"But why should we thus sadden one another's hearts?Is not 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 post:--"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 l0th 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,****** to *****te,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 Iwill 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 florins,one of his cousins,a widow,dies and leaves three orphan children.He runs immediately to carry the first consolations to the unhappy little creatures,entreats his mother to take charge of the youngest,and overjoyed at her answer,thanks her thus:--"Far the very keen joy that you have given me by your letter,and for the very dear tone in which your soul speaks to me,bless you,O my mother!As I might have hoped and been sure,you have taken little Julius,and that fills me afresh with the deepest gratitude towards you,the rather that,in my constant trust in your goodness,I had already in her lifetime given our good little cousin the promise that you are fulfilling for me after her death."About March,Sand,though he did not fall ill,had an indisposition that obliged him to go and take the waters;his mother happened at the time to be at the ironworks of Redwitz,same twelve or fifteen miles from Wonsiedel,where the mineral springs are found.Sand established himself there with his mother,and notwithstanding his desire to avoid interrupting his work,the time taken up by baths,by invitations to dinners,and even by the walks which his health required,disturbed the regularity of his usual existence and awakened his remorse.