forgotten, to proceed forthwith to the
Bürgermeister, and register their names as liable
to service. And I believe, if any were
forgotten, they did register. They could not
hope to avoid detection for any length of
time.

The conscription was fixed on Monday, the
eighteenth of the month, eighteen hundred
and thirty nine. The whole of the
previous week anxious fathers and mothers
might be seen besieging the office of the
Bürgermeister, or making their humble
representations to the pastor, and in some instances
to the schoolmaster. The conscription, though
established for many years, was not
altogether popular among the older peasants,
who could not and would not understand by
what right the King took their boys from the
plough and the thrashing-floor, to play at
soldiers in some distant town. What was to
become of the fields without Wilhelm? and
how could old Schönenberg ever get his hay
in without Karl? The King was high
and mighty, and his will must be done,
but if the Herr Bürgermeister would speak
a word at the right time, the Herren of the
Commission would certainly relent and spare
Wilhelm or Karl, at least for a year or
two, until the younger boys were fit for field
work.

I made it my business to get upon a
familiar chatty sort of footing with the
Bürgermeister. I asked him about the anti-
military tastes of the older peasantry, and
understood from him that matters had been
much worse years ago, when the new system
was first established. Previous to the French
war the Prussian army, like the English army
of the present day, consisted of volunteers,
with this difference—that the necessity of a
great number of troops, and the comparative
smallness of the sums which the State could
devote to the acquiring and maintaining
them, encouraged all sorts of low trickery
and even acts of violence on the part of the
recruiting officers. The service was for life,
or until the soldiers were disabled. The
usual plan was to make the men drunk, lock
them up, and take them to the depôt in irons
like so many convicts. A great many of them
were convicts. Vagabonds, whenever they
could be apprehended, were forcibly enlisted;
acts of petty larceny, instead of being
punished with the treadmill, were almost
always punished by forcible enrolment. The
arrival of a recruiting officer in any place
caused a general jail delivery; and, all criminals
who were not destined for the scaffold,
had to exchange the prison dress for the King's
uniform.

It was not an easy task to establish the
present Prussian army on such rotten ground.
Public opinion was against it. The three
years' military service, which the State
demanded from each subject, was
considered in the light of the demand of an
income-tax, "for three years." Three years,
every one apprehended, meant always. That
the State, especially in peace, would not spend
its annual income of soldiers, and that some
must be discharged to make room for others,
seemed, however, obvious enough. In the
opinion of many, the terms soldier and
ruffian were synonymous. Hence it required
severe and even tyrannical measures to
prevent parents and guardians from hiding their
sons and wards.

All this the Bürgermeister told me, together
with strange stories of the cunning devices
and stratagems which some of the country
people of his youth resorted to, in order to
avoid the dreaded conscription. For a long
time the young men cut off their fingers; until
it was decreed that the maimed recruits
should be enlisted in the Train corps. They
were dressed in coarse grey cloth, like so
many convicts, and employed as drivers of
artillery and baggage waggons. There were
other young men who listened to the advice
of old women cunning in herbs; and who,
by dint of some poisonous salve, made
their legs swell and fester. That was the
way, said the Bürgermeister, in which lame
old Löhr, the drunkard, escaped the conscription.
They sent him to the hospital, but the
surgeons could not cure his leg—(it was
presumed that he contrived to use the old
crone's salve while under treatment)—and he
was sent back limping, "and he limps," said
the Bürgermeister, "and has an open sore in his
leg to this day. It is a visitation, Herr Becher
—a special visitation to teach our young men
that the King's will must be done. The
King's service is God's service, and he who
deserts from the one is a deserter from the
other. I would rather," added the
Bürgermeister, stroking his moustaches, "slay my
son with my own hand (which would have
been difficult, for he had no children) than
do aught to enable him to desert from the
King's service."

Phrases of this kind belong to the stock-in-
trade of a Prussian functionary. He who
repeats them often enough and loud enough
has a good chance of promotion. Knowing
this, the Bürgermeister spoke out on every
occasion; but, with all his apparent fierceness,
he was really a kind man, and on the day of
the conscription, he used his utmost endeavours
to obtain freedom or a respite for
several of the poorer recruits in his commune.

The approach of that grand day was remarkable
for various sly manoeuvres on the
part of those who had hopes to be declared
"invalids" on account of bodily weakness.
Others, being small and thin, expected to be
"put back" for a year or two; for, when a
recruit is not strong enough at the legal age,
he is told to go home and come back next
year, or the year after. The weak and small
men did all they could to appear weaker and
smaller. They neither ate nor slept, that
their faces might be pale and their muscles
flabby, on the day of inspection.