they were men of highly trained intelligence, but they were not acute enough to know what sort of king their prince would make.

When his father passed away, Frederick felt as sincere a grief as if there had never been anything but love between them; always afterwards he spoke of him with reverence, and he learned to place a high value on the stern discipline of his early life — which is still to some extent a model for the bringing up of young Hohenzollerns.

It was a handsome young king who came to the throne in 1740. His face was round, his nose a keen aquiline, his mouth small and delicately curved, and all was dominated by those wonderful blue-gray eyes, that, as Mirabeau said, “at the bidding of his heroic soul fascinated you with seduction or with terror.” Even in youth the lines of the face showed a sardonic humour. One can well imagine his replying to the optimistic Sulzer, who thought severe punishments a mistake: “Ach! meine lieber Sulzer, you don’t know this — race!” In the old-age portraits the face is sharp and hatchet-like, the mouth is shrunken to a mean line, but the great eyes still flash out, commanding and clear.

The reign began with peace and philanthropy: Frederick II. started out by disbanding the giant grenadiers, the absurd monstrosities that his father had begged and bought and kidnapped from everywhere; he started a “knitting-house” for a thousand old women; abolished torture in criminal trials; set up an Academy of Sciences; summoned Voltaire and Maupertius; made Germany open its eyes at the speech, “In this country every man must get to Heaven in his own way”; and proclaimed a practical freedom of the press — all in his first week.

The fury of activity now took possession of Frederick, which lasted all his life. He had the Hohenzollern passion for doing everything himself: the three “secretaries of state” were mere clerks, who spared him only the mechanical part of secretarial duties. His system of economy was rigid. While looking over financial matters one day he found that a certain convent absorbed a considerable fund from the forest-dues, which had been bequeathed by dead dukes “for masses to be said on their behalf.” He went to the place and asked the monks, “What good does anybody get out of those masses?”

“Your majesty, the dukes are to be delivered out of purgatory by them.”

“Purgatory? And they are not out yet, poor souls, after so many hundred years of praying?” The answer was, “Not yet.”

“When will they be out, and the thing settled?” There was no answer to this. “Send me a courier whenever they are out!” With this sneer the king left the convent.

Stern business went on all day, and in the evening, music, dancing, theatres, suppers, till all hours; but the king was up again at four in the summer — five in winter. In early youth Frederick had known a period of gross living, from which he suffered so severely that his reaction from it was fiercely austere. After his accession, a young man who had been associated with this “mud-bath,” as Carlyle has named it, begged an audience. The king received him, but rebuked him with such withering speech that he straightway went home and killed himself.

Only five months of his reign had passed when the event occurred that put an end to the ideal monarch of Frederick’s subjects. Charles VI., Emperor of Germany, was dead. For years he had worked to bind together his scattered and wabbling empire, and by his “Pragmatic Sanction”  secure it to his daughter, Maria Theresa, contrary to the rule that only male heirs should succeed, and she was on the day of his death (October 20) proclaimed empress.

If the young Maria Theresa had been married to the young Prince Frederick of Prussia, as their reigning parents had at one time decided, European history would undoubtedly have been different, though historians may be mistaken in thinking that much trouble would have been saved the world. In view of the fact that both these young people were extravagantly well endowed with the royal gifts of energy and decision, one must be permitted to wonder whether Frederick, as the spouse of the admirable Maria Theresa, would have ever become known as “the Great.” But at all events it would have prevented him from rushing in on her domains and seizing Silesia as soon as she was left with no one but her husband — a man of the kindly inert sort — to protect her; and we should have lost the good historical scene of Maria Theresa appearing before her Hungarian Diet, with the crown on her beautiful head, thrilling every heart as she lifted her plump baby, Francis Joseph, and with tears streaming down her face implored its help against the Prussian robber.

We can still hear the thunderous roar of the loyal reply, “We will die for our sovereign, Maria Theresa!”

Nevertheless, by December the Prussian robber was in Silesia with thirty thousand men, engaged in finding out that he was really made to be a warrior. By May he held every fortified place in the province; by June Maria Theresa was forced to cede it to him — since which time it has always been a loyal part of Prussia. “How glorious is my king, the youngest of the kings and the grandest!” chanted Voltaire in a letter to Frederick, who, one is pleased to know, found the praise rather suffocating.

The genius of Frederick was next put to a considerable test in the way of matchmaking — a delicate art, particularly when practised for the sake of providing the half-barbarous empire of Russia with mated rulers.

The Czarina Elizabeth — Great Peter’s daughter — wished the king to find a German bride for her nephew-heir, who was afterwards Peter III. A true Hohenzollern, Frederick felt himself quite equal to this task — as to any other. From a bevy of young princesses he selected the daughter of the poverty-stricken Prince of Anhalt-Herbst, because of the unmistakable cleverness the girl had shown, though not fifteen. She was handsome as well, and Elizabeth renamed her “Catherine,” changed her religion, and the marriage came off in 1745. Frederick had displayed great acumen, but it would puzzle a fiend to contrive a more diabolical union than that of Peter and Catherine!