Prague to Deutschbrod
"The Bohemian inns do not enjoy the best reputation."
"The Bohemian inns do not enjoy the best reputation."
We took with us the blessing of our friends and continued our pilgrimage from Prague. Where I have seen nothing, I can naturally tell you nothing. Night lodgings are night lodgings; and whether we ate ham or sausage, or both together, can be of little concern to you.
It was a fine, splendid, fresh morning when we passed through Kolín and through the region of the battlefield.(1) Daun knew how to conduct all his battles with great skill as positional engagements,(2) and Frederick more than once experienced the formidable genius of this Cunctator.(3) Had he not been wounded at Torgau,(4) it would probably have been a second edition of Kolín. The region from Kolín to Čáslav(5) struck me as very pleasant; above all, the villages on the right in the valley present a fine view. The penultimate rise before Čáslav affords a magnificent prospect to right and left, forward and backward, over a fertile expanse dotted with villages and towns. It seems to me that this would be one of the best military positions imaginable, so easily and precisely can one descend toward all directions; and I should be very surprised if the spot did not appear somewhere in military history. Not far from Kolín I ate my midday meal at a roadside inn, without troubling myself much about the food. My soul was in a peculiar, very mixed mood; not without a certain melancholy, amid the dreadful scenes of the past. Then, from a corner of the large, dark room, a faint, trembling, simply magical music sounded to me. I confess my weakness: a single tone can sometimes melt my soul and lead me about like a child.
An old Bohemian woman sat at a brighter window opposite us, drying her eyes, and a young, beautiful girl, probably her daughter, seemed gently to console her with looks and words. From time to time, at a distance, I understood a little from its similarity to Russian, which, as you know, I was once compelled to learn somewhat.(6) Feeling rarely breaks out in me unless humanity draws me along with irresistible force. I help where I can, if only I could do so more often. The tone of the old instrument, played by a fair-haired young fellow in the other dark corner, may have acted more strongly on the women’s souls and made their peculiar mood more vivid. It was neither harp, nor lute, nor zither; no one could tell me its proper name; it most resembled the Russian balalaika.(7)
It seems to me that others have already remarked that the road from Prague to Vienna is perhaps the busiest in all Europe. We encountered an endless number of wagons with Hungarian wines, wool, and cotton; but most of them were bringing flour to the magazines at Čáslav and further on toward the frontier.(8)
The Bohemian inns do not enjoy the best reputation, and between Dresden and Prague we had already once been forced to eat, drink, and sleep in a rather cynical fashion. We were comforted with the assurance that in Deutschbrod(9) we would find a very good house; but never was such a good hope so badly fulfilled. We tried two inns, neither of which looked particularly inviting, and could get no room; the officers, we were told, had taken everything on their march through. That may well have been the case, for everything was moving home from the army — hence the unsafe roads. At the third, I angrily set my knapsack straight onto the table and quartered myself without a word. The landlord was a dauber who called himself a painter, and his mother a specimen of an old, ugly, quarrelsome woman who had for forty years already stepped from the sixth petition into the seventh.(10) After us appeared a crowd of Jews, glass-dealers, trinket-sellers, and box-carriers of all kinds, one of whom claimed to trade as far as Siberia on the Yenisei.(11) The company drank, sang, and quarrelled at full volume, without caring a fig for my aesthetics; and at night they packed us so tightly on the straw with the Hebrews that on the British transport to Columbia I was scarcely stowed more oppressively.(12) Such evenings and nights had to be reckoned with when we strapped on our travel sack.