very next morning he was attacked with a disease of the eyes,
to which he attributed his subsequent blindness.

On the 26th of August there was a prospect of improvement in the
condition of the corps. Davoust had sent forty wagons of provisions
to Hamburg, and the men were ordered to capture them. The attack was
successful, but at what a price! Theodor Korner, the noble young poet
whose songs will commemorate the deeds of the Lutzow corps so long as
German men and boys sing his "Thou Sword at my Side," or raise their
voices in the refrain of the Lutzow Jagers' song:

"Do you ask the name of yon reckless band? 'Tis Lutzow's black troopers
dashing swift through the land!"

Langethal first saw the body of the author of "Lyre and Sword" and
"Zriny" under an oak at Wobbelin; but he was to see it once more under
quite different circumstances. He has mentioned it in his autobiography,
and I have heard him describe several times his visit to the corpse of
Theodor Korner.

He had been quartered in Wobbelin, and shared his room with an Oberjager
von Behrenhorst, son of the postmaster-general in Dessau, who had taken
part in the battle of Jena as a young lieutenant and returned home with
a darkened spirit.

At the summons "To my People," he had enlisted at once as a private
soldier in the Lutzow corps, where he rose rapidly to the rank of
Oberjager. During the war he had often met Langethal and Middendorf;
but the quiet, reserved man, prematurely grave for his years, attached
himself so closely to Korner that he needed no other friend.

After the death of the poet on the 26th of August, 1813, he moved
silently about as though completely crushed. On the night which followed
the 27th he invited his room-mate Langethal to go with him to the body
of his friend. Both went first to the village church, where the dead
Jagers lay in two long black rows. A solemn stillness pervaded the
little house of God, which had become during this night the abode of
death, and the nocturnal visitors gazed silently at the pallid, rigid
features of one lifeless young form after another, but without finding
him whom they sought.

During this mute review of corpses it seemed to Langethal as if Death
were singing a deep, heartrending choral, and he longed to pray for
these young, crushed human blossoms; but his companion led the way into
the guard's little room. There lay the poet, "the radiance of an angel
on his face," though his body bore many tra