stant
districts, bore their part in the work, often undergoing the greatest
labours and sufferings, especially those on the frontiers. A simple
arrangement sufficed for the business in the circles; a military
commission was formed of two landed proprietors, one citizen and one
yeoman, the landrath of the circle, and the burgomaster of the capital
of the circle, were almost always the almost zealous members of it. It
was undoubtedly an occupation for simple men which was adapted to
awaken extraordinary powers. They had to deal with the remains of the
French army, with their hunger and typhus, with the thronging Russians
who for many months were in a doubtful position, with two languages,
that of their new friends being more strange to them than that of their
retreating enemies; and, added to this, the coarseness and wildness of
their new allies, whose subaltern officers were for the most part no
better than their soldiers, lusting after brandy, and at least as
rapacious and more brutal than irregular troops. Soon did the
commissioners learn how to deal with the wild people; tobacco chests
stood open, together with clay pipes, in the office room: it was an
endless coming and going of Russian officers, they filled their pipes
and smoked, demanded brandy, and received harmless beer. If ever the
coarseness of the strangers broke out, the Prussian officials at last
learnt to punish the ill-behaved with their own weapons, the kantschu,
which perhaps a Russian officer had left him, that he might more easily
manage his people. The last typhus sufferers of the French still filled
the hospitals of the city, the Baschkirs bivouacked with their felt
caps in the market-place; the inhabitants quarrelled with the
foreigners quartered on them; every day the Russians required the
necessaries of life and transport, couriers; Russian and Prussian
officers demanded relays of horses, the cultivators and peasants of the
neighbouring villages complained that they had been deprived of theirs,
that no ploughboys were to be found, and that the cultivation of the
land was impossible. In the midst of all this hurly-burly came the
orders of their own government, strong and dictatorial, as was required
by the times, and not always practical, which was natural in such
haste; the cloth-makers were to furnish cloth, the shoe-makers shoes,
the harness-makers and saddlers cartouche-boxes and saddles; so many
hundred pair of boots and shoes, so many hundred