446 
A CRUISING VISIT TO SOME GERMAN RATTLE-FIELDS. 
lias carried me and my maps in a great many countries of tlie old and 
new world, and always in the most successful way. A great advantage 
of that boat springs from the fact that in nearly every country of 
Europe there are a large number of officials, principally policemen, 
who make it a business to enquire what the stranger is doing, and it is 
an enormous convenience to have a little boat that slips along and 
leaves no trail. A little craft of that kind puzzles them in the begin¬ 
ning and by the time they have solved the puzzle the boat has gone 
somewhere else and it is no more their business to enquire what it is. 
It is an exceedingly valuable boat in that respect. One does not camp 
until twilight comes on and then one always selects a little open spot 
above the village, not below it, and no one is notified,- and the next 
morning you cook your coffee between your knees as you float away in 
the dawn of another day. 
This peculiar trip that I am speaking of now was started from the 
head waters of the Elbe, which is really not the Elbe, but the Moldau. 
The Elbe runs through the heart of Germany from the top of Bohemia to 
Hamburg. I shipped the boat by rail from Flushing up to the head 
waters at Budweis. It is astonishing how little it costs to send a boat 
of that size half way across Europe. I think it was a matter of 10s. 
or 12s. The German railways have a very convenient and kind way of 
charging, only by weight and not by cubic contents as the railways do 
here, which makes an enormous difference. I found it at Budweis in 
good condition and I started down towards Prague. 
Bohemia is to-day a battle-field of races; it is more insufferable 
than the most insufferable part of the Transvaal. If you speak to the 
Germans you are insulted by the Czechs. I have never met anybody 
who could talk Czech. I do not know what the effect of speaking 
Czech among the Germans would be, but I found after my first day’s 
experience it was safer to begin with Dutch or English, or anything 
like that, and to work up very slowly and carefully to the German. 
Prague was a place of great interest to me, because it was there that 
Scharnhorst died. Scharnhorst is, I suppose, now universally recog¬ 
nised as the author of the universal service in the army. He was the 
man who contributed, perhaps more than any other single man, to 
making Prussia capable of rising against Napoleon, uniting all her 
forces, civil and military, against an enemy who seemed at that time 
unconquerable. Pie was a simple, modest, scholarly man—one would 
have said a most unsoldierly-looking man. He was not a Prussian, 
and it may be interesting to recall that not a single one of the great 
men who made Prussia a military power was a Prussian, they were, 
every one of them, from non-Prussian countries. Scharnhorst was a 
Hanoverian; Gneisenau was an Austrian subject; Blucher was a 
Mecklenburger and saw his first service in the Swedish army; the 
great Prime Minister Stein was from Nassau ; and Hardenberg, the 
Prime Minister who succeeded him, was a Hanoverian. But Blucher 
and Gneisenau and Scharnhorst, the three greatest generals of that 
time were not one of them Prussians. 
In Prague I went to see where Scharnhorst had died and I assumed 
that every boy in the streets would be as familiar with Scharnhorst, 
