Karl Ludwig Sand | Page 9

our cause
just and holy, and is not God just and holy? How then should we not be
victors? You see that sometimes I doubt, so, in your letters, which I am
impatiently expecting, have pity on me and do not alarm my soul, far in
any case we shall meet again in another country, and that one will
always be free and happy.
"I am, until death, your dutiful and grateful son,
"KARL SAND."
These two lines of Korner's were written as a postscript:--
"Perchance above our foeman lying dead We may behold the star of
liberty."
With this farewell to his parents, and with Korner's poems on his lips,
Sand gave up his books, and on the 10th of May we find him in arms
among the volunteer chasseurs enrolled under the command of Major
Falkenhausen, who was at that time at Mannheim; here he found his
second brother, who had preceded him, and they underwent all their
drill together.
Though Sand was not accustomed to great bodily fatigues, he endured
those of the campaign with surprising strength, refusing all the
alleviations that his superiors tried to offer him; for he would allow no
one to outdo him in the trouble that he took for the good of the country.
On the march he invariably shared: anything that he possessed
fraternally with his comrades, helping those who were weaker than
himself to carry their burdens, and, at once priest and soldier,
sustaining them by his words when he was powerless to do anything
more.
On the 18th of June, at eight o'clock in the evening, he arrived upon the
field of battle at Waterloo, On the 14th of July he entered Paris.
On the 18th of December, 1815, Karl Sand and his brother were back at
Wonsiedel, to the great joy of their family. He spent the Christmas
holidays and the end of the year with them, but his ardour for his new

vacation did not allow him to remain longer, and an the 7th of January
he reached Erlangen. Then, to make up for lost time, he resolved to
subject his day to fixed and uniform rules, and to write down every
evening what he had done since the morning. It is by the help of this
journal that we are able to follow the young enthusiast, not only in all
the actions of his life, but also in all the thoughts of his mind and all the
hesitations of his conscience. In it we find his whole self, simple to
naivete, enthusiastic to madness, gentle even to weakness towards
others, severe even to asceticism towards himself. One of his great
griefs was the expense that his education occasioned to his parents, and
every useless and costly pleasure left a remorse in his heart. Thus, on
the 9th of February 1816, he wrote:--
"I meant to go and visit my parents. Accordingly I went to the
'Commers-haus', and there I was much amused. N. and T. began upon
me with the everlasting jokes about Wonsiedel; that went on until
eleven o'clock. But afterwards N. and T. began to torment me to go to
the wine-shop; I refused as long as I could. But as, at last, they seemed
to think that it was from contempt of them that I would not go and
drink a glass of Rhine wine with them, I did not dare resist longer.
Unfortunately, they did not stop at Braunberger; and while my glass
was still half full, N. ordered a bottle of champagne. When the first had
disappeared, T. ordered a second; then, even before this second battle
was drunk, both of them ordered a third in my name and in spite of me.
I returned home quite giddy, and threw myself on the sofa, where I
slept for about an hour, and only went to bed afterwards.
"Thus passed this shameful day, in which I have not thought enough of
my kind and worthy parents, who are leading a poor and hard life, and
in which I suffered myself to be led away by the example of people
who have money into spending four florins--an expenditure which was
useless, and which would have kept the whole family for two days.
Pardon me, my God, pardon me, I beseech Thee, and receive the vow
that I make never to fall into the same fault again. In future I will live
even more abstemiously than I usually do, so as to repair the fatal
traces in my poor cash-box of my extravagance, and not to be obliged
to ask money of my mother before the day when she thinks of sending
me some herself."
Then, at the very time when the poor young man reproaches himself as

if with a crime with having spent four