CHAPTER XXIII.

BATTLE HYMNS OF GERMANY.

VAST array of illustrations of battle songs in history is found in Germany. In the story of war lyrics of that country we meet with "flashing, sword-cut songs and fierce epics which read like the rush of a torrent of blood amid the groans of the dying, formulating battle hymns no less dominant than they were among the Norsemen who lived to sing and sang to die." From the fifteenth century to the present day, the songs of Germany have risen with almost every generation in fresh swarms. If we take a retrospect of German life, we will find the people of that country, most prone, perhaps of all modern races, to outbursts of feeling in song. A Spaniard or a Frenchman sings as if he could not help it; a German sings as though he would not help it if he could. This accounts for the earnest spirit

of so many of their songs of the Reformation, and the cultured and well-balanced form of even their rudest soldier songs. The consequence has been that the German-folk, not being ashamed of poetic expressions of their feelings, have done all honor to their poets, and have sung their war songs enthusiastically and in triumphant tones. The agonies of Germany in the Thirty Years' war and other conflicts, produced up to the end of the seventeenth century 32,700 patriotic and Christian songs. Such an unburdening of the emotions of the heart and of the conflict of the soul in song can scarcely find a parallel in the history of any other race of people.

Germany has produced some war ballads which roused the masses to the highest pitch of excitement. In the uprising of the German nation in 1813, Theodor Köner, born in 1791, encouraged his comrades in the army by writing fiery, patriotic songs. He was an enthusiastic patriot, and the night before the battle near Rosenburg, which was fought on the 26th of August, 1813, and in which he was killed, he wrote his famous "Sword Song," which for some time was regarded as the "Marseillaise" of the German people.

One of Germany's most powerful battle songs came from the heart of Ernst Moritz Arndt, who

was born in 1769, and died in 1860. The year 1813 is memorable in the history of Germany's struggle for liberty. The country had been involved in the war by Napoleon, and when his Russian campaign had resulted disastrously, the remnant of his once great army, famished and frozen, "wandered like ghosts across the snowfields of Germany, looking for shelter."

During those trying times, faithful preachers of the gospel of political liberty traveled over Germany, gave the people patriotic songs to sing, encouraging them to trust in God, and to have confidence in a free and united Germany.

When Napoleon had fled from Russia, making his way to Paris, two men could be seen in a sleigh hurrying toward the Russian frontier with a message of hope to patriotic Germans in the field. They were Baron Stein, the noted constitutional authority, and the poet Arndt, whose songs became as powerful as the sword. It was during this winter's ride that Stein, after having been long absorbed in thought, exclaimed: "The Prussian congress must be convened; the volunteers must be called out-Austria, Saxony, Westphalia, Bavaria, Wurtemberg, Tyrol—and so the rest of Germany must follow in the wake."

Arndt, also, was equal to the occasion, and