ball grazed my elbow and another went through my cap; but at sunset
the French were broken, and we swept after the rout as well as we
could through the litter, along the southward roads. We were at a halt
for a minute, I remember, when a rider in a chapeau with a plume, and
a hooked nose underneath, trotted up, wrapped in a military cloak,
and somebody said it was Wellington." Grandfather was sure to be at
a white heat before he had finished, and so, too, his audience. The
athletic student grandson, with a deep scar across his cheek from a
_Schläger_ cut, rose and paced the room. The _Fräulien_,
his sister, to whom the retired grenadier has told the story of the
feather-beds at Weimar, showed in her eves she remembered it all.
"Yes, friend American!" breaks in the father of the family, "and it
all must be done over again. Sooner or later it must come, a great
struggle with France; the Latin race or the Teutonic, which shall be
supreme in Europe? We are ready now; arsenals filled, horses waiting,
equipments for everybody. Son Fritz there has his uniform ready, and
somewhere there is one for me. _Donnerwetter_! If they get into
Prussia, they'll find a tough old _Landsturm_! Only let Vater
Wilhelm turn his hand, and to-morrow close upon a million trained and
well-armed troops could be stepping to the drum." It was an evening at
the end of June. Napoleon was having the finishing touches put to the
new Opera House at Paris, thinking, so far as the world could tell,
of nothing more important than how many imperial eagles it would do to
put along the cornice. King William was packing for Ems, designing
to be back at the peaceful unveiling of his father's statue the first
week in August. Bismarck was at his Pomeranian estate, in poor health,
it was said, plotting nothing but to circumvent his bodily trouble.
In less than a month full-armed Prussia was on the march. I could
understand the readiness, when I thought of the spiked helmet I had
seen in the Prussian home that quiet summer night.