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Nathaniel Hawthorne - "A Select Party (From Mosses From An Old Manse)"

Ethel C. Pedley - "Dot and the Kangaroo"

Georg Ebers - "The Emperor, Part 2, Volume 8."

E. P. Roe - "A Day Of Fate"

Barry Lyndon

W >> William Makepeace Thackeray >> Barry Lyndon




The heads of the sermon which my friend the theologian intended to
impart to me, were, however, never told; for, after our coming out
of the hospital, he was drafted into a regiment quartered as far as
possible from his native country, in Pomerania; while I was put into
the Bulow regiment, of which the ordinary headquarters were Berlin.
The Prussian regiments seldom change their garrisons as ours do, for
the fear of desertion is so great, that it becomes necessary to know
the face of every individual in the service; and, in time of peace,
men live and die in the same town. This does not add, as may be
imagined, to the amusements of the soldier's life. It is lest any
young gentleman like myself should take a fancy to a military
career, and fancy that of a private soldier a tolerable one, that I
am giving these, I hope, moral descriptions of what we poor fellows
in the ranks really suffered.

As soon as we recovered, we were dismissed from the nuns and the
hospital to the town prison of Fulda, where we were kept like slaves
and criminals, with artillerymen with lighted matches at the doors
of the courtyards and the huge black dormitory where some hundreds
of us lay; until we were despatched to our different destinations.
It was soon seen by the exercise which were the old soldiers amongst
us, and which the recruits; and for the former, while we lay in
prison, there was a little more leisure: though, if possible, a
still more strict watch kept than over the broken-spirited yokels
who had been forced or coaxed into the service. To describe the
characters here assembled would require Mr. Gilray's own pencil.
There were men of all nations and callings. The Englishmen boxed and
bullied; the Frenchmen played cards, and danced, and fenced; the
heavy Germans smoked their pipes and drank beer, if they could
manage to purchase it. Those who had anything to risk gambled, and
at this sport I was pretty lucky, for, not having a penny when I
entered the depot (having been robbed of every farthing of my
property by the rascally crimps), I won near a dollar in my very
first game at cards with one of the Frenchmen; who did not think of
asking whether I could pay or not upon losing. Such, at least, is
the advantage of having a gentlemanlike appearance; it has saved me
many a time since by procuring me credit when my fortunes were at
their lowest ebb.

Among the Frenchmen there was a splendid man and soldier, whose real
name we never knew, but whose ultimate history created no small
sensation, when it came to be known in the Prussian army. If beauty
and courage are proofs of nobility, as (although I have seen some of
the ugliest dogs and the greatest cowards in the world in the
noblesse) I have no doubt courage and beauty are, this Frenchman
must have been of the highest families in France, so grand and noble
was his manner, so superb his person. He was not quite so tall as
myself, fair, while I am dark, and, if possible, rather broader in
the shoulders. He was the only man I ever met who could master me
with the small-sword; with which he would pink me four times to my
three. As for the sabre, I could knock him to pieces with it; and I
could leap farther and carry more than he could. This, however, is
mere egotism. This Frenchman, with whom I became pretty intimate--
for we were the two cocks, as it were, of the depot, and neither had
any feeling of low jealousy--was called, for want of a better name,
Le Blondin, on account of his complexion. He was not a deserter, but
had come in from the Lower Rhine and the bishoprics, as I fancy;
fortune having proved unfavourable to him at play probably, and
other means of existence being denied him. I suspect that the
Bastile was waiting for him in his own country, had he taken a fancy
to return thither.

He was passionately fond of play and liquor, and thus we had a
considerable sympathy together: when excited by one or the other, he
became frightful. I, for my part, can bear, without wincing, both
ill luck and wine; hence my advantage over him was considerable in
our bouts, and I won enough money from him to make my position
tenable. He had a wife outside (who, I take it, was the cause of his
misfortunes and separation from his family), and she used to be
admitted to see him twice or thrice a week, and never came empty-
handed---a little brown bright-eyed creature, whose ogles had made
the greatest impression upon all the world.

This man was drafted into a regiment that was quartered at Neiss in
Silesia, which is only at a short distance from the Austrian
frontier; he maintained always the same character for daring and
skill, and was, in the secret republic of the regiment--which always
exists as well as the regular military hierarchy--the acknowledged
leader. He was an admirable soldier, as I have said; but haughty,
dissolute, and a drunkard. A man of this mark, unless he takes care
to coax and flatter his officers (which I always did), is sure to
fall out with them. Le Blondin's captain was his sworn enemy, and
his punishments were frequent and severe.

His wife and the women of the regiment (this was after the peace)
used to carry on a little commerce of smuggling across the Austrian
frontier, where their dealings were winked at by both parties; and
in obedience to the instructions of her husband, this woman, from
every one of her excursions, would bring in a little powder and
ball: commodities which are not to be procured by the Prussian
soldier, and which were stowed away in secret till wanted. They WERE
to be wanted, and that soon.

Le Blondin had organised a great and extraordinary conspiracy. We
don't know how far it went, how many hundreds or thousands it
embraced; but strange were the stories told about the plot amongst
us privates: for the news was spread from garrison to garrison, and
talked of by the army, in spite of all the Government efforts to
hush it up--hush it up, indeed! I have been of the people myself; I
have seen the Irish rebellion, and I know what is the free-masonry
of the poor.

He made himself the head of the plot. There were no writings nor
papers. No single one of the conspirators communicated with any
other than the Frenchman; but personally he gave his orders to them
all. He had arranged matters for a general rising of the garrison,
at twelve o'clock on a certain day: the guard-houses in the town
were to be seized, the sentinels cut down, and--who knows the rest?
Some of our people used to say that the conspiracy was spread
through all Silesia, and that Le Blondin was to be made a general in
the Austrian service.

At twelve o'clock, and opposite the guard-house by the Bohmer-Thor
of Neiss, some thirty men were lounging about in their undress, and
the Frenchman stood near the sentinel of the guard-house, sharpening
a wood hatchet on a stone. At the stroke of twelve, he got up, split
open the sentinel's head with a blow of his axe, and the thirty men,
rushing into the guard-house, took possession of the arms there, and
marched at once to the gate. The sentry there tried to drop the bar,
but the Frenchman rushed up to him, and, with another blow of the
axe, cut off his right hand, with which he held the chain. Seeing
the men rushing out armed, the guard without the gate drew up across
the road to prevent their passage; but the Frenchman's thirty gave
them a volley, charged them with the bayonet, and brought down
several, and the rest flying, the thirty rushed on. The frontier is
only a league from Neiss, and they made rapidly towards it.

But the alarm was given in the town, and what saved it was that the
clock by which the Frenchman went was a quarter of an hour faster
than any of the clocks in the town. The generale was beat, the
troops called to arms, and thus the men who were to have attacked
the other guard-houses, were obliged to fall into the ranks, and
their project was defeated. This, however, likewise rendered the
discovery of the conspirators impossible, for no man could betray
his comrade, nor, of course, would he criminate himself.

Cavalry was sent in pursuit of the Frenchman and his thirty
fugitives, who were, by this time, far on their way to the Bohemian
frontier. When the horse came up with them, they turned, received
them with a volley and the bayonet, and drove them back. The
Austrians were out at the barriers, looking eagerly on at the
conflict. The women, who were on the look-out too, brought more
ammunition to these intrepid deserters, and they engaged and drove
back the dragoons several times. But in these gallant and fruitless
combats much time was lost, and a battalion presently came up, and
surrounded the brave thirty; when the fate of the poor fellows was
decided. They fought with the fury of despair: not one of them asked
for quarter. When their ammunition failed, they fought with the
steel, and were shot down or bayoneted where they stood. The
Frenchman was the very last man who was hit. He received a bullet in
the thigh, and fell, and in this state was overpowered, killing the
officer who first advanced to seize him.

He and the very few of his comrades who survived were carried back
to Neiss, and immediately, as the ringleader, he was brought before
a council of war. He refused all interrogations which were made as
to his real name and family. 'What matters who I am?' said he; 'you
have me and will shoot me. My name would not save me were it ever so
famous.' In the same way he declined to make a single discovery
regarding the plot. 'It was all my doing,' he said; 'each man
engaged in it only knew me, and is ignorant of every one of his
comrades. The secret is mine alone, and the secret shall die with
me.' When the officers asked him what was the reason which induced
him to meditate a crime so horrible?--'It was your infernal
brutality and tyranny,' he said. 'You are all butchers, ruffians,
tigers, and you owe it to the cowardice of your men that you were
not murdered long ago.'

At this his captain burst into the most furious exclamations against
the wounded man, and rushing up to him, struck him a blow with his
fist. But Le Blondin, wounded as he was, as quick as thought seized
the bayonet of one of the soldiers who supported him, and plunged it
into the officer's breast. 'Scoundrel and monster,' said he, 'I
shall have the consolation of sending you out of the world before I
die.' He was shot that day. He offered to write to the King, if the
officers would agree to let his letter go sealed into the hands of
the postmaster; but they feared, no doubt, that something might be
said to inculpate themselves, and refused him the permission. At the
next review Frederick treated them, it is said, with great severity,
and rebuked them for not having granted the Frenchman his request.
However, it was the King's interest to conceal the matter, and so it
was, as I have said before, hushed up--so well hushed up, that a
hundred thousand soldiers in the army knew it; and many's the one of
us that has drunk to the Frenchman's memory over our wine, as a
martyr for the cause of the soldier. I shall have, doubtless, some
readers who will cry out at this, that I am encouraging
insubordination and advocating murder. If these men had served as
privates in the Prussian army from 1760 to 1765, they would not be
so apt to take objection. This man destroyed two sentinels to get
his liberty; how many hundreds of thousands of his own and the
Austrian people did King Frederick kill because he took a fancy to
Silesia? It was the accursed tyranny of the system that sharpened
the axe which brained the two sentinels of Neiss: and so let
officers take warning, and think twice ere they visit poor fellows
with the cane.

I could tell many more stories about the army; but as, from having
been a soldier myself, all my sympathies are in the ranks, no doubt
my tales would be pronounced to be of an immoral tendency, and I had
best, therefore, be brief. Fancy my surprise while in this depot,
when one day a well-known voice saluted my ear, and I heard a meagre
young gentleman, who was brought in by a couple of troopers and
received a few cuts across the shoulders from one of them, say in
the best English, 'You infernal WASCAL, I'll be wevenged for this.
I'll WITE to my ambassador, as sure as my name's Fakenham of
Fakenham.' I burst out laughing at this: it was my old acquaintance
in MY corporal's coat. Lischen had sworn stoutly, that he was really
and truly the private, and the poor fellow had been drafted off, and
was to be made one of us. But I bear no malice, and having made the
whole room roar with the story of the way in which I had tricked the
poor lad, I gave him a piece of advice, which procured him his
liberty. 'Go to the inspecting officer,' said I; 'if they once get
you into Prussia it is all over with you, and they will never give
you up. Go now to the commandant of the depot, promise him a
hundred--five hundred guineas to set you free; say that the crimping
captain has your papers and portfolio' (this was true); 'above all,
show him that you have the means of paying him the promised money,
and I will warrant you are set free.' He did as I advised, and when
we were put on the march Mr. Fakenham found means to be allowed to
go into hospital, and while in hospital the matter was arranged as I
had recommended. He had nearly, however, missed his freedom by his
own stinginess in bargaining for it, and never showed the least
gratitude towards me his benefactor.

I am not going to give any romantic narrative of the Seven Years'
War. At the close of it, the Prussian army, so renowned for its
disciplined valour, was officered and under-officered by native
Prussians, it is true; but was composed for the most part of men
hired or stolen, like myself, from almost every nation in Europe.
The deserting to and fro was prodigious. In my regiment (Bulow's)
alone before the war, there had been no less than 600 Frenchmen, and
as they marched out of Berlin for the campaign, one of the fellows
had an old fiddle on which he was flaying a French tune, and his
comrades danced almost, rather than walked, after him, singing,
'Nous allons en France.' Two years after, when they returned to
Berlin, there were only six of these men left; the rest had fled or
were killed in action. The life the private soldier led was a
frightful one to any but men of iron courage and endurance. There
was a corporal to every three men, marching behind them, and
pitilessly using the cane; so much so that it used to be said that
in action there was a front rank of privates and a second rank of
sergeants and corporals to drive them on. Many men would give way to
the most frightful acts of despair under these incessant
persecutions and tortures; and amongst several regiments of the army
a horrible practice had sprung up, which for some time caused the
greatest alarm to the Government. This was a strange frightful
custom of CHILD-MURDER. The men used to say that life was
unbearable, that suicide was a crime; in order to avert which, and
to finish with the intolerable misery of their position, the best
plan was to kill a young child, which was innocent, and therefore
secure of heaven, and then to deliver themselves up as guilty of the
murder. The King himself--the hero, sage, and philosopher, the
prince who had always liberality on his lips and who affected a
horror of capital punishments--was frightened at this dreadful
protest, on the part of the wretches whom he had kidnapped, against
his monstrous tyranny; but his only means of remedying the evil was
strictly to forbid that such criminals should be attended by any
ecclesiastic whatever, and denied all religious consolation.

The punishment was incessant. Every officer had the liberty to
inflict it, and in peace it was more cruel than in war. For when
peace came the King turned adrift such of his officers as were not
noble; whatever their services might have been. He would call a
captain to the front of his company and say, 'He is not noble, let
him go.' We were afraid of him somehow, and were cowed before him
like wild beasts before their keeper. I have seen the bravest men of
the army cry like children at a cut of the cane; I have seen a
little ensign of fifteen call out a man of fifty from the ranks, a
man who had been in a hundred battles, and he has stood presenting
arms, and sobbing and howling like a baby, while the young wretch
lashed him over the arms and thighs with the stick. In a day of
action this man would dare anything. A button might be awry THEN and
nobody touched him; but when they had made the brute fight, then
they lashed him again into subordination. Almost all of us yielded
to the spell--scarce one could break it. The French officer I have
spoken of as taken along with me, was in my company, and caned like
a dog. I met him at Versailles twenty years afterwards, and he
turned quite pale and sick when I spoke to him of old days. 'For
God's sake,' said he, 'don't talk of that time: I wake up from my
sleep trembling and crying even now.'

As for me, after a very brief time (in which it must be confessed I
tasted, like my comrades, of the cane) and after I had found
opportunities to show myself to be a brave and dexterous soldier, I
took the means I had adopted in the English army to prevent any
further personal degradation. I wore a bullet around my neck, which
I did not take the pains to conceal, and I gave out that it should
be for the man or officer who caused me to be chastised. And there
was something in my character which made my superiors believe me;
for that bullet had already served me to kill an Austrian colonel,
and I would have given it to a Prussian with as little remorse. For
what cared I for their quarrels, or whether the eagle under which I
marched had one head or two? All I said was, 'No man shall find me
tripping in my duty; but no man shall ever lay a hand upon me.' And
by this maxim I abided as long as I remained in the service.

I do not intend to make a history of battles in the Prussian any
more than in the English service. I did my duty in them as well as
another, and by the time that my moustache had grown to a decent
length, which it did when I was twenty years of age, there was not a
braver, cleverer, handsomer, and I must own, wickeder soldier in the
Prussian army. I had formed myself to the condition of the proper
fighting beast; on a day of action I was savage and happy; out of
the field I took all the pleasure I could get, and was by no means
delicate as to its quality or the manner of procuring it. The truth
is, however, that there was among our men a much higher tone of
society than among the clumsy louts in the English army, and our
service was generally so strict that we had little time for doing
mischief. I am very dark and swarthy in complexion, and was called
by our fellows the 'Black Englander,' the 'Schwartzer Englander,' or
the English Devil. If any service was to be done, I was sure to be
put upon it. I got frequent gratifications of money, but no
promotion; and it was on the day after I had killed the Austrian
colonel (a great officer of Uhlans, whom I engaged--singly and on
foot) that General Bulow, my colonel, gave me two Frederics-d'or in
front of the regiment, and said, 'I reward thee now; but I fear I
shall have to hang thee one day or other.' I spent the money, and
that I had taken from the colonel's body, every groschen, that night
with some jovial companions; but as long as war lasted was never
without a dollar in my purse.

CHAPTER VII

BARRY LEADS A GARRISON LIFE, AND FINDS MANY FRIENDS THERE

After the war our regiment was garrisoned in the capital, the least
dull, perhaps, of all the towns of Prussia: but that does not say
much for its gaiety. Our service, which was always severe, still
left many hours of the day disengaged, in which we might take our
pleasure had we the means of paying for the same. Many of our mess
got leave to work in trades; but I had been brought up to none: and
besides, my honour forbade me; for as a gentleman, I could not soil
my fingers by a manual occupation. But our pay was barely enough to
keep us from starving; and as I have always been fond of pleasure,
and as the position in which we now were, in the midst of the
capital, prevented us from resorting to those means of levying
contributions which are always pretty feasible in wartime, I was
obliged to adopt the only means left me of providing for my
expenses: and in a word became the ORDONNANZ, or confidential
military gentleman, of my captain. I spurned the office four years
previously, when it was made to me in the English service; but the
position is very different in a foreign country; besides, to tell
the truth, after five years in the ranks, a man's pride will submit
to many rebuffs which would be intolerable to him in an independent
condition.

The captain was a young man and had distinguished himself during the
war, or he would never have been advanced to rank so early. He was,
moreover, the nephew and heir of the Minister of Police, Monsieur de
Potzdorff, a relationship which no doubt aided in the young
gentleman's promotion. Captain de Potzdorff was a severe officer
enough on parade or in barracks, but he was a person easily led by
flattery. I won his heart in the first place by my manner of tying
my hair in queue (indeed, it was more neatly dressed than that of
any man in the regiment), and subsequently gained his confidence by
a thousand little arts and compliments, which as a gentleman myself
I knew how to employ. He was a man of pleasure, which he pursued
more openly than most men in the stern Court of the King; he was
generous and careless with his purse, and he had a great affection
for Rhine wine: in all which qualities I sincerely sympathised with
him; and from which I, of course, had my profit. He was disliked in
the regiment, because he was supposed to have too intimate relations
with his uncle the Police Minister; to whom, it was hinted, he
carried the news of the corps.

Before long I had ingratiated myself considerably with my officer,
and knew most of his affairs. Thus I was relieved from many drills
and parades, which would otherwise have fallen to my lot, and came
in for a number of perquisites; which enabled me to support a
genteel figure and to appear with some ECLAT in a certain, though it
must be confessed very humble, society in Berlin. Among the ladies I
was always an especial favourite, and so polished was my behaviour
amongst them, that they could not understand how I should have
obtained my frightful nickname of the Black Devil in the regiment.
'He is not so black as he is painted,' I laughingly would say; and
most of the ladies agreed that the private was quite as well-bred as
the captain: as indeed how should it be otherwise, considering my
education and birth?

When I was sufficiently ingratiated with him, I asked leave to
address a letter to my poor mother in Ireland, to whom I had not
given any news of myself for many many years; for the letters of the
foreign soldiers were never admitted to the post, for fear of
appeals or disturbances on the part of their parents abroad. My
captain agreed to find means to forward the letter, and as I knew
that he would open it, I took care to give it him unsealed; thus
showing my confidence in him. But the letter was, as you may
imagine, written so that the writer should come to no harm were it
intercepted. I begged my honoured mother's forgiveness for having
fled from her; I said that my extravagance and folly in my own
country I knew rendered my return thither impossible; but that she
would, at least, be glad to know that I was well and happy in the
service of the greatest monarch in the world, and that the soldier's
life was most agreeable to me: and, I added, that I had found a kind
protector and patron, who I hoped would some day provide for me as I
knew it was out of her power to do. I offered remembrances to all
the girls at Castle Brady, naming them from Biddy to Becky
downwards, and signed myself, as in truth I was, her affectionate
son, Redmond Barry, in Captain Potzdorffs company of the Bulowisch
regiment of foot in garrison at Berlin. Also I told her a pleasant
story about the King kicking the Chancellor and three judges
downstairs, as he had done one day when I was on guard at Potsdam,
and said I hoped for another war soon, when I might rise to be an
officer. In fact, you might have imagined my letter to be that of
the happiest fellow in the world, and I was not on this head at all
sorry to mislead my kind parent.

I was sure my letter was read, for Captain Potzdorff began asking me
some days afterwards about my family, and I told him the
circumstances pretty truly, all things considered. I was a cadet of
a good family, but my mother was almost ruined and had barely enough
to support her eight daughters, whom I named. I had been to study
for the law at Dublin, where I had got into debt and bad company,
had killed a man in a duel, and would be hanged or imprisoned by his
powerful friends, if I returned. I had enlisted in the English
service, where an opportunity for escape presented itself to me such
as I could not resist; and hereupon I told the story of Mr. Fakenham
of Fakenham in such a way as made my patron to be convulsed with
laughter, and he told me afterwards that he had repeated the story
at Madame de Kamake's evening assembly, where all the world was
anxious to have a sight of the young Englander.

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