Have a couple of physical Fritz books I badly want to read/reread, but can't, so instead I'm opening up to a random page once or twice a day and reading one page, which is about what I can do without aggravating my back.
Anyway, I thought yesterday evening's and this morning's fun facts were worth sharing here.
1) Book 1 says mail in the 19th century was mostly cash-on-delivery, meaning the recipient paid. When soldiers got mail, it put them in a really tight spot, because they had so little pay, and yet being stuck in the horrible conditions of a campaign for long periods meant you were really desperate to get those letters. And so you'd often end up selling things you couldn't afford to do without (or were required to have as part of army life and would be punished for not having) in order to get your hands on those letters.
Well, my book says Fritz set up free postal service for his soldiers in the Silesian wars to deal with this problem.
This is consistent with other things I've read about Fritz's army, which is that on the one hand, Prussian discipline was notoriously *brutal*, so desertion was a huge problem he and his officers had to contend with, but on the other hand, he had a lot of soldiers defecting to his side, in part because working conditions were better in many respects than in his opponents' armies. E.g. Fritz was able to keep his supply lines intact and provide much more reliable food, so you were much less likely to go hungry in his army. And getting your mail must have been good for morale.
2) A quote both memorable and pathetic from Book 2.
Infant/toddler Fritz (who was the inbred scion of a family in which illnesses galloped and who only had 18th century medicine to treat him) was sickly, which greatly displeased FW (who had already buried his first 2 or 3 infant sons, I forget, and was desperate for an heir). Quote:
"His father often stormed into the nursery or had the child brought to him to examine as if he were some sort of backward worm."
This was before bb!Fritz could freaking talk! This was before he was pissing off FW by reading French and writing poetry!
Man, I'd always had it presented to me as FW leaving bb!Fritz to the women and ignoring him until he was about to turn 6, which was when the abuse started. No such luck, apparently.
3) Book 2 says when Fritz was fourteen (the actual quote is "in many ways a very weary fourteen," which strikes me as heart-breakingly accurate), the French envoy to Berlin fucking hated FW and for years had been trying to get transferred back home. Meanwhile, he convinced the French court that they needed to build up a party around Fritz and try to stage a coup. Fritz was *all over* this and used to tell the French envoy literally everything he knew about what his dad was up to. He was, in other words, spying on FW for the French.
At one point, French envoy dude wrote a report back home stating that he thought FW was on the verge of being declared insane and unfit to rule and being locked up in a fortress. My book says there's some evidence SD and Fritz thought so too, "which certainly would have been an exciting prospect for the harassed heir."
Random facts
Anyway, I thought yesterday evening's and this morning's fun facts were worth sharing here.
1) Book 1 says mail in the 19th century was mostly cash-on-delivery, meaning the recipient paid. When soldiers got mail, it put them in a really tight spot, because they had so little pay, and yet being stuck in the horrible conditions of a campaign for long periods meant you were really desperate to get those letters. And so you'd often end up selling things you couldn't afford to do without (or were required to have as part of army life and would be punished for not having) in order to get your hands on those letters.
Well, my book says Fritz set up free postal service for his soldiers in the Silesian wars to deal with this problem.
This is consistent with other things I've read about Fritz's army, which is that on the one hand, Prussian discipline was notoriously *brutal*, so desertion was a huge problem he and his officers had to contend with, but on the other hand, he had a lot of soldiers defecting to his side, in part because working conditions were better in many respects than in his opponents' armies. E.g. Fritz was able to keep his supply lines intact and provide much more reliable food, so you were much less likely to go hungry in his army. And getting your mail must have been good for morale.
2) A quote both memorable and pathetic from Book 2.
Infant/toddler Fritz (who was the inbred scion of a family in which illnesses galloped and who only had 18th century medicine to treat him) was sickly, which greatly displeased FW (who had already buried his first 2 or 3 infant sons, I forget, and was desperate for an heir). Quote:
"His father often stormed into the nursery or had the child brought to him to examine as if he were some sort of backward worm."
This was before bb!Fritz could freaking talk! This was before he was pissing off FW by reading French and writing poetry!
Man, I'd always had it presented to me as FW leaving bb!Fritz to the women and ignoring him until he was about to turn 6, which was when the abuse started. No such luck, apparently.
3) Book 2 says when Fritz was fourteen (the actual quote is "in many ways a very weary fourteen," which strikes me as heart-breakingly accurate), the French envoy to Berlin fucking hated FW and for years had been trying to get transferred back home. Meanwhile, he convinced the French court that they needed to build up a party around Fritz and try to stage a coup. Fritz was *all over* this and used to tell the French envoy literally everything he knew about what his dad was up to. He was, in other words, spying on FW for the French.
At one point, French envoy dude wrote a report back home stating that he thought FW was on the verge of being declared insane and unfit to rule and being locked up in a fortress. My book says there's some evidence SD and Fritz thought so too, "which certainly would have been an exciting prospect for the harassed heir."
AU! AU! AU!