Chapter V: Part 5

When to ordinary senility there is added the intolerable desire that accompanies such trouble as I have mentioned, all other considerations are cast to the winds. After his marriage to Marie de’ Medici Henri abandoned even the pretence of decency. Marie seems to have had to let him go his own way. As for him, he complained that she made his life a hell upon earth, and he attempted to assuage his wounded feelings with every other girl who came his way. There were many such who yielded to the king while they mocked at the elderly man with their younger lovers. Then, in 1609 he met Charlotte de Montmorency, a charming and beautiful maiden of fifteen. He saw her while she was rehearsing for a mask, dressed up as a nymph of Diana. He was passionately arrested by her beauty, but soon afterwards was laid up with an attack of gout. Alas, Charlotte was already engaged to a M. de Bassompierre; but this did not daunt the conqueror of Gabrielle d’Estrees. He had dealt with such trifles before. As he lay groaning with the gout he thought out a brilliant scheme, which he amazingly proposed to M. de Bassompierre. He sent for the young man, told him that he was frantically in love with Charlotte, and asked him to give up the idea of marrying her so that the damsel should be free to become Henri’s platonic mistress, with all her virginal beauty untouched. And de Bassompierre actually agreed to give up his bride. Naturally Charlotte was deeply aggrieved, and gave her easy-going and youthful lover such a withering glance that he retired in mortification to his own room and could not eat for three days. But that did not mean that Henri was to possess her; for, in the easy fashion of those days, he married her to the Prince de Condé, who was supposed to think only of hunting and field-sports and not at all about women. But Condé’s nature changed after marriage to a beautiful girl, as any cynic might have expected; and he became mightily annoyed when he saw the king aping the young man in silks and satins, and paying violent court to his beautiful young wife; nor was Charlotte so discreet as she might have been, for she received from him desperate love-letters and poems, and answered them erotically and foolishly. The young husband and the elderly lover quarrelled fiercely, and Henri lost what dignity he still possessed. Then Condé took her away for safety to a castle near Flanders; Henri followed, and stood by the roadside, disguised as one of his own huntsmen, with a patch over one eye that he might have the joy of gazing upon her for a moment. Seeing her at a window, he would bow and kiss his hand, placing the other hand over his heart, and assuming all the ridiculous antics of an elderly lover on the stage. The Duc de Montmorency, her father, wished Charlotte to yield that he might gain the favour of the king. When Condé heard this he thought he had better take more active measures, so the young couple hastened over the border, whither Henri could not follow them. The actual details of the next few months are not very interesting; they simply represent the frantic efforts of a man who was getting senile to gratify an adulterous passion. It is said that he even threatened war with Spain for Charlotte’s bright eyes, but this is probably not true. Henri loved his country enough to prevent him from doing anything so wicked. But if his prostate was not growing too large he showed all the mental symptoms of it so far as we can tell to-day. The incident is one of the most painful in history, and calls for all one’s sympathy with the “sorrows of a poor old man.”

Then came Ravaillac and his dagger to end Henri’s misery; and probably, to those who know the inevitable end of a man suffering possibly from enlarged prostate without modern surgery, Providence was kind to Henri in sparing him years of real misery and pain. Assassination is at least a merciful death to a man who at fifty-five has nothing to look forward to but the “labour and sorrow” of the Psalmist. People often wonder what further reforms he might have effected in France; but it is the common experience that a man does not live very long after such an incident as that with Charlotte de Montmorency. We cannot even guess at the cause of this degeneration in Henri and Marguerite. Syphilis would no doubt account for it; but so far as I know there is no reason to suspect it. He had done great work for France. Besides the merciful Edict of Nantes, which gave freedom of worship to the French Protestants for generations, he reformed her finances, organised her army, and introduced the silkworm industry which has done so much to strengthen the people of that amazing country. The French have long ago forgiven his sins against morality and decency, and taken him to their hearts as one of the greatest of Frenchmen. And now, when his wonderful personal charm has long mouldered to dust, the evil that he did is interred with his bones: only the good remains in the memory of mankind.

* * * * *

The best book about the troubles of old age is _The Medical Aspects of Old Age_, by Sir Humphrey Rolleston, which, though originally written for doctors, should be read by every man and woman in the land; for perhaps it would induce in them a greater sympathy for the old men. “Enlarged prostate” must be taken symbolically. The whole subject of these senile attacks of concupiscence is still under discussion, and, just as you spared me a too close inquiry into Elizabeth’s physical attributes, I ask you to spare me the inquiry into those of an equally great, but far more lovable, sovereign, Henri Quatre. The incident of Henri Quatre and Charlotte de Montmorency seems to represent what is known as a “psychosis of involution” occurring somewhat prematurely owing to Henri’s hard life in the field.

Frederick the Great

If it be true that most great men are slightly “cracked” surely this fact is proved by the peculiarities of Frederick the Great. I propose to defend the memory of this most illustrious of Prussian soldiers and minor poets from the infamous slander that he died of syphilis. Frederick had the misfortune to win his glory in fighting against three women: the Empress Maria Theresa, the Empress Elizabeth of Russia, and Madame de Pompadour; and, most unwisely, he tried to fight them, not only with guns and bayonets, but with jibes and flouts and jeers. His father, as is well known, was King Frederick William Hohenzollern of Brandenburg, who was famous for his regiment of giants. These colossal creatures averaged well over six feet high, and to find them Europe, Asia, Africa and America were ransacked at vast expense. Frederick William must have been at heart a man of scientific mind, for he experimented in breeding with these human cattle; and doubtless his experience, had it been recorded with true Prussian accuracy, would have been the forerunner of those results of the Abbé Mendel which have laid the foundation for the science of eugenics. Unhappily his cattle were less submissive than Mendel’s peas or the Chillingham bulls, for, in spite of all the floggings and bribings to which Frederick William resorted, he was not always successful in securing his results. One day, when he was going from Potsdam to Berlin, he saw a fine strapping Saxon girl, a very giantess, whom he at once saw would be a fit wife to produce more gigantic toys if coupled with one of his guards; so he stopped her and entered into conversation with her.

“Art thou married, mädchen?” he asked her in his hearty Prussian way.

“No, kingly majesty,” she curtsied.

“Take thou then this letter to the commandant at Potsdam,” he said, “and there shall be for thee a dollar. Here it is, in thy hand, girl”; and putting a letter and a dollar in the girl’s great hand, he resumed his journey to Berlin. The blue-eyed girl knew Frederick William’s ways, and, running on toward Potsdam, met an ancient crone sitting by the wayside. To this old hag, therefore, she gave the king’s gracious letter with strict injunctions to give it to the commandant himself, and thereupon made the best of her way towards home without calling into Potsdam at all. When the commandant read the letter he found that it was an imperative order to marry the bearer to a certain private soldier, and at his peril fail not; experience had shown the commandant that his portion would be the cane or the royal boot should the king return and find Private Schmidt still unwed. The ancient crone, naturally, did not object, but Schmidt, who probably had another fräulein in his mind’s eye, sobbed and made a great moan. Still, there were His Majesty’s royal orders, and they must be obeyed, so the marriage duly took place. When the king returned to Potsdam, he found Schmidt still blubbering in a truly Prussian ecstasy, and the lady still rejoicing that at the end of a doubtless ill-spent life she had at length found a husband. As it was obvious that this experiment in Mendelism would be unlikely to be really successful, there was ultimately nothing to do but to divorce the couple, and the maiden returned home still a maid, while the soldier ceased his lamentations.

This was the kind of father that fate had given to Frederick the Great; and his discipline seems, from all accounts, to have been terribly severe. At the age of about twenty his father forced him to marry a young lady, Christina-Elizabeth of Brunswick-Bevern, apparently against his will. It is said that Frederick really wanted to marry an English girl; and, according to Lord Dover, who took his account from the Princess of Bareith, the marriage was never consummated, for, hardly had the candles been put out when an alarm of fire was raised in the castle. Frederick hastily got out of bed, rushed to the help of the fire-fighters, and never returned to his bride. The reason of this very unusual action has been the subject of endless conjecture. The princess from whose memoirs Lord Dover drew his account was quite sure of it, because the queen, her mother, told her so for a fact more than a year after Frederick had run from his bride. It is suspected that Frederick had syphilis, and that he did not wish to give it to the young lady; this, of course, is possible, though it would seem to be rather unlike the usual conduct of an eighteenth-century soldier; and again, it is said that it was really she who had syphilis, because some time later she developed a trouble in her leg and was in danger of her life. Needless to say, that by itself would be no evidence whatever of syphilis. Another explanation of the desertion was that there may have been some physiological or anatomical trouble with the unwilling husband himself; many years afterwards, when he was lying dead at Sans Souci, the gallant fellows, whose unpleasant duty it was to wash his body, took advantage of the opportunity to examine his royal person, and issued a special announcement that His Late Majesty was as complete as any other man. But Frederick really loved his wife of an hour. He showed it by visiting her once a year on her birthday, and, such was the honour in which he held her, that he took off his boots for the occasion, and visited her in his stockings. He kept a special pair of black silk stockings just to visit his wife in, and, as he would never permit these to be held up with garters, they were always hanging down his shrunken shanks in great creases. Undoubtedly he must have loved her, and what is more important, undoubtedly she must have loved him, for he never washed himself, and yet she stood him.

The only portrait of the young lady that I have seen shows her to have been apparently a rather stupid and ordinary German girl; and it is said that she once boasted of having had a miscarriage to her husband. On the whole, perhaps a good deal of unnecessary sympathy has been poured out upon her, and doubtless that was part of the penalty that Frederick had to pay for having jibed at three women whom he had made his enemies even without the jibes. Catherine of Russia was certainly not a woman to insult; and Madame de Pompadour was quite able to take care of herself in a battle of tongues. As for poor Maria Theresa, she was probably too high and mighty, too utterly hurt at the saints for forsaking her in her hour of need, to condescend to answer Frederick in the bitter way that suited himself. But Marie Antoinette held, in common parlance, her end up. Like Maria Theresa, her mother, she was a Habsburg, and no doubt, like all the Habsburgs, despised these upstarts of Hohenzollerns. It was probably through her, or somebody equally pure-minded, that many of the stories of Frederick’s abominable and unnatural vices first arose. Well has the daughter defended her mother in the combat of slander that has signalised Frederick the Great and his Prussia.

As it is vastly important to know his _real_ habits, I draw a description of them from his latest English biographer, Mr. Norwood Young.

“In later years Frederick gave up shaving, and merely clipped at his beard with scissors. He seldom washed any part of his person, even his hands and face. In that respect he was very different from his father,[15] who used soap and water freely, and often complained of his son’s dirtiness. One of his valets concluded from his master’s dislike of water that he must be afflicted with a kind of hydrophobia. His height has been variously stated, the extreme ranges being 5 feet 4 inches and 5 feet 7½ inches. He was neither thin nor fat; in his youth he was rather inclined to stoutness, but he became very thin before he died. His complexion was tanned—doubtless because it was seldom washed, like a tramp’s to-day; but unlike a tramp’s, it was touched up with red paint. His eyes were prominent and blue-grey.”

People who never wash themselves acquire a curious complexion which is distinguishable to a doctor at a glance, for it is quite different from the healthy tan of sun and air.

Hardly had he come to the throne when he attacked Maria Theresa, and marched his army into Silesia without warning. The iron ramrod of the Prussians proved successful, giving Frederick’s troops a far greater rapidity of fire than was possible to the wooden ramrod of the Austrians. But I am not now concerned with Frederick’s glories, and if you are interested in them you will get a far more vivid account of them from Lord Macaulay than I would care to write, even if I could; a later writer has referred scoffingly to “Macaulay’s lurid style.” All that I set out to prove was that this great man did not die of syphilis, as wicked slanders have said of him.

Maria Theresa humbled, and Prussia for the first time on the map as a war-state, Frederick returned home to a well-deserved rest, and built himself the palace of Sans Souci, where he settled down to form a great centre of literature and arts on the lines of the French Academy.

He was hardly a German in many ways; his favourite language was French, and his great ambition was to be a poet. Although he could speak three languages he could spell none; and a writer in the _Quarterly_ for 1847 gives some instances of his peculiarities in that respect.

When writing a letter he used to add, in his own handwriting, some words often of bitter jibe or of sardonic humour; and these words were generally wrongly spelt. Thus, he used to spell “winter” hiverd, “actress” actrisse, “old” vieu, and “pay” peyer. That he never learned to spell “pay” properly was doubtless because he hated to think of such a thing; throughout his life, economy was his ruling passion.

To improve his spelling, grammar, and poetical construction, he invited Voltaire to stay with him at Sans Souci, and everyone knows that the two poets did not get on well together. Macaulay took the squabble too seriously, and worked himself up into a rage over it, with much about Voltaire’s “withering irony,” and other early Victorian and exaggerated phrases. It has been left for Mr. Lytton Strachey, the man who told us the truth about Queen Victoria, to tell us the truth about the famous Voltaire-Frederick squabble, and he makes it possible to compress it into a phrase. They were two poets, each trying to overreach the other. Frederick, in the eyes of the world, won, because he had the greater poet arrested, thus winning by the only way he knew—by force of arms; also he dared to call Voltaire a monkey. In our war-hospital, I remember, we had a monkey as a pet, which used to live at the top of one of the entrance gate-posts. When the descendants of Frederick the Great used to emulate him by letting loose poison gas, it was the duty of the quartermaster-serjeant to put the poor little shivering beast into a gas-helmet. At about that time Lytton Strachey’s book came out, and I sometimes read it as I looked at the monkey and heard the incessant tramp of feet that, to me, is the chief remembrance of the war, apart from the disgusting nature of the wounds and the thundering noise. And as the tramping men, marching to death in interminable thousands, looked up astonished at the monkey, I used to wonder at the effrontery of the king who would compare one of the greatest intellects that ever lived in France to that of a monkey. Voltaire got his revenge, more deadly than Marie Antoinette’s. In 1759, the most glorious year of Frederick’s life, he published _Candide_, which, though a joyful satire on Leibnitz’ philosophy that this was the best of all possible worlds, contained, if I am not much mistaken, a far more deadly description of the new style of civilised warfare introduced by the Great Frederick. Listen (I quote from Mr. Philip Littell’s translation):

“No,” said Dr. Pangloss, “Miss Cunegonde was ripped open by the Bulgarian soldiers, after having been violated by many; they broke her father’s head for attempting to defend her; my lady, her mother, was cut in pieces; my poor pupil was served just the same as his sister; and, as for the castle, they have left not one stone upon another, not a barn, nor a sheep, nor a duck, nor a tree.” For “Bulgarian” read “Prussian,” and you will see the great improvements that Frederick made in war. Voltaire, like Anatole France, had an unrivalled power for saying the utmost possible in the fewest words; and yet some blockheads try to deceive themselves by saying that Anatole France is not of the school of Voltaire! I suppose they do so because they have made up their minds that Voltaire was a wicked man and an atheist, whereas Anatole France is at least now an accepted wit and therefore can say what he likes.

But two years after Voltaire died, Frederick used to pray to his God—if he had any—“Divin Voltaire, ora pro nobis!” that is to say, he acknowledged that Voltaire had triumphed. This to me seems characteristic of the man who bullied Maria Theresa.

Of course the Seven Years’ War was a very wonderful feat of endurance for the Prussian people, just as was the Great War; and in it Frederick won a reputation which was marvellous till a yet greater arose in the art of slaughter. The history of it is repulsive, in that it shows the triumph of unscrupulous burglary against people who only wanted to be left in peace. The results of our own war were better at least on paper, though fortunately it did not produce any man so great as Frederick.

But now I come to the purpose of this essay: to show the real cause of this extraordinary man’s death.

On August 4th, 1784, he attended a review in Silesia in the midst of six hours of driving rain, during the progress of which he refused to put on a coat and became drenched to the skin. Arriving home he felt ill and shivery with a constant cough. During the autumn of that year his fever left him, but was succeeded by a harsh dry cough which never left him. His strength diminished, and his legs began to swell; he had constant oppression in his chest—that is to say, his heart began to fail him—and he could not breathe if he lay in bed, but had to spend his days and nights in an arm-chair; that is to say, he probably had what we now call “cardiac asthma.”...

As the summer of 1786 gradually returned he began to improve, so he went from Potsdam to Sans Souci, which he never left alive. He was then under the care of the Court physicians, Selle and Cothenius, and the surgeon Frese. Unfortunately for Dr. Selle he hinted that the great man probably had dropsy, so Frederick flew into a rage, dismissed him, and wrote to Hanover, where there dwelt an eminent man of the name of Dr. Zimmermann, who arrived at Potsdam on June 26th, 1786. When Frederick saw him he asked at once, “Doctor, can you cure me?” To which Zimmermann, being evidently a courtly fellow, answered, “I can relieve you, sir.” Zimmermann, it strikes one, must have known that men like Selle and Cothenius would know enough about their patient to render it dangerous for any outsider to offer an opinion carelessly. The first thing for Zimmermann to do was evidently to try to gain his patient’s confidence, because never was there a more unruly man, especially where eating and drinking were concerned. The doctor found that Frederick would talk on literature and poetry as long as he would allow him, although it made him cough violently; and his first line of treatment was to get Frederick to promise to read through _The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_. No doubt he thought that that gigantic book would be a good way of keeping his patient quiet for a very long time. Then the conversation would shift to other sovereigns; and Zimmermann was able to give Frederick some of the truth about the health of Empress Catherine of Russia, whose surprising immorality must have been an attractive feature to a soldier. “But,” said Zimmermann, “she boasts that her health costs her only eighteenpence a year!” “Wonderful!” applauded the aged emperor, “I always said she was a woman of supreme genius.”

Then Zimmermann, seeing that Frederick was really ill, asked that he might be allowed to have a consultation with the dismissed Selle. This threw Frederick into a passion; his face flushed beneath the paint, and his eyes glowed with a deepened fury; his voice roared with anger; one fit of violent coughing after another came upon him, so that Zimmermann thought it wiser to desist, and return to his talk of scandal or literature. But he had already gained sufficient information to leave us a valuable report as to the king’s physical condition. “His legs were swollen with dropsy, which also extended up on to the skin of the abdomen, and, though he was not feverish, his pulse was hard and violent.” That is to say, he was probably suffering from a high blood-pressure with failing heart, which was causing his dropsy.

Next day Zimmermann was able cautiously to approach the question of treatment, which indeed needed much tact, for Frederick obstinately refused to try any of the doctor’s remedies, especially any suggestion that he should moderate his gigantic appetite. Zimmermann suggested taraxacum; and after a good deal of discussion the gallant soldier agreed to try it. Taraxacum, or dandelion, used sometimes to be given as a purgative that was supposed to act specially on the liver; and no doubt Zimmermann thought that if he could get the king’s bowels to act freely the dropsy might be relieved.

But next day the doctor had once again to go over the whole arguments. Of the three doses of taraxacum that he had carefully measured out with his own hands for the king, only one had been consumed; and Frederick sat looking with horror-stricken eyes upon the medicine glass as though it had been a piece of artillery.

Frederick said enthusiastically, “I assure you that though my legs are swelled I am not dropsical. The only thing that is the matter with me is that I am a little asthmatical.” Zimmermann must have begun to suspect that to give taraxacum to his unruly patient would be very much like firing a pistol at the Rock of Gibraltar, but he persevered with a tenacity equal to Frederick’s own, and ultimately got him faithfully to promise to take his medicine. In the morning Frederick started on his medicine cautiously little by little, and by a miracle began to improve. Then nothing could be too good for the Herr Doktor with his wonderful taraxacum. It was saving the royal life. But Zimmermann added another condition. Majesty must eat less, and not so much of eel-pies. Then all the glory departed out of Zimmermann. That ignorant fellow Selle, with his balderdash about dropsy, was a better doctor after all, and Zimmermann, who really seems to have tried to act in as decent a manner as was possible towards his colleagues, allowed Selle to write and receive reports concerning the patient’s progress even though he was in disgrace. Frederick was a sworn enemy to all medicines, except a powder of his own, consisting of rhubarb and Glauber’s salts. At any moment the taraxacum might be thrown to the dogs, and the king’s own powder substituted behind the physician’s back. (Between ourselves it was not a bad powder.) “And,” groaned Zimmermann, “no idea could be formed of the excess which His Majesty allowed himself in his diet; his cooks were obliged to season his food in a manner sufficient to destroy his stomach; those dishes which were the most difficult of digestion were his favourites, especially Prussian peas, which were certainly the hardest in the world. This was the cause of all those attacks of vomiting and violent pain in the stomach which attacked him after every meal, and of the severe colic from which he suffered every week, and nobody durst remonstrate with him about it.”

Next day, when Zimmermann was sent for hastily to see the king he found him attacked with a terrible fit of coughing so violent that he spat blood. This is not uncommon in cases of very high blood-pressure, and frequently puts an unobservant physician off the scent. Still, under the purgative effect of the taraxacum, he began to get gradually better, and as he felt himself the subject of a miracle he ate more and more, until he devoured a pie of eels so hot and so highly seasoned that, to use the words of a fellow-sufferer, it seemed as if it had been baked in hell. After this he got an unusually violent attack of colic which he attributed to the taraxacum; and, to use Shakespeare’s words, “Zimmermann’s cake was dough.” Zimmermann forecasted that Frederick would soon suffer from bleeding hæmorrhoids, “And how will Your Majesty like that, please?” Majesty did not like the prospect at all, but on July 12th, when Zimmermann left, his prophecy came to pass, which was perhaps a good thing for the gluttonous patient. Then Selle tried to get rid of some of the dropsy by making incisions in his right leg; and the ancient ingrained dirt in his skin took a hand in the game; the cut suppurated and became intolerably offensive. Even Selle began to lose heart when he made a second incision and the wound became violently inflamed and erysipelatous. But Frederick never lost heart: if he found that he had a more violent indigestion than ever after his overeating, he simply took a double dose of his own powder; and on August 4th the erysipelatous inflammation spread all over the leg and on to the abdomen; blisters arose and burst, and from them leaked a quart of fluid a day, by which treatment the dropsy slowly abated, until, after a struggle worthy of his struggles in the Seven Years’ War, he gradually sank under a slow pneumonia, which is the natural end of man. But it is a cruel slander upon this mighty king to say that he died of syphilis, though occasionally syphilis is said to cause high blood-pressure. He was seventy-five years of age, and therefore there were seventy-five excellent reasons for his death. If to them you add years of gluttony and sepsis, caused by a lifetime of dirt, you get the real cause of the death of Frederick the Great. Did I not say rightly that Frederick the Great, like most other great men, was a trifle “cracked?”

The poet Campbell, in the last volume of his life of Frederick, gave a detailed account of some of the horrors of his death-bed, but, though interesting, they are too disgusting for my clean pages, and I shall not inflict them on the reader. They are chiefly concerned with the difficulty that his friends found in getting his body in a fit state of cleanliness for the grave. A lifetime of ingrained dirt! No wonder the startled washers found it necessary to get the water out of him somehow in that hot summer weather.

This is the truth that lies behind the demure paragraph of the ordinary English biographies: “Frederick died after a long illness (which he bore with exemplary fortitude), contracted, such was his sense of duty, by prolonged exposure to the rain while reviewing his troops in the province which he had rescued from the Queen of Hungary owing to his wonderful genius.”

The Children’s Crusade and “The Pied Piper”

Which of us can remember a time when he did not know “The Pied Piper of Hamelin?” Which of us can remember a time when he thought it merely funny, or could not recite the joyous thing by heart like his schoolfellows? If the gliding years have stolen the detailed memory, at least they have not stolen the enormous impression that the poem made upon children; for we can still see the piper with his pin-point pupils and his light hair without tuft on cheek nor beard on chin, and his queer parti-coloured clothes: just like a Chinaman he seemed to us—like the poor mysterious “John” from whom we used to steal bananas and evoke torrents of uncouth gibberish. Perhaps he too was trying to tell us in his mildly explosive way how he had talked with the Cham of Tartary or the Nizam of Asia; perhaps he was telling us of some other mysterious potentate for whom he had contracted to bewitch vermin, though to be sure we had never observed any great love for music in him, nor did his fingers itch to do anything more than heave his stave on to his shoulders or pick out faulty vegetables for the cook. And how deliciously the piper had piped the rats from that little mediæval town: “O rats! rejoice, for the world is grown to one vast drysaltery!” We did not quite know what a drysaltery was, but to use Australian slang, it must contain things positively “bosker” to eat. The rough and tripping metre appealed to boyhood, and the queer words that we did not quite understand, though we felt that in a minute we should; such as “nuncheon” and “justling.” It seemed quite right and proper to say that salt sprinkled on a candle flame would burn green; and it savours of the “knowledge of good and evil” to know that it really burns yellow. It is good fun to try to reread the poem with a boy’s mind. But it is impossible; you cannot fully surrender yourself to the poet’s magic as a boy can, and you catch yourself wondering how much of it is really true; and, not content with the jolly way in which the story is told, you wonder whether it is “founded on fact” like so many other boys’ stories. That is the real tragedy of life, that a time comes when you cannot be contented with simple faith in good stories.

Probably there is really some foundation for the legend, which was not uncommon and was told of several other towns in the Middle Ages when grown men were really more like children than little boys are to-day. That, I take it, is the only way to study the Middle Ages—to remember that the world had not yet quite grown up and men were not as gods, but in many ways like children. Otherwise how can you explain many very wonderful things that undoubtedly happened? (Not that we are particularly godlike to-day except some men in their own estimations; but at least some of us are beginning to have the germs of common sense.)

The true foundation is much more pathetic than Browning’s poem, which to us boys seemed so funny, for we were not old enough to sympathise or to see the tragedy upon which it dances. That came later, when we learnt that “nuncheon” is not the funniest thing in the world and life has forced upon us a knowledge of things other than “good and evil.” The Koppelberg into which the children danced is not a “mighty top”; no crowded little bones have been unearthed from it; it is just so high that a child would be hidden from sight as it danced on its way to Cologne.

Of course one naturally accuses the gipsies, for there were certainly gipsies in Europe even so early as the twelfth century, let alone the thirteenth; three centuries were to pass before they reached their climax. According to the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ the legend of the Pied Piper dates from 1284, though Browning in the poem dates it _July 22nd, 1376_. I believe the reason for his error is not definitely known; but I think it is possible to guess. On either date there were plenty of gipsies about, and no doubt they would be quite prepared to pick up an odd child or two if they saw money in the abduction. But it is impossible to believe that they would dare to try any such mighty abduction as was achieved by the Pied Piper. Europe would have gone mad with rage; probably every gipsy would have had his throat cut by infuriated parents and the race would have been exterminated.

Nor is it likely that the so-called “Dancing Mania” was more than in part a solution, because that was really a spiritual reaction from the Black Death of 1348; probably people were so glad to have remained alive that they danced firstly for joy, afterwards from “mass-suggestion.” It is a partial solution of our difficulty because it began in Aix-la-Chapelle in 1374; as Hecker says, “Hardly had the graves of the victims of the Black Death been covered in”; which is a somewhat excitable way of saying “a few years.” The dancing neurasthenia lasted a long time, and recurred all over Europe in several epidemics. Just so, after a terrible war, do we dance to-day, though few of us, looking at our gloomy and barbaric dances, would dream that these short-frocked maidens are dancing for joy. In 1375 it had spread the thirty-six miles to Cologne, and in _1376_ the few miles to Hamelin.

I do not attempt to explain the episode of the rats, beyond saying that the story is not uncommon, that there is to this day a “Ratfanger’s Haus” in the ancient town of Hamelin, and that according to the original legend the piper was accused of sorcery. Any man who studied the habits of rats and learned how to catch them did so in peril of being accused of sorcery; and quite likely Browning, writing for children, made the mayor and corporation more ridiculous by saying that they had spent all their money in gluttony and could not pay the rat-catcher his fee. “A thousand guilders! Come, take fifty!” With what shuddering delight did we hear the absurd and obese old mayor brave the vengeance of the piper in those awful words. How could he ever have had the courage to do it? The real legend of Hamelin says that the piper was accused of being a sorcerer.

But it is the children who most interest us to-day. We must find a motive which could excuse an atrocious crime and hold it for righteousness. That motive we find in the Crusades; and it has been often suggested that in the “Children’s Crusade” we find the real foundation of the episode.

Although we nowadays number the Crusades in a charming regularity and order, probably the people who took part in them did not realise that they were anything but episodes in a furious and weary struggle which, up to 1212 at least, had had little more result than disaster and destruction. Children saw their fathers dragged away to the East, and, lost in a gloomy fog of war and despair, mostly disappear for ever. Their mothers and their priests told them that daddy had gone to get back the tomb of Christ and save it from wicked men; and the world was sunk in misery and poverty and despair; up to 1212 at least, the war had had no further result than the capture of Acre in 1191, the elevation of Saladin to a pinnacle of romantic glory, the barbarous quarrels among Christians, and the frightful attack upon Constantinople which had led to the destruction in hideous circumstances of that once glorious city in 1204. In 1212 the grown men of Europe had become heartily sick of the weary struggle, and it occurred to the clergy that, since it seemed likely that the tomb of Christ could never be recovered by sinful men—and if you read Gibbon you will see that many of the Crusaders were exceedingly sinful, Cross and all—it was only right to try if the innocence of little boys might not be able to prevail over the powers of evil. It is not suggested that the clergy really encouraged the “Children’s Crusade,” though some people seem to think that they did. All the authorities that Hecker was able to consult show that the saner of the clergy were as much horrified by this result of the neurasthenia of the time as the parents.

In Germany a little boy named Nicholas, of whom we know nothing but his name, appeared in _July, 1212_, and gave out that he was sent directly from God to lead the children to the Holy Land. Vast numbers crowded to follow him in spite of everything that the parents could do to keep the little people at home. Finding that the boys were determined to go, the parents, with true German forethought, provided them with “harlots” to keep them company and entertain them on the way. Personally I believe that for this unpleasant word we should read “nurses,” for the average age of the boys seems to have been rather under twelve than over. There was a considerable number of older men and women, whose morals suffered sadly. They crossed the Alps in straggling swarms dignified by the name of armies; they wore Crusaders’ uniform and bore themselves as soldiers of the Cross; some little girls joined them in boys’ clothes—even then they couldn’t keep the girls from following the boys into mischief, just as to-day we cannot keep them from playing that most dangerous game for girls, Rugby football; the total number of the children was at least 30,000; their real starting-point was Cologne, which you reach from Hamelin, as I have said, after you cross the Koppelberg. Many of them starved in the Alps or were eaten by wolves; crowds of robbers infested them and ate their substance and seized their clothing; they reached Genoa and were mocked at by the sensible Italians, who were sadly wanting in that faith which should lead little boys to victory against black men who rode about on horses and carried big swords and shouted to Allah as they fought. The armies scattered, and it is possible that stragglers reached Transylvania and formed the basis for one verse of the “Pied Piper.” Some certainly settled in Genoa and became ultimately rich and prosperous, but some of them tried to return home through the wolves and mountains, only to find their friends as mocking as the Italians, for nothing fails like failure. Some reached Innocent III, the pope, and after having been made by that astute statesman to swear that they would become Crusaders when they grew up, were told to go back home again. A few sturdy little fellows reached Brindisi and found that the sea would not divide before them; they were sold as slaves to the Saracens, and thus reached the Holy Land, but in far other guise than that of conquerors. Very few of them all ever saw their mothers again.

This is what many people now believe to have been the real basis of Browning’s poem, though it is quite possible that he did not know it himself but intended it to refer to one of the idle legends of sorcery that I have mentioned. If he had known it was a thing so tragic would he have treated it in so jocular a vein?

Even more pitiful was the tragedy of the French children in the same year when the world really seems to have gone mad. The leader was a little shepherd boy of twelve, named Stephen. Matthew Paris in ponderous language calls him a bad little boy—I suppose he had stolen some cleric’s apples or done something else equally atrocious. The children in their madness called him St. Stephen; and he worked miracles. One morning in _July_, 1212, he thought he saw Christ, who not only accepted a piece of bread from Stephen’s grubby hand, but gave him a letter to the king, and told him to lead an army of children to the Sepulchre. The king of France ordered Stephen not to be silly, and forbade other little girls and boys to attend his meetings, and the parents, so far as they could, put them under lock and key. Just so and with as little success might we confine behind a feeble mediæval lock to-day a little boy who wanted to go swimming. Very few little girls joined Stephen. The heart-broken parents did everything that they knew to keep their little sons at home, and some of the boys were killed in a mad crush to get a lock of Stephen’s hair; in response Stephen promised that the Mediterranean would open before them and allow them to reach the Holy Land dry-shod. The richer parents sent guides; the poorer boys found their own way to the sea. The unhappy mothers could not tell us their feelings when they saw their sons thus dragged away by suggestion; because they could not write; but one would like to know what clerk it was whom Stephen saw and thought to be Christ. He, apparently, was the direct cause of Stephen’s delusion; he, and his letter.[16]

At length they reached Marseilles and found the Mediterranean as blue as ever and as treacherous. Two shipowners met them while they were wondering why the sea had not even a tide, far less showed signs of opening for little boys. Let us give these shipowners their glorious names; they were William Porcus and Hugh Ferreus. They welcomed the boys and joined in their services, behaving, to the boys’ eyes, as true Christians. Stephen rejoiced in them, for all through the south of France he had met nothing but robbers and most unchristian men. William the Pig and Iron-hearted Hugo offered to take them to Palestine on shipboard for sheer love of God, as it seemed unlikely that the sea would open to give them passage as Stephen had promised. The little boys filled seven large ships and set forth joyfully and with cheerful shouts, singing hymns of victory. Two of the ships were wrecked in a storm off St. Pierre’s Rock, near Sardinia, and every boy on board was drowned. They were the lucky ones, because in time the survivors reached a strange and savage land which was not Holy, but was Egypt, where black men came on board and bought them all as slaves; and not one of those little boys ever reached France again. The usual stories were set afoot that some of them had been martyred rather than turn Moslem; but all that is known for certain is that eighteen years later seven hundred of them were still alive—but no longer little boys. It does not require much knowledge of Egypt to picture the tree of knowledge of which those little boys had been forced to eat. The extraordinary thing is that neither French nor German boys seem to have known of the deeds of the others.

The only light in the gloom is that the free-thinking Emperor Frederick II afterwards laid hands upon William and Hugo and hanged them ingloriously with several other scoundrels. Probably he did this on general principles, and not on account of the little boys.

Of course the frightful episode of the Children’s Crusade is merely an instance of the extraordinary suggestibility of children. You can do anything with a little boy if you work upon his imagination and subject him to “mass-suggestion.”

I believe that the date in the “Pied Piper of Hamelin” is that of the dancing neurasthenia when it attacked that town; the rat episode is a distorted recollection of some rat-legend attributed to Hamelin but which may have referred to other places; the theft of the children refers to the German branch of the Children’s Crusade, whose Hamelin members crossed the Koppelberg to reach Cologne.

And the leader’s name was Nicholas—Old Nick?

Some Epidemics of Social Importance

There is some reason to believe that Hippocrates himself, our professional father, who drew up that oath by which all modern doctors measure their conduct, knew the bubonic plague when he saw it, though he never went through a plague epidemic. The first epidemic of which we have detailed knowledge is the great plague of Athens in the Peloponnesian War about which there can be very little doubt, for it was described by one of the greatest literary artists of Greece, who saw it all with his own eyes, and suffered from it. Thucydides was not a doctor, but like Cervantes he had the eye and mind of a doctor; and he could describe a disease so plainly that many other ancient and even mediæval historians have taken their descriptions of their own epidemics straight from his with never an acknowledgment. And in Thucydides’ account of that plague we get the invariable conditions of all epidemics—the ungovernable terror of the people, the powerlessness of the doctors, the abandonment of all moral laws, the wild accusations of poisoning by enemies, the selfishness, cowardice, and ignorance of man in a panic, the hysterical dancing in the shadow of the tomb. From this one learn all.

I give a translation of Thucydides’ description of the symptoms, by C. Foster Smith. It must be remembered that Athens was being besieged and the Athenians had brought all the farmers into Athens so that the Spartans should find no food for the Lacedæmonian armies; the device of an already beaten nation.

“The disease began in Ethiopia and then descended into Egypt and Libia. Then it suddenly fell upon the Piræus and city of Athens, so that people at first said that the Peloponnesians had put poison into the cisterns. Afterwards it reached the upper city also, and from that time the mortality became greater. I have had the disease myself and seen others sick of it. Suddenly men were seized first with an intense heat of the head and redness and inflammation of the eyes, and the parts inside the mouth became bloodshot and exhaled an unnatural and fœtid breath. In the next stage sneezing and hoarseness came on and in a short time the disorder descended to the chest attended by severe coughing and sneezing. There was severe vomiting of every kind attended by great distress; and in most cases ineffectual retching producing violent convulsions which sometimes abated directly, sometimes not very long afterwards. The body was not very hot to the touch; it was not pale, but reddish, livid, and breaking out into small blisters and ulcers. Patients could not bear to have on them the slightest covering or linen sheets, but wanted to be quite uncovered and would have liked best to throw themselves into cold water—indeed, many who were not prevented did so. Most of them died on the seventh or ninth day from internal heat, but had still some strength left. After the crisis the disease sometimes attacked the privates and fingers and toes, so that many patients lost these, though some lost the eyes also. Immediately after recovery there was often loss of memory, so that many failed to remember either themselves or their friends. The most dreadful thing was the despondency of the victims.”

I am glad to say that I personally did not serve in the Balkan campaigns, but many doctors who did tell me that Thucydides’ description might, with a little imagination, be stretched to include that plague which proved so distressing to Dr. Elsie Inglis and her gallant band. In other words, Thucydides was describing typhus fever, which has always been the enemy of besieged cities, especially in hot and dirty surroundings. Dr. Crawfurd states that we may look upon it as almost certain that the plague of Athens was typhus fever, though he discusses at considerable length the academic question whether it might not have been bubonic plague or smallpox. At least we can say for certain that the plague of Athens showed more of the symptoms of typhus fever than of any other known disease; and if Dr. Crawfurd is wrong he had made a very shrewd guess. From my own experience of typhus, which is small, I should certainly be inclined to support him. But typhus nowadays is a thing almost of the past except in times of war. That we owe simply to washing ourselves and our clothes better than of old. It is a remarkable thing in clinical experience that typhus frequently accompanies bubonic plague, because they are both diseases of primitive civilisations like India and China to-day.

Passing over the innumerable ancient attacks of pestilence upon mankind, we come to the great plague of the Antonines which was probably the real cause of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, for it is extremely doubtful whether the Empire ever recovered from it. To most of us this plague is remarkable for the fact that Galen, the Roman Hippocrates, ran away from it, and has left us an account of it which seems to have been drawn second-hand from Thucydides. In the Roman Empire many of the physicians were Greek slaves and had the slave mind. Though Galen himself was not a slave, still he was a man of his time, and it was not then thought imperative that a doctor should, in Dr. Crawfurd’s words, be “captain of his soul.”[17] Dr. Crawfurd gives many instances of honoured names whose owners ran before the onset of plague; and it was not till the Black Death that we find the real true silent courage that we now expect from the medical profession as a matter of course.