During the long sojourn of our corps in Havelberg previously alluded to, I strengthened my inner life, so far as the military service permitted, by spending all the time I could in the open air, in communion with Nature, to a perception of whose loveliness a perusal of G. Forster’s “Travels in Rhineland” had newly unlocked my senses.[82]

We friends took all opportunities of meeting one another.  By-and-by we set to work to make this easier by three of us applying to be quartered together.

In the rough, frank life of war, men presented themselves to me under various aspects, and so became a special object of my thoughts as regards their conduct, and their active work, and most of all as to their higher vocation.  Man and the education of man was the subject which occupied us long and often in our walks, and in our open-air life generally.  It was particularly these discussions which drew me forcibly towards Middendorff, the youngest of us.

I liked well our life of the bivouac, because it made so much of history clear to me; and taught me, too, through our oft-continued and severely laborious marches and military manoeuvres, the interchanging mutual relations of body and spirit.  It showed me how little the individual man belongs to himself in war time; he is but an atom in a great whole, and as such alone must he be considered.

Through the chance of our corps being far removed from the actual seat of war, we lived our soldier life, at least I did, in a sort of dream, notwithstanding the severe exertions caused by our military manoeuvres, and we heard of the war only in the same sleepy way.  Now and then, at Leipzig, at Dalenburg, at Bremen, at Berlin, we seemed to wake up; but soon sank back into feeble dreaminess again.  It was particularly depressing and weakening to me never to be able to grasp our position as part of the great whole of the campaign, and never to find any satisfactory explanation of the reason or the aim of our manoeuvres.  That was my case at least; others may have seen better and clearer than I.

I gained one clear benefit from the campaign; in the course of the actual soldier life I became enthusiastic upon the best interests of the German land and the German people; my efforts tended to become national in their scope.  And in general, so far as my fatigues allowed, I kept the sense of my future position always before me; even in the little skirmishes that we had to take part in I was able to gather some experiences which I saw would be useful to me in my future work.

Our corps marched through the Mark,[83] and in the latter part of August through Priegnitz, Mecklenburg, the districts of Bremen and Hamburg, and Holstein, and in the last days of 1813 we reached the Rhine.  The peace (May 30th, 1814) prevented us from seeing Paris, and we were stationed in the Netherlands till the breaking up of the corps.  At last, in July 1814, every one who did not care to serve longer had