Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thackeray (english readers .TXT) 📖

on which I am yet in doubt, and if your honour could but condescend to enlighten me on these, I think—I think Solomon Hirsch would be a convert to your eloquence.”

‘“What are these points, my good friend?” said I; and I pointed out to him the twenty-four heads of my sermon, asking him in which of these his doubts lay.

‘We had been walking up and down before the inn while our conversation took place, but the windows being open, and my comrades having heard the discourse in the morning, requested me, rather peevishly, not to resume it at that period. I, therefore, moved on with my disciple, and, at his request, began at once the sermon; for my memory is good for anything, and I can repeat any book I have read thrice.

‘I poured out, then, under the trees, and in the calm moonlight, that discourse which I had pronounced under the blazing sun of noon. My Israelite only interrupted me by exclamations indicative of surprise, assent, admiration, and increasing conviction. “Prodigious!” said he;—“Wunderschon!” would he remark at the conclusion of some eloquent passage; in a word, he exhausted the complimentary interjections of our language: and to compliments what man is averse? I think we must have walked two miles when I got to my third head and my companion begged I would enter his house, which we now neared, and partake of a glass of beer; to which I was never averse.

‘That house, sir, was the inn at which you, too, if I judge aright, were taken. No sooner was I in the place, than three crimps rushed upon me, told me I was a deserter, and their prisoner, and called upon me to deliver up my money and papers; which I did with a solemn protest as to my sacred character. They consisted of my sermon in MS., Prorector Nasenbrumm’s recommendatory letter, proving my identity, and three groschen four pfennigs in bullion. I had already been in the cart twenty hours when you reached the house. The French officer, who lay opposite you (he who screamed when you trod on his foot, for he was wounded), was brought in shortly before your arrival. He had been taken with his epaulets and regimentals, and declared his quality and rank; but he was alone (I believe it was some affair of love with a Hessian lady which caused him to be unattended); and as the persons into whose hands he fell will make more profit of him as a recruit than as a prisoner, he is made to share our fate. He is not the first by many scores so captured. One of M. de Soubise’s cooks, and three actors out of a troop in the French camp, several deserters from your English troops (the men are led away by being told that there is no flogging in the Prussian service), and three Dutchmen were taken besides.’

‘And you,’ said I—‘you who were just on the point of getting a valuable living,—you who have so much learning, are you not indignant at the outrage?’

‘I am a Saxon,’ said the candidate, ‘and there is no use in indignation. Our government is crushed under Frederick’s heel these five years, and I might as well hope for mercy from the Grand Mogul. Nor am I, in truth, discontented with my lot; I have lived on a penny bread for so many years, that a soldier’s rations will be a luxury to me. I do not care about more or less blows of a cane; all such evils are passing, and therefore endurable. I will never, God willing, slay a man in combat; but I am not unanxious to experience on myself the effect of the war-passion, which has had so great an influence on the human race. It was for the same reason that I determined to marry Amalia, for a man is not a complete Mensch until he is the father of a family; to be which is a condition of his existence, and therefore a duty of his education. Amalia must wait; she is out of the reach of want, being, indeed, cook to the Frau Prorectorinn Nasenbrumm, my worthy patron’s lady. I have one or two books with me, which no one is likely to take from me, and one in my heart which is the best of all. If it shall please Heaven to finish my existence here, before I can prosecute my studies further, what cause have I to repine? I pray God I may not be mistaken, but I think I have wronged no man, and committed no mortal sin. If I have, I know where to look for forgiveness; and if I die, as I have said, without knowing all that I would desire to learn, shall I not be in a situation to learn EVERYTHING, and what can human soul ask for more?

‘Pardon me for putting so many I’s in my discourse,’ said the candidate, ‘but when a man is talking of himself, ‘tis the briefest and simplest way of talking.’

In which, perhaps, though I hate egotism, I think my friend was right. Although he acknowledged himself to be a mean-spirited fellow, with no more ambition than to know the contents of a few musty books, I think the man had some good in him; especially in the resolution with which he bore his calamities. Many a gallant man of the highest honour is often not proof against these, and has been known to despair over a bad dinner, or to be cast down at a ragged-elbowed coat. MY maxim is to bear all, to put up with water if you cannot get Burgundy, and if you have no velvet to be content with frieze. But Burgundy and velvet are the best, bien entendu, and the man is a fool who will not seize the best when the scramble is open.

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