THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
cannot too strongly express my obligation to her, who not only did for me the more or less dry work of turning German phrases into English, but was in a large sense my coworker, aiding me throughout with most valuable counsel as to the tone of the narrative, and as to passages to be shortened or struck out, and others to be more amply elaborated.
I was born in a castle. This, however, does not mean that
I am of aristocratic ancestry. My father was, at the time
of my birth, a schoolmaster in Liblar, a village of about eight
hundred inhabitants, on the left bank of the Rhine, three
hours' walk from Cologne. His native place was Duisdorf,
near Bonn. Losing his parents in early childhood, he was
adopted into the home of his grandfather, a man belonging to
the peasant class, who possessed a small holding of land upon
which he raised some grain, potatoes and a little wine. Thus
my father grew up a true peasant boy.
At the period of his birth, in 1797, the left bank of the Rhine was in the possession of the French Republic. The years of my father's youth thus fell in what the Rhine folk called “The French Time,” and later in life he had much to tell me of those stirring days; how he had seen the great Napoleon, before the Russian campaign, passing in review a body of troops in the neighborhood of Bonn; how, in the autumn of 1813, the French army, after the battle of Leipzig, defeated and shattered, had come back to the Rhine; how, while standing in the market-place at Bonn, he had seen General Sebastiani dash out of his headquarters in the “Hotel Zum Stern,” leap upon his horse and gallop around with his staff, the trumpeters sounding the alarm and the drums beating the long roll, because of the news that a band of Cossacks had crossed the Rhine between Bonn and Coblenz; how the French troops, stationed
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