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'..%^^trt.tmm-mh,.'-^.- r.i: KOMANCK OK \ REGIMENT LEY WEUR CAU' HELD '■ CHINhUN, B.A. LONDO>T MARSTON AND COMPANY •{? ?v, 3378 THE ROMANCE OF A REGIMENT BRING THE TRUF AND DIVERTING STORY OF THE GIANT GRENADIERS OF POTSDAM, HOW THEY WERE CAUGHT AND HELD IN CAPTIVITY I7I3— 1740 BY J. R. HUTCHINSON, B.A. "That unique giant regiment, of which the world has heard so much in a vague, half-mythical way."— Carlyle. LONDON SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON AND COMPANY LIMITED 5t. Clunsfaa's jljoast 1S9S , CONTENTS DS^^O I HAP. I. THE MASTER AND HIS MANIA II. "the means of c.race" III. THE ROYAL SPORT OF MAN-HUNTINC. iV. THE king's OWN V. ONCE A GRENADIER, ALWAYS A GRENADIER VI. THE PRUSSIAN MAN - HUNTER IN ENGLAND VII. BAD WEATHER AT VVUSTERHAUSEN VIII. AMENITIES OF THE RECRUITER'S LIFE IX. THE RULING PASSION STRONG IN DEATH I'ACE I 25 56 87 118 142 165 198 224 (' i AUTHORITIES QUOTED OR CITED Record Office, State Papers, Pyussia. " >> >> ,, A'ltssi'a. •> W >f ), Germany. ,»» »» >j J, Holland. " " >> M Doviestic. British Museum, Newcastle Papers. TUTTLE, /r/V^;j of Prussia. Lavisse, Youth of Frederick the Great. Stephen's History of the Criminal Laxo of England. Mhnoires de la Margrave de Baireth. The Margravine of Baireuih and Voltaire, PoLLN'iTZ, Mhnoires de Brandcbourg, De Mauvillox, Histoire de Frid^ric Guillaume /. BiELFELD, Lettres Familibres. FoRSTER, Pretusens Helden im Krieg und Frieden. ,, Friedrich IVilhelm I. Von Weber, Aus Vier Jahrhunderten. NicOLAl, Aneckdoten von Konig Friedrich II. Ledebur, Tonkunstlcr Lexicon. >''J«' «" 'iiiiNiPiii^n^vipppHiippimiiipi I THE ROMANCE OF A REGIMENT CHAPTER I THE MASTER AND HIS MANIA Scarcely had English Anne ceased to touch for the old King's-evil at the Court of St. James, when a King's-evil of a more virulent type began to show itself at the Court of Berlin. It was the spring of 17 13, and King Frederick William, the first of that name, had but just ascended the throne of Prussia. Reared in the lap of a Court as pusillanimous as it was ex- travagant, he already, although only five-and- twenty years of age, enjoyed a well-established home reputation for that love of fat money-bags and strapping soldiers which was yet to make him the by-word and jest of the civilized world ; B ii: 'The Romance of a Regiment I' ! ! and no sooner did he taste the sweets of power than, giving free rein to his bent, he proceeded to cut down Court expenses with unsparing hand, in order to have the more to spend upon the gratification of his military whim. It was highly characteristic of the man, as of his later reign, that his stepmother, the fanatical Queen- Dowager, should have been the first to feel the pinch of his miserly fingers. "We poor beggars must cut our coat according to our cloth," said the King, with a covert quip at the good woman's ostentatious piety ; and although his coffers contained 230,000 ducats in gold, and upwards of 100,000 dollars in silver, he forthwith dismissed her maids of honour, sent her domestics packing, and bundled her plate off to the Mint. This, however, was but the preliminary dust raised by the new broom. The prodigality of the late King, under whose regime a French laundryman drew higher pay than an am- bassador, and a dancing-master as much as a general, afforded admirable scope for sweeping. The Court poet, making use for once of feet that did not halt, sought another market for his rhymes. Army officers no more battened on The Master and his Mania stolen forage allowances. Salaries, pensions, perquisites, all alike suffered merciless curtail- ment. Courtiers were in dismay. " Our good master is dead," they cried, " and the new one sends us to the devil ! " The royal cellars, the stables, the kennels — each of its kind the admiration and envy of Europe — were next subjected to the searching processes of the new economy. Of his father's rare vintages the King retained only the Rhine and Moselle ; of his magnificent stud, only twelve pairs of carriage and twenty saddle horses. The late King's four hundred dogs, together with his menagerie of wild beasts, were sold for what they would fetch. The Jewish vultures had fine pickings. One of their number, an adventuress of the name of Lippmann, who hailed from Halberstadt, did not fare so well, however. Having by some means obtained the entree at Court, she had succeeded in amassing a fortune by trading on the old King's credulity and inordinate love of jewels ; and when he died she quietly and ex- peditiously loaded two waggons with as much money as she could get together in the hurry of the moment, and set the heads of the horses 3 (.1 .1 1, III in« lu. Ill wwnp«'^fy»— nypiwpi I !' The Romance of a Regiment towards the nearest frontier. The new broom overtook them, and the money, some 60,000 dollars in all, rattled merrily back into the royal treasury. An ignoble contingent of cooks, stewards, butlers, pages, ushers, players and musicians, was swept by the same besom of reform into the army, there to fill a more laborious rok than that of dancing attendance upon a dotard King. By such drastic measures as these — speedily extended far beyond the precincts of Palace or Court — did Frederick William pave the way for the inception of that grand military system to which it may be said he was already in honour pledged. Years before, whilst learning pro- fanity and the art of war in Flanders, he had been taunted, by certain officers of the allied armies, with the fact that his fatherland could not, as they alleged, maintain a paltry 15,000 men without the aid of foreign subsidies. " Can it not ? " retorted the angry Prince. " I will yet show you that Prussia can support double the number unaided." The time was now come to prove the boast no idle one ; to prove, indeed, that the resources of the despised kingdom were equal to the maintenance, not 'The Master and his Mania of 30,000 soldiers alone, but of thrice that number. For in the intervening years his ambition had soared to greater heights than he foresaw when the boast was uttered. The Prussian army, it is true, had grown in the interim, but not so rapidly as to keep pace with his dreams of military grandeur. Thirty thousand, the osten- sible fighting force bequeathed him by his father, was to his ambitious mind a mere bagatelle. How defend his " long and disjointed posses- sions " with so insignificant a handful of men ? Had not his " beloved brother the jack-pudding," whom he had thrashed as a boy, whom he might have occasion to thrash again, become Heir Apparent to the throne of England ? Had he not those enterprising "Dutch devils" to cir- cumvent on the one hand, his pretensions to Jiilich-Berg to uphold on the other ? Above all, because including all, had not the time come when a King of Prussia should " make a figure in the world," and command respect for the crown which the first Frederick had placed upon his own head amid the jeers of Europe ? Thirty thousand men ? He must have eighty ! Pride, self-interest, pique counselled the augmentation, s 9 J»L\ i " liiii ) r 5S I ' i \ I ^ TTt^ Romance of a Regiment and to effect it Frederick William, having first put his finances in the way of order after the despotic fashion of which we have had a glimpse, set himself roundly to work. Now that his time was come, he should not prove false to the " warlike appearance " which fondly astute eyes had, it is said, perceived in him as an infant. In Prussian dominions it had long been cus- tomary to assign each regiment a district in which to recruit, and to this system the King now had recourse for the raising of his new levies. But the plan did not work well. Regiment constantly clashed with regiment, rival recruiting parties fought each other into the surgeon's hands for possession of eligible men. This wab its chief drawback from a military point of view. From the point of view of the people, there was another, yet more serious. Burghers, artisans, apprentices, students, were violently torn from home and occupation with- out respect of person. Here and there one resisted, hundreds fied, thousands went into hiding. An edict calling upon the recalcitrants to submit, on pain of having their property confiscated and their names posted on the gallows, served only to fan the flames. Every- 6 'The Master and his Mania where the malcontents fomented disturbance; the entire kingdom broke into tumultuous pro- test against the violent proceedings of King and recruiter. To such a pitch did the opposition swell that the old recruiting system practically went to pieces. The King was obliged to yield, and it was decreed that for the future no man should be forced into the service. This seeming concession made, Frederick William began to cast about for other means of violating the liberty of the subject. The idea of remodelling the old system occurred to him, and without loss of time he proceeded to carry it into execution on lines worthy of the greatest recruiter of modern times. His entire kingdom he divided into circles, according to the number of hearths. Five thousand hearths were allotted to a foot regi- ment, fifteen hundred to a regiment of horse. Each district was subdivided into as many cantons as there were companies in the regi- ment to which it was allotted, and each and every canton was given to understand exactly what it had to expect from the royal clemency. Was it the sudden springing of the impress upon a man, to the present dismay and future 7 'The Romance of a Regiment grief of his wife and children? No more of that, my lieges ! Was it voluntary enlistment, eloquent of a freedom of will totally at variance with the prerogative of a despot ? No more of that either ! The last state of the malcontents was destined to be worse than the first. Every uble-bodied male, excepting only certain classes necessary for purposes of education, trade, manufacture, and tillage, being predestined from his birth to bear arms, was thenceforth to be held in daily remembrance of it either at home or in barracks. Learning the name of his future regiment with that of his native village, every boy, who was not a cripple or dwarfed, was to wear a perpetual reminder of that name, and of the servitude in store for him, in the shape of a regimental stock. Even children of five years and under were enrolled as future food for powder, and their parents obliged to give security for their appearance when called for. The rigorous enforcement of this system of legalized kidnapping quickly drained the country of able-bodied males. The army throve upon it, it is true, but not in strict proportion to the drain upon the country. Only men of a certain 8 The Master and his Mania height could be enlisted, and death, term of service, and desertion had to be reckoned with. Scarcely a year passed but the streets of Amster- dam were filled with hundreds of deserters, fine strapping fellows all, wearing the Prussian uniform. Nor was the case of the Dutch capital by any means unique. Every foreign town within easy reach of Prussian soil had its steady influx of runaways, and to offset this, the most serious counterdrain upon his ranks, the King, whose promises were fast becoming noto- rious for "ending in smoke," again and again did extra violence upon his subjects. " Take up everybody fit to carry arms. Let none escape except those belonging to foreign ministers," were the orders from Potsdam on these occasions, and many a hot press, following hard upon the orders, spread terror through town and country-side. " Better be a eunuch in a Turkish harem," cried the harassed people, " than a Prussian subject." Having thus riddled out of his own dominions every available man capable of shouldering a musket, the insatiable King turned his gaze abroad. The Empire, Holland, P>ance, Eng- land had men and to spare. To hire them 9 'The Romance of a Regiment !!■ 1 would be a good stroke of policy; to steal them, a better. East, west, north and south his emissaries went forth, disguised as farmers, as parsons, as servants, as anything, in short, that would serve to satisfy their master's greed for recruits. Even women played the role of recruiter, and more than one fine fellow, seduced in a double sense, awoke from the witchery of a pair of sparkling eyes only when the cruel bastinado compelled him to abjure a relentless mistress for a still more relentless master. By such means as these — fair or foul, no matter — Frederick William impressed or en- rolled, outside his dominions, more than 40,000 men in the space of twenty-eight years. At the cost of infinite pains, fabulous sum.s, and innumerable squabbles — through the assiduous prosecution of the most unscrupulous, dare- devil system of man-stealing the world has ever seen, the strength of the Prussian army finally touched, and went beyond, the 80,000 his ambition had fixed. With the making of such an army at his back — for its maximum strength of 89,000 was not reached until 1 740, the year of his death — the 10 I The Master and his Mania King tiiought himself very formidable, little suspecting that the sole reasons for his never becoming so were ingrained in his very nature. His ministers and flatterers took infinite pains to foster this opinion. They drew frequent parallels between the ancient Macedonian troops and theirs, and hinted that, if Alexander the Great could do such wonderful things with a comparative handful of well-disciplined men, there was nothing his Majesty of Prussia might not achieve, with troops uncjuestionably the finest in Europe. In most matters the King thought his ministers fools, and told them so to their teeth ; but here he was at one with them. He was "as intoxicated as he could be " with the notion of his power, and had his policy kept pace with, or his courage equalled, the strength of his illusion, the peace of Europe must inevit- ably have suffered serious disturbance. But that method of employing the magnificent military resources at his command was left to his successor, who fought many a battle, and won many a victory, with the veteran material collected and moulded by the master hand of the Recruiter King. Drawing mazes with his finger on the misty ,11 "ii 1 1i The Romance of a Regiment window-panes at Wusterhausen, he once enun- ciated his policy, in characteristic terms, and perhaps for the only time in his life, to the British Envoy Whitworth. The topic was the affairs of the North, in which the King imagined himself to have been over-reached by British diplomacy. " He went roundly to work," he declared, " and allowed no little arts or fetches to be practised upon him with impunity. The Dutch proverb, ' A man a man, a word a word,' was the footing on which he desired to live. No two-faced diplomatists, no double-tongued politicians for him ! If they sacrificed his interests, if they embroiled him, let them have a care ! He should not scruple to defend himself." This was in 17 17. By the year 1739 he had apparently made up his mind that " the best system is to have no system at all," and his conduct fully bore out his conviction. Angry with George H. for making so formidable a figure, he was also angry with France because she did not join with Spain and declare war on England, angry with the Dutch because they seemed disposed to augment their forces by sea and land, angry with the Emperor and Russia 12 ■\ The Master and his Mania for having made their peace with the Turk, and, lastly, angry with himself because he lacked courage to put his mischievous designs in execu- tion. He was " frightened at his own shadow." His army, though always ready to take the field at eight days' warning, was never used. Often he took up arms, never once, after the third year of his reign, when ended his brush with Sweden, did he go to war. The yearly visitation of Hanover by the Georges filled him with apprehension and rage. When his recruiters were put out of the way, as they too often richly deserved to be, he threatened condign venge- ance. Pot-valiant to the point of drawing his sword, he flashed it furiously in the eyes of his temporary enemy, and, sobered by the demon- stration, returned the blade to its scabbard unbaptized. An open niggard and a covert coward, he blustered in his own dominions, teased, scolded, and bullied his neighbours about matters too trivial to involve him in consequences, but could never be persuaded, either by his impetuous temper, his inordinate pride, or his most cherished interests, to make any attempt likely to be attended with danger or expense. 13 'The Romance of a Regiment Lacking the courage of his ambitions, and fearing to employ his forces for purposes of revenge, the King, since so fine an army must be put to some use, now and then doffed the recruiter's sash and assumed the role of show- man. Once a year — in the month of May, unless gout or apprehension of his detested English rival's coming to Hanover occasioned delay — the troops were paraded in grand review. The Great Grenadiers, his pet regiment, first underwent the ordeal of the fifty-four move- ments which were de rigueur on such occasions. Then came the "small men," as the rank and file were called. No detail of condition, equip- ment, or adornment escaped the lynx-eyed King. He knew exactly how many soldiers had died, how many recruits had been enrolled in each regiment, battalion and company since the last review. The length of the men's cuffs, the height of their collars, the number of buttons on their boots, the very cockades of the horses — tin, japanned black, an invention of his Majesty's — all came in for silent approval or open disapprobation. Himself a rigid sub- mitter to all rules and regulations, he was an uncompromising stickler for their observance by 14 r I The Master and his Mania others. What was good enough for his soldiers was good enough for him ; what was good for him could not be bad for them. Bleeding relieved him when over-heated, as he too often was, with passion or drink. Bleeding must have a like beneficial effect upon the rest- less or insubordinate soldier. " Bleed the regi- ment, every man ! " was his command at one of the Spring reviews, in bitterly cold weather. He himself was first operated upon ; the unlucky regiment next, company by company, as they stood under arms. Never before or after did Frederick Will .\m cause so much blood to be spilt. In this month of May, in this grand function of the grand review, all the petty spites, jea- lousies, and resentments which the irascible King had conceived or cherished during the preceding twelvemonth, reached their culmina- tion. Happy the man, be he foreign minister or prince, who was bidden to the show. Than this no more signal mark of the royal favour could be conferred upon him ; nor, in its ab- sence, of the royal displeasure. (juy-Dickens, appointed English Resident at Berlin in 1730, saw the King for the first time in that capacity I :« ' The Romance of a Regiment 1 at the review in May 1732. Enraged against England by the abrupt rupture of the double- marriage negotiation, the King had deprived him of that privilege for two whole years. "Such a thing would appear incredible," says Guy- Dickens, " was I placed under any other meri- dian but that of Berlin." There it was not only credible, it was notorious. He who incurred the King's ill-will was always liable, be his rank or station what it might, to be unceremoniously hustled from the royal presence, or threatened with a cut of the royal cane ; but the unkindest cut of all was the cut inflicted by ignoring the offender when the annual review came round, and the Recruiter King, chuckling with gratified spite and pride, flaunted his useless prowess in the face of an amused continent. At these reviews "the whole talk ran upon nothing else but who had the best regiment, which performed most to the King's satisfaction, and " — this the foremost topic — " who had made the finest recruits since last year." For if there was anything the King dearly loved, it was a fine recruit. Given to blushing if a lady kissed his hand as Crown Prince, manhood found him grown so callous to the charms of 16 The Master and his Mania women, that when, in the course of a visit to the Hcentious Court of Dresden, retiring early that he might not retire drunk, he charged his son "to have a care of the ladies," the circum- stance was considered sufificiently noteworthy to call for mention in the official despatches of the day; while a report, current in April of the same year, to the effect that he had written to the King of Poland, pressing him to include some ladies in his retinue on his return visit, set all Berlin agape with astonishment and incredulity. These were concessions to the fair sex which "did not easily obtain belief," so wide-spread and well-founded was the popular conception of his supercilious and unimpassioned regard for them. Who had not heard tell of how, when he instituted the famous tabagie or tobacco par- liament in 1 7 13, by presenting the Belvidere Garden to General Gersdorff of the Great Grenadiers, he had expressly stipulated that, while pipes and tobacco should always be kept there, no women should on any account be allowed to enter ? — or how, when slapped on the face by the presumably virtuous Pannewitz, one of the Queen's maids-of-honour, whom he acci- 17 C ^ii 1 '■^ I'he Romance of a Regiment dentally embraced on an ill-lighted staircase, the inamative King could think of nothing more suitable to the exigencies or opportunities of the moment than to exclaim, " Oh, the naughty she-devil"? Who, moreover, was ignorant of that mad, malicious prank played upon him by the dissolute King of Poland, which had sent him flying, hot with indignation and shame, from the presence of a ravishingly beautiful but nude female? These things were known to all the world and his wife, and when talked over with many a shrug and wink, as no doubt they often were, we may be sure a certain stock saying of the purist King was not forgotten : " The most beautiful girl or woman in the world would be a matter of indifference to me; but soldiers, they are my weakness ! " They were by no means his only weakness. A character poorer in strength, or richer in weaknesses, was seldom or never seen. A good dinner pleased him almost as much as a fine recruit, especially if served at another's expense. He had a most embarrassing habit of inviting himself to the table of any minister, ofificer, or official whom he had reason to suspect of being unusually "flush" of pocket. One of his i8 The Master and his Mania Generals, who enjoyed almost as great a noto- riety for "nearness" in money matters as his royal master, once sought to excuse himself from this compulsory hospitality on the score of having no establishment suitable for his Majesty's entertainment. "Oh, Herr So-and- So's will do very well," said the King, naming one of the most expensive hostelries in Berlin ; and there, in due course, he put in an appear- ance with a numerous company. The dinner was all that the veriest gourmand could desire — numerous courses, costly dishes, rare wines; to all of which the guests did ample justice. In rising from table the General, who was resolved that he should not be "let in" for so loyal a spread, called for the landlord and asked : " How much a head ? " "One florin," replied Boniface, "without the wine." "Then here's a florin for myself," said the General, "and another for his Majesty. As for the rest of these people, I did not desire their company, and they can pay for themselves." The King settled the score, but it may be doubted whether he ever forgave it, since his stinginess was so excessive as to be proverbial. 19 The Romance of a Regiment t II *' I have no gold," was his stereotyped response to calls for money. Nor was ever Jew more avaricious. Some workmen once came upon a hidden treasure, and a dispute arising as to how it should be divided, the matter was referred to the King. His decision removed every ground of difference. " wSend it to me," said he. His fondness for oysters knew no bounds save repletion. To gulp down a hundred or so at a time was a common feat with him. He once, in the depth of a most severe winter, made a journey to Hamburg in an open post- waggon, to enjoy the succulent bivalves — fresh ! Equally fond of his pipe, he smoked incessantly. Every one who took a seat in the tabagie, or tobacco-council, had to make at least a pretence of sucking at a pipe. Nothing pleased him more than to compel the Prince Royal, who detested the fragrant weed as heartily as his father detested him, to smoke himself ill. When King Stanislaus was at Berlin, their Majesties uFed to smoke from seven p.m. until two o'clock in the morning, consuming in that time upwards of thirty-two pipes of tobacco each. Count Seckendorf himself braved the pangs of nausea to please the King in this particular. Many The Master and his Mania and various were the tributes of amused recog- nition paid to a habit which was regarded at that time as highly eccentric in one so eminent. At Prague, in 1732, to cite a single instance, the Emperor and Empress, who were adepts at *' taking people as they found them," won his heart and continued allegiance by a gift *' the peculiarity of which was much talked of" at the time. " It is, my Lord," writes simple- hearted Thomas Robinson, British Resident at Vienna, to his Secretary for Foreign Affairs, " a Great Golden Case, containing all manner of Utencils necessary for Smoaking. There are six different Painted China Pipes with Gold-worked Joints ; Tobacco Stoppers, fusils for striking fire, and two knives, with China handles set in Gold, the one in the nature of a pruning knife for cutting the Tobacco : the whole distributed into their proper divisions, besides a great compart- ment left for a large quantity of Smoaking Tobacco." To his habit of excessive smoking the King's extreme irritability of temper was perhaps due. Or it may have been " an effect of wine," for the consumption of which he was said to be *' the best German imaginable." 21 l! The Romance of a Regiment "Yesterday evening," writes Guy-Dickens, " the King dined one German mile hence with one of his chamberlains. Several other persons of distinction were also invited, and they all returned to town, the King not excepted, most immoderately drunk." The following day, after standing godfather to the child of one of his Generals, he was visibly "in the same cue." Indeed, he " had not gone to bed sober for a month." At most times, in most places, he " drank excessive hard." In circumstances such as these it is scarcely matter for wonder that his periodical "fits of fondness " for this, that, or the other person should have been succeeded by fits of uncon- trollable anger, or that he should have earned for himself the sobriquet of "The Wrathful Monarch." While yet a youth he had given his attendants a taste of his quality by throwing one of them over the banisters, and as he advanced in years his temper went from bad to worse. So violent were his paroxysms of passion, they not infrequently made him ill, and when this was the case no one could go near him " without being ill-used in words or blows." In sickness as in health his favourite implement of i''-. The Master and his Mania wrath was the stick which he invariably carried or kept by him ready for instant use. He is said to have furnished a room with these ready- reckoners, A characteristic story is told of him in this connection. One day a Jew, seeing the burly royal figure and its attendant stick coming down the street, took to his heels and fled. The King caught sight of him. " Hi ! you there, stop ! " The runaway Hebrew pulled up. *' What are you running for ? " demanded the King. "I — I vas a leetle afraid," stammered the trembling Jew. " Afraid, eh ? " cried the King, upon whom the point of the other's remark was by no means lost. "You have no business to be afraid. You ought to love me ! " and to inculcate the needful lesson he forthwith proceeded to conjugate the verb "to love" upon the poor fellow's jacket. To this turbulent and irascible nature the gaining of a fine recruit was as oil upon troubled waters. The news of such an acquisition pro- duced an immediate and visible effect upon his countenance and temper, and all was then sun- 23 The Romance of a Regiment shine and peace at Potsdam, or ^Vusterhause^, or Berlin, or wheresoever the otherwise wrathful monarch chanced to be. For in this lay his weakness of weaknesses, his love of loves, from which all his pleasures were derived, and to which all his passions were tributary, all his troubles due. It dominated his entire life, it was strong upon him in death ; and in it the student of Frederick William's little part upon the stage of Kings may find the true and only key to his character, policy and career. 24 CHAPTER II "the mp:ans of crack" Fredkrick William's passion for soldiers of extraordinary stature "passed all imagination." Report gave hut an inadeijuate notion of it, and the lengths to which it was carried had to be witnessed in all their absurd actuality in order to be rightly appreciated. For this was the acute phase of his military mania, a new form of madness which, baffling alike the gaping world at large and the ablest chirurgeons of his day, tailed loudly for " further anatomical research." The outward and visible sign of this singular form of dementia was a regiment styled variously the Great Grenadiers, the Big Prussian Blues, the Potsdam Giants — or, to omit half-a-score of equally apt appellatives — the Means of Grace. Composed of the tallest men to be found in all Europe, it was the centre from which all Frederick William's military splendour radiated, 25 I I IH: Ik I 'The Romance of a Regiment the model on which all his other regiments were moulded, the axis on which all the interests of his little world revolved; and in the porten- tous ranks and unparalleled discipline of its three battalions lay hidden, as in a germ, the greatness of the second Frederick, the destinies of the two Silesias, the foundations of an empire. The story of its growth is one of the most curious in history. " He who sends me tall soldiers," Frederick William was wont to avow, "can do with me whatever he likes." So universally did this candid confession become circulated, and so unanimously was it accepted at its face value, that emperors, kings, queens, princes, home and foreign ministers of every state or diplomatic degree, lick-spittles of every shade of rank and servility, recognizing in it the only effective recipe for favour or preferment, hastened, in face of present or in view of future need, to pay their court through the medium of giant recruits for the eccentric King's body-guard. The warm- est protestations of brotherly or cousinly regard were so much waste of breath at the Prussian Court unless thus backed up. The highest in the land might sue in vain who sued through 26 I ^ C( The Means of Grace " i any channel but that of nature's extra cubit ; and thus it was that the regiment came to be known, through the ironical wit of Wilhelmine, own daughter to the exacting gigantomaniac, as the "Means of Grace." Peter the Great, Czar of all the Russias and Protector of the Northern Coasts, with politic eye to assistance in his designs on Sweden, and to the future training of Russian military cadets, led the van of illustrious panderers. His first contribution to the ranks of the giant regiment was made as early as the year 17 14, when he forwarded to Berlin a contingent of "eighty Muscovites notable for their tallness." The year 1717 saw the half-savage Czar himself in- stalled at Berlin, in the Queen's palace of Mon- Bijou, asking without ceremony for whatever tickled his fancy, drawing blood from that stoniest of stones, his royal host's miserly heart. A quantity of rare statuary, a priceless cabinet of amber curios, and a Dutch pleasure-yacht said to have -been worth ^50,000 of present-day money, followed him, on this or other occasions, to his marshy capital amid the fens of Neva. An outlay so phenomenally lavish, under a regime which made the ordering of a new suit 27 '' i T The Romance of a Regiment l^: ft'i of clothes an epoch in Court annals, must have cost the parsimonious King of Prussia many bitter and lasting regrets but for the sequel. This more than reco^iciled him to his prodigality, for the Czar had promised to send him, in com- pensation, an annual batch of tall northerners, and ere many months had passed there arrived, as an earnest of his good faith, 150 of the tallest to be found in Russian dominions. Year in, year out, from that time onward until the death of the great Czar closed the account, a squad of sheepskin-clad Muscovite giants, footsore and weary from, it too often happened, a terrible mid-winter march, filed sullenly into the palace yard at Potsdam, where no emotions were wasted upon them save those of wonder and delight. The Czar's minister, who was "much caress'd" on such occasions, reaped the reward of their sufferings. Upon the whole, the Czar's covetous pickings at Mon-Bijou proved anything but a bad investment for Frederick William. The latter possessed a pretty sense of humour, and he must often, when asked whence he had obtained a certain son of Anak, have echoed with twinkling eyes the naive words uttered at Berlin, in 17 17, by one of Catherine 28 ft T ** The Means of Grace " the Brown's serving women, apropos of the child she carried in her arms : "The Czar did me the honour." The colossal Russian seems to have stood high in Frederick \Villiam's esteem until an officer, whom he had sent to Petersburg on a man-hunting expedition, returned, after a whole year's dissipation in the northern capital, with some specimens who came up to the King's expectations neither in point of number nor of size, and this, together with other disappoint- ments from the same quarter, began " to alter his opinion of 'em." Still, he was not at all averse to taking what he could get, and when, shortly after Peter's death, the Czarina ordered her provincial governors to send forthwith to Pots- dam "all the tall men that could be found in their respective districts, of six foot four inches high and upwards," the gift, which netted twenty men, was hailed with liveliest satisfaction. Succeeding years doubtless brought other con- tingents from the northern steppes, but concern- ing these the records are silent. Not until 1739 do we read of the advent at Berlin of "eighteen Turks, taken at the siege of Oczakow, of which the Czarina has made a present to the King of 29 I :;J/ ■7. * 27z„d lie King in his meshes. The pleasing duty of bestowing the Emperor's living largesse de\oive^i ripon him as a matter of course, and clothed him with posver. What obstinacy could withstand the agreeable news that Hungary was thrown open to the Prussian recruiter, or that every colonel in the Emperor's dominions had orders to pick out the tallest and handsomest man in his regiment and send him to Potsdam ? What ill-humour could refuse to yield to a sumptuous repast washed down with the choicest of wines, and followed by the pre- sentation of a herculean Tyrolese who had cost upwards of 5000 dollars to procure ? — or what intrigue shake the credit of a minister whose (( The Means of Grace " secret instructions directed him to ply the King with great men, and more great men, until he gained his point? To so beneficent a being the King could refuse nothing, and ably abetted by his bosom friend Grumkow — another unscrupulous fisher in troubled waters — the wily Count cast his tempting bait in every social, domestic, or political eddy, and added to his own or his imperial master's catch at the expense of any against whom he bore a grudge. The Treaty of Hanover, by virtue of which Frederick William had become an ally of England and the Dutch, was his first and main object of attack. A curious light is thrown upon his aggressive tactics by a letter which he indited, in October of 1726, to Prince Eugene. "Send me twenty-four of the finest, tallest, and youngest men in Hungary, Croatia, and Bohemia," he wrote. " I should be able to do more with this present here in the matter of the treaty, than with the most powerful arguments." The Prince promptly complied with his request, and the secret treaty of Wusterhausen, binding — if so unstable an ally could be bound — Frederick William to the Emperor, demonstrated beyond JO D yyi" ^wp ^t^m mmmmmmmmmmmmmKmm hree tall men," and to promise " ten more." On the outern'ost edge of this outer circle of sycophants, looking Potsdam-wards with long- ing eyes, hovered another Field-Marshal, Count Miinnich of the Russian service. Being anxious to come from Dt.ntzic, where he held the far 45 The Romance of a Regiment ' ' n '\ \ from desirable post of commandant, to win the King's favour by a personal interview, he wrote asking Count Seckendorf how he could best succeed in achieving his end. " To make your Excellency's arrival pleasing to the King," the Count replied with that engaging frankness of which he was sometimes guilty, "it is abso- lutely necessary that you come not alone, but with at least four tall men as a present for the King's Majesty. You can obtain them either where you are, or in Poland, where they are to be had in plenty, and may easily be got away. It is all one to the King of what nationality these creatures may be, so long as they are tall and well set-up." With so many notable instances of the value of " these creatures " before their eyes, the King's own ministers had no option but to sail with the only favourable wind that blew. Degenfeld, returning from a political mission, " paid his court that way " through a couple of tall m.en whom he had inveigled over from England. So, too, did Borcke the younger, who in his high capacity of Prussian Minister at the Court of King George, achieved notoriety — as we shall have more than one occasion to remember in 46 " 'The Means of Grace " the course of this narrative — by the "unworthy trade of debauching and seducing " his Britannic Majesty's subjects for similar ends ; while Chan- cellor Grumkow himself, first Minister of State though he was, owned with shame that " he was obliged to play the Pyrate as well as others, insomuch that was the Emperor's first Kettle- Drummer a jMan fit for his purpose, he would steal him away if he was within his reach." Than the lot of the Prussian army officers in this respect nothing could well have been more pitiable. Let the difficulty and expense of gratifying the King's whim be what it might, they " could not be sure of their bread " unless able to show a goodly number of tall recruits at every review. " The King has declared," General Forcade once wrote, in imploring Count Flemming to help him make up his tale of tall men, " that the officer who has none shall be broken like glass ! " Nay, an even severer punishment than cashiering awaited him who was guilty of this heinous sin of omission ; for if the King did not find the requisite ornaments of the right wing in sufficient numbers, or of a size to please his fastidious taste, immurement in Spandau was the possible fate of the defaulter. 47 "The Romance of a Regiment ^\ Such was the Nemesis that in 1739 overtook a major, whose glaring remissness in this respect singled him out for the King's displeasure. He was committed to the dread fortress for six years. To escape such disgrace and the consequent ruin it entailed upon them, ofificers were not only obliged, like greater men, to have recourse to practices utterly inconsistent with every dic- tate of honour and self-respect, but also to make pecuniary sacrifices which only too often brought them to the very brink of the ruin they sought to avoid. In a sense, it is true, they cast their bread upon the waters, for sooner or later, after few days or many, a run of recruiting luck would surely put them in pocket again ; but tall men did not grow like mushrooms, and for the time being the pinch of the shoe was excruciating. One captain at Magdeburg was obliged to give 4000 dollars and a substantial monthly pension in exchange for the only make-shift upon whom he could lay hands — the seventeen-year old, abnormally overgrown son of an Austrian gen- tleman, who was not above selling the youthful prodigy into a state worse than slavery for such a consideration. 48 :L, I' ''^ 'The Means of Grace The loss of one of these expensive parade ornaments was a serious blow to the purveyor. A tall fugleman once got drunk at an inn, and in this state staggered into the Spree through the defective railings of a bridge. He was drowned, and as he was a foreigner, who repre- sented an outlay of 1500 dollars, his captain, well aware that a king who was so fond of live giants would give not a stiver for a dead one, however tall, hit upon an ingenious method of getting his money back. Appealing to his Majesty, he enlarged in pathetic terms upon the deceased's phenomenal inches, and prayed that the official responsible for the care of the bridge, and hence for the loss of the giant, should be made to suffer for his negligence. The King's heart was touched. Tears of regret for the dead " long fellow " mingled with the ink of the marginal in which he summarily ordered the official to make good the captain's loss, and to have a corporal and six privates quartered on him until he paid up. But this, alas for the humour of our story ! was an exceptional case. Seldom indeed were the recruiting burdens of officers thus lightened ; and so heavily did those burdens tell upon their pockeis, so bitterly upon 49 B lU h 'J > I The Romance of a Regiment their spirits, they were fain to cry, both great and small : " Oh for a war, to cure our cruel task- master of his fatal passion for tall men ! " But if the situation of officers in general was bad, that of the Prince Royal, first as Colonel of the Brandenburg section of Great Grenadiers, next as commander of the regiment stationed at Ruppin, V as infinitely worse. Thanking his father, as a lad, for an addition to his cadet corps, he expressed a hope that the new recruit might grow sufficiently to allow of his admission, at some future day, to that famous regiment in which only giants were enrolled. How fervently in after years, when "recruiting was the burthen he groaned under," must he have echoed that wish ! "The practice," he declared to Guy-Dickens in 1739, "pressed upon him with intolerable weight. It was all very well to expostulate with him about the money he threw away on it, all very well to say there was no reason why he should be at greater expense on that account than any other colonel in the service. Reason- ing must cease when recruits were concerned. He had begun to pay his court that way after his disgrace, and it was the only way he had to procure him a quiet life." 50 (( 'The Means of Grace " The calm of the Prince's existence, however, during the period to which he was wont to refer in after and more stormy years as the " time of his tranquillity," was not wholly undisturbed. Fine recruits might appease an irascible king and prevent ugly scenes at inspection, but mean- time that commonplace arbiter of peaceful domesticity, the creditor, had by some means or other to be staved off. There was little to choose, perhaps, between his father'c anger and an avalanche of bills which an allowance truly Frederician in its meagreness rendered it im- possible to meet. But a golden day was com- ing, when the beggar should be master of the miser's hoard, and on this the Prince traded, living largely on credit, and spending nearly every penny of his slender income, of the Emperor's equally slender advances — 2500 crowns, as near as may be estimated, freely given and "not to be required again " — and of the loans obtained from Biron, Duke of Cour- land, on the procuration or purchase of tall men. Once he succeeded in touching the royal heart and pocket by his show of fine recruits. ' ' I love thee, Fritz/' hiccoughed his father, after the generous dinner which followed, " for 51 ■ 'The Romance of a Regiment I f ii) I perceive a Frederick William in thee after all. Ask of me what thou wilt " " I desire nothing of my Most All-Gracious Lord-Father," interrupted the I'rince, who knew how to appraise such protestations, " but his continued love and favour." "Good!" said the King. " I will give thee 100,000 crowns as an earnest of it." But in his sober moments he first forgot and then regretted the promise, payment was long deferred, the gift finally dwindled to 70,000 crowns. Harassed beyond endurance by the demands of petty tradesmen, and driven to the utmost straits for a tittle of the treasure with which his father's coffers threatened to burst but did not, the Prince demeaned himself by an act for which he afterwards had reason to blush with shame. He helped himself to the contents of the regimental recruiting chest. The recruiting chest — or, more comprehen- sively, the recruiting fund — was an institution of Frederick William's own. Frederick I. had had a marine fund ; Frederick William, diverting it into the insatiable channel of his mania, applied it chiefly to the maintenance of his so- called body-guard, though in a secondary sense 52 W!«wpji;wii^»wrrnr««PitWM«iP'