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When the young men from the Gymnasium come into the freedom of university life, they toss their heads a bit, kick up their heels, laugh long and loud at the Philistine, but just as every German climax is incomplete without tears, so they too are soon singing: "Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten dass ich so traurig bin!" the gloom of the Teutoburger Wald settles down on them, and they buckle to and work with an enduring patience such as few other men in the world display, and join the great army here who, bitted and harnessed, are pulling the Vaterland to the front.
The average Englishman, American, or Australian of to-day who wishes to recall the feats of power with which his race should be credited in the shadowy dawn of its history, may go back to the half-mythical glories of Hengist and Horsa, perhaps to the deeds of Civilis the Batavian, or to those of the hero of the Teutoburger fight, but certainly to the wars neither of the Silurian chief Caractacus nor of his conqueror, the after-time Emperor Vespasian.
Did no captive tribune of Varus' legions, led with horrid shouts round Thor's altar in the Teutoburger Wald, ere his corpse was hung among the horses and goats on the primaeval oaks, turn to bay like a Roman, and tell his wild captors of the Eternal City, and of the might of that Caesar who would avenge every hair upon his head with a German life; and receive for answer a shout of laughter, and the cry 'You have come to us: and some day we will go to you? Did no commissary, bargaining with a German for cattle to be sent over the frontier by such a day of the week, and teaching him to mistranslate into those names of Thor, Woden, Freya, and so forth, which they now carry, the Jewish-Assyrian-Roman days of the se'nnight, amuse the simple forester by telling him how the streets of Rome were paved with gold, and no one had anything to do there but to eat and bathe at the public expense, and to go to the theatre, and see 20,000 gladiators fight at once?
It was to this branch of the German race that Varus lost his legions, at the place where the Ems has its source, at the foot of the Teutoburger Wald.
Innumerable dim corners of memory had been flooded with light by that one quick glance of the aide-de-camp's: things he had heard, hints he had let pass, smiles, insinuations, cordialities, rumours of the improbability of the Prince's founding a family, suggestions as to the urgent need of replenishing the Teutoburger treasury....
But this danger vanished forever on the day of the slaughter by the Teutoburger Wald, when the legions of Varus were broken by the rush of Hermann's wild warriors. Two or three hundred years later the Germans, no longer on the defensive, themselves went forth from their marshy forests conquering and to conquer.
This had been prophesied by Tacitus, and Hermann in the Teutoburger Wald had shed his martyr's blood for it. Rome and Germany! A spiritual and a worldly kingdom! Inscrutable are the ways of the Lord! When we drank to the strong and gentle Carolus Magnus Augustus, we both rose, Thiodolf and I, and bowed before the empty chair, as though he sat there in bodily presence.
They might have done it before that again, when Hermann slew Varus and his legions in the Teutoburger Wald; or before that again, when the Kempers and Teutons burst over the Alps, to madden themselves with the fatal wines of the rich south. And why did the Teutons not do it? Because they were boys fighting against cunning men.
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