generals with German
musket balls. It was such a brilliant victory, such a humiliating
defeat of the hereditary enemy, that everywhere in Germany there was
hearty rejoicing. Even where the soldiers of a State were fighting
against King Frederick, the people at home in city and country
rejoiced at the blows he dealt in good old German fashion. And the
longer the war lasted, the more active became the faith in the King's
invincibility, and the higher rose the confidence of the Germans. For
the first time in long, long years they now had a hero of whose
military glory they could be proud--a man who accomplished what seemed
more than human. Innumerable anecdotes about him ran through the
country. Every little touch about his calmness, good humor, kindness
to individual soldiers, and the loyalty of his army, traveled hundreds
of miles. How, in danger of death, he played the flute in his tent,
how his wounded soldiers sang chorals after the battle, how he took
off his hat to a regiment--he has often been imitated since--all this
was reported on the Neckar and the Rhine, was printed, and listened to
with merry laughter and tears of emotion. It was natural that poets
should sing his praise. Three of them had been in the Prussian army:
Gleim and Lessing, as secretaries of Prussian generals, and Ewald von
Kleist, a favorite of the younger literary circles, as an officer,
until the bullet struck him at Kunersdorf. But still more touching for
us is the loyal devotion of the Prussian people. The old provinces,
Prussia, Pomerania, Brandenburg, and Westphalia, were suffering
unspeakably by the war, but the proud joy of having a share in the
hero of Europe often lifted even humble men above their own
sufferings. Citizens and peasants took the field as militiamen again
and again for years. When a number of recruits from the province of
Cleves and the county of Ravensberg deserted after a lost battle and
returned home, the deserters were declared perjurers by their own
fellow-countrymen and relatives, were excluded from the villages and
driven back to the army.

Foreign opinion was no less enthusiastic. In the Protestant cantons of
Switzerland there was as warm sympathy with the King's fate as if the
descendants of the Ruetli men had never been separated from the German
empire. There were people there who were made ill by vexation when the
King's cause was in a bad way. It was the same in England. Every
victory of the King aroused wild