Now good sleep to you! to-morrow, then, we shall either have beaten the Enemy or else be all dead." "Yea," answered the whole regiment; "dead, or else the Enemy beaten:" and so went to deep sleep, preface to a deeper for many of them,--as beseems brave men.

In this world it much beseems the brave man, uncertain about so many things, to be certain of himself for one thing.
These snatches of Camp Dialogue, much more the Speech preserved to us by Retzow Junior, appear to be true; though as to the dates, the circumstances, there has been debating.

[Kutzen, pp.

175-181.] Other Anecdotes, dubious or more, still float about in quantity;--of which let us give only one; that of the Deserter (which has merit as a myth).
"What made thee desert, then ?" "Hm, alas, your Majesty, we were got so down in the world, and had such a time of it!"-- "Well, try it one day more; and if we cannot mend matters, thou and I will both desert." A learned Doctor, one of the most recent on these matters, is astonished why the Histories of Friedrich should be such dreary reading, and Friedrich himself so prosaic, barren an object; and lays the blame upon the Age, insensible to real greatness; led away by clap-trap Napoleonisms, regardless of expense.

Upon which Smelfungus takes him up, with a twitch:-- "To my sad mind, Herr Doctor, it seems ascribable rather to the Dryasdust of these Ages, especially to the Prussian Dryasdust, sitting comfortable in his Academies, waving sublimely his long ears as he tramples human Heroisms into unintelligible pipe-clay and dreary continents of sand and cinders, with the Doctors all applauding.
"Had the sacred Poet, or man of real Human Genius, been at his work, for the thousand years last past, instead of idly fiddling far away from his work,--which surely is definable as being very mainly, That of INTERPRETING human Heroisms; of painfully extricating, and extorting from the circumambient chaos of muddy babble, rumor and mendacity, some not inconceivable human and divine Image of them, more and more clear, complete and credible for mankind (poor mankind dumbly looking up to him for guidance, as to what it shall think of God and of Men in this Scene of Things),--I calculate, we should by this time have had a different Friedrich of it; O Heavens, a different world of it, in so many respects! "My esteemed Herr Doctor, it is too painful a subject.