Page:The Hessians and the other German auxiliaries of Great Britain in the revolutionary war.djvu/56

 44 from the ranks. Seume writes that he himself had hopes of promotion, which were shattered by the ending of the war, as in time of peace no one who was not noble could aspire to be anything more than a sergeant-major. Kapp speaks of the officers as belonging mostly to the lower nobility. The list of Hessian officers in 1779 does not bear out these statements. It appears that at that time more than one half of the officers were not noble, nobility being judged by the presence, or absence, of the mystic particle von.

We come at last to the character of the officers. Their education was generally confined to a limited amount of writing and a little barbarous French. They understood neither the cause for which the Americans were fighting, nor, at first, the language in which the statesmen of both contending parties argued their different claims. But had they understood far more than they did, their feelings would still have been on the side of royal prerogative against popular rights. I can recall no instance in which one of the German officers engaged in this war uses any expression showing him to have been in sympathy with the liberal intellectual movement of the eighteenth century. This conservatism was not necessary to make them go where they were ordered, nor did it prevent some of them from heartily wishing themselves at home again after a campaign or two in America. Once there, we find them talking about the despotism of Congress. This absurd idea was probably suggested to them by the English, and was taken up by the anti-American press in Germany. There is little doubt, too, that many, both of the officers and soldiers, looked forward with