Chi mi dara la voce e le parole, E un proferir magnanimo e profondo!
Che mai cosa piufiera sotto il sole Nonfu veduta in tutto quanto il mondo;L'altre battagliefur rose e viole, Al raccontar di questa mi confondo;Perche il valor, e'l pregio della terra Afronte son condotti in questa guerra (Boiardo, Orlando Inamorato , Canto 27)[Now who will give me words and who the tongue, To sing of such brave deeds in sonorous sounds!
For ne'er was strife upon this earth begun More proudly fought on bloodier battle grounds;Compared to this all other wars are roses To tell of it my Iyric art confounds For on this earth there ne'er was seen such glory Or noble velour bright as in this story]
The latest fashionable arrivals had made up the full complement of the Emigration and the time had now come for a more comprehensive "organisation", to round it off upwards to a full dozen. As might have been expected these attempts degenerated into bitter feuds. The paper war conducted in the transatlantic journals now reached its climax. The privations of individuals, intrigues, plots, self-praise -- the heroes spent their energies in such paltry activities. But the Emigration did have one achievement to its credit:
a history of its own, lying outside world history, with its own political petti-foggery running parallel to public affairs. And the very fact that they fought each other so bitterly led each to believe in the importance of the other. Beneath the façade of all these strivings and conflicts lay the speculation in democratic party funds, "the Holy Grail", and this transformed these transcendental rivalries, these disputes about the Emperor's beard, into ordinary quarrels among fools. Anyone who wishes to pursue the study of this great war between the frogs and the mice will find all the decisive original documents in the New-Yorker Schnellpost , the New York Deutsche Zeitung , the Allgemeine Deutsche Zeitung and the Staatszeitung , in the Baltimore Correspondent , in the Wecker [Clarion] and in other German-American papers. However, this display of alleged connections and imagined conspiracies, this whole hue and cry raised by the émigrés was not without serious consequences. It provided the governments with the pretext they needed to arrest all sorts of people in Germany, to suppress the indigenous movements and to use these wretched strawmen in London as scarecrows with which to frighten the German middle classes. Far from constituting any danger to existing circumstances these heroes of the exile wished only that everything should die down in Germany so that their voice might be heard the better and that the general level of thought should decline so far that even men of their stature might appear outstanding.
The newly-arrived South German bonhommes , lacking in any definite commitment, found themselves in an excellent position to mediate between the various cliques and, at the same time, to gather the mass of émigrés around the leaders as a kind of chorus. Their sturdy sense of duty impelled them not to forgo this opportunity.
At the same time, however, they could already see Ledru-Rollin where he saw himself, namely in the chair of the president of France. As the most important neighbours of France it was vital for them to obtain recognition from the provisional government of France as the provisional overlords of Germany. Sigel especially wished to see his supreme command guaranteed by Ledru. But the way to Ledru led over Arnold's corpse. However, they were still impressed by Arnold's persona and he still passed as the philosophical Northern Light who would illumine their South German twilight. So they turned to Ruge.
On the opposing side stood in the first instance Kinkel with his immediate entourage -- Schurz, Strodtmann, Schimmelpfennig, Techow etc.; then came the former deputies and members of parliament, led by Reichenbach with Meyen and Oppenheim as the representatives of literature; and, lastly, Willich with his host which, however, remained in the background. The roles were distributed as follows: Kinkel playing a passion-flower represented the German Philistines in general; Reichenbach playing a Count represented the bourgeoisie; Willich, playing Willich represented the proletariat.
The first thing to say about August Willich is that Gustav always felt secretly mistrustful of him because of his pointed skull signifying that the enormous overgrowth of self-esteem had stunted all other qualities.
A German Philistine who once caught sight of ex-Lieutenant Willich in a London pub snatched up his hat and fled exclaiming: My God, he looks just like Jesus Christ! In order to increase the similarity Willich became a carpenter for a while before the Revolution. Later on he emerged as a partisan leader in the campaign in Baden and the Palatinate.
The partisan leader, a descendant of the old Italian condottiere is a peculiar phenomenon of more recent wars, especially in Germany. The partisan leader, accustomed to act on his own initiative, is reluctant to subordinate himself to a more general command. His men owe their allegiance only to him, but he is likewise wholly dependent on them. For this reason the discipline in a free corps is somewhat arbitrary; according to circumstances it may be savagely strict, but mostly it is extremely lax. The partisan leader cannot always act the martinet, he must often flatter his men and win them over individually with the aid of physical caresses; the normal military practices are of little use here and boldness must be supplemented by other qualities if the leader is to retain the respect of his subordinates.
If he is not noble he must at least have a noble consciousness to be complemented as always by cunning, the talent for intrigue and a covert practical baseness.
