The Prussian Girls

Начало книги

The year was 1729. The winter on the plain north of Rathenow already promised particular severity, even in October. It was sixteen years since Friedrich Wilhelm I, the “Royal Drill Sergeant” as he was called in the courtyards and corridors of European Ministries, had become the first Hohenzollern ruler of Brandenburg and established such rigorous discipline as the keynote of his State that it was now widely known as “the land of the Corporal's stick.” As for the Army, he had initiated a severity unknown since Roman times; one of his first ordinances was to decree that any soldier resisting discipline should run the gauntlet thirty times.

But this atmosphere of drill and discipline, in which the individual existed only for the State, by now permeated every institution, including the family. Of his son, this new and self-styled King of Prussia had fulminated-“That snot-nose, he shall have the whip before he has a wife.” And he would have him tried as a common deserter, for leaving his country. It was, in fact, in the year in which our story opens that the young Prince Friedrich's supposed love-affair with Dorothea Elizabeth Ritter, the demure daughter of a Potsdam Rector, had been discovered. The result? The following official decree:

Читать дальше →