On duty I am another person altogether, scarcely recognizable even by myself--a sort of wooden machine, ready, when a button is touched, to bring my heels smartly together, and my hand to the salute.

There is something in the air that stiffens one's backbone, and freezes one from the tip of one's toes to the end of one's pigtail.

When one is with the marshal alone, one thaws; for there is no better fellow living, and he chats to us as if we were on a mountain side in Scotland, instead of in Frederick's palace.

But one is always being interrupted; either a general, or a colonel, or possibly the king himself, comes in.
"For the time, one becomes a military statue; and even when they go, it is difficult to take up the talk as it was left.

Oh, it is wearisome work, and heartily glad I shall be, when the trumpets blow and we march out of Berlin.