willows and drained mire, except that human industry is pleasantly busy
upon it, and has long been. So that the neighborhood is populous beyond
expectation; studded with rough cottages in white-wash; hamlets in a
paved condition; and comfortable signs of labor victoriously wrestling
with the wilderness. Custrin, an arsenal and garrison, begirt with two
rivers, and with awful bulwarks, and bastions cased in stone,--"perhaps
too high," say the learned,--is likely to be impregnable to Russian
engineering on those terms. Here, with brevity, is the catastrophe of
Custrin.

TUESDAY, 15th AUGUST, 1758. At two in the morning, several thousand
Russians, grenadiers, under Quartermaster General Stoffeln, whom the
readers of Mannstein know from old Oczakow times, are astir; pushing
along from Gross Kamin, through the scraggy firwoods, and flat peat
countries; intending a stroke on Custrin, if perhaps they can get it:
[Tempelhof, ii. 217; but Tielcke, ii. 69 et seq., the real source.]--not
the slightest chance to get Custrin; Prussian soldiership and Turkish
being two quite different things! The pickeering and manoeuvring of
Stoffeln shall not detain us. Stoffeln came along by the Landsberg
road (course of the now Konigsberg-Custrin Railway); and drove in the
Prussian out-parties, who at first took him for Cossacks. Stoffeln set
himself down on the north side of the place; planted cannon in certain
clay-pits thereabouts, and about nine o'clock began firing shells and
incendiary grenadoes at a great rate. Tielcke saw everything,--and had
the honor to take luncheon, that evening, with certain chief Officers,
sitting on the ground, after all was over, and only a few shots from the
Garrison still dropping. [Tielcke, ii. 75 n.]

At the third grenade, which, it seems, fell into a straw magazine,
Custrin took fire; could not be quenched again, so much dry wood in it,
so much disorder too, the very soldiers some of them disorderly (a bad
deserter set); so that it soon flamed aloft,--from side to side one sea
of flame: and man, woman and child, every soul (except the Garrison,
which sat enclosed in strong stone), had to fly across the River, under
penalty of death by fire. Of Custrin, by five in the evening, there was
nothing left but the black ashes; the Garrison standing unharmed, and
the Church, School-house and some stone edifices in a charred skeleton
condition. "No life was lost, except that of one child in arms." All
Neumark had lo