Man and the education of man was the subject
which occupied us long and often in our walks, and in our open-air life
generally. It was particularly these discussions which drew me forcibly
towards Middendorff, the youngest of us.
I liked well our life of the bivouac, because it made so much of history
clear to me; and taught me, too, through our oft-continued and severely
laborious marches and military manoeuvres, the interchanging mutual
relations of body and spirit. It showed me how little the individual man
belongs to himself in war time; he is but an atom in a great whole, and
as such alone must he be considered.
Through the chance of our corps being far removed from the actual seat
of war, we lived our soldier life, at least I did, in a sort of dream,
notwithstanding the severe exertions caused by our military manoeuvres,
and we heard of the war only in the same sleepy way. Now and then, at
Leipzig, at Dalenburg, at Bremen, at Berlin, we seemed to wake up; but
soon sank back into feeble dreaminess again. It was particularly
depressing and weakening to me never to be able to grasp our position as
part of the great whole of the campaign, and never to find any
satisfactory explanation of the reason or the aim of our manoeuvres.
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