History: c. 1750 - 1813

Prologue: the Rhineland (c. 1750 - 1796)

The family from which Nikolaus hails is an old and distinguished noble house of western Prussia.  However, the centuries had stripped it of much of its lands by the time Nikolaus' grandfather, the consummately Nordic Bastian Kasch, claimed his inheritance as Freiherr of Doenhoff.  The ongoing Russian conflict didn't help, either.  Indeed, Bastian Kasch's inheritance was little more than a large stretch of farmable land in the far north of German, where the river Elbe emptied into the sea, a modest manor, and a mostly depleted treasury.  It was there that Nikolaus' father, Adelrich Kasch, was born in 1757--the same year Prussia came under a renewed attack by Russia.  Under the stress of war, peasants moved away, the land deteriorated, and the young lord's future looked bleak.

Fortunately, Bastian had the foresight to see Prussia's future just might lie in the military, for it was a unified national military that would defend and save the country, and the military that would wield the power when the wars were over.  So it was that Adelrich, who had inherited his mother’s dark hair and darker eyes, was raised both as Freiherr and officer, learning military strategy alongside Enlightenment disciplines that were popular at the moment.  Even when Peter III of Russia returned all conquered lands to Prussia in 1762, Adelrich's martial education did not cease.  Bastian had decided: his son would thrive even should the House fall--if not as a baron, then as an officer of the Prussian army.

With the advent of Catherine the Great in Russia, Russo-Prussian affairs took a new turn.  Prussia, having learned its lesson, steadily built its military might and Russia began to set its gaze on a less menacing opponent.  Prussia, hungry for expansion after years in retreat, began eyeing the same morsel.  After a series of wars, Poland was partitioned between Prussia, Austria and Russia in 1772.  The battles that had preceded the event were some of the first that 15-year-old Adelrich would participate in.

They were not by any means the last.

For the next quarter-century, Adelrich would devote his life to his country.  He was married before his seventeenth birthday to a stern, sensible and stout daughter of the neighboring lord of Kirstendoff--a woman seven years older than he--thus expanding the lands that his offspring inherit, but remained home only long enough to sire three boys and one girl, and not to watch them grow.  Even when the country was relatively peaceful, he spent almost all of his time drilling his men.  His soldiers loved him as a father.  His children, however, knew him only as a serious man, an authoritative and strong head of the family, but distant.

The girl was eventually married to a rising young officer under Adelrich's command.  All three boys were educated as Adelrich was, but despite the urgings of his wife, Adelrich never chose his successor.  Somehow--perhaps because Adelrich never really spent the time to get to know his own children--none of them really struck him as a proper inheritor of his new, martial legacy.

In 1792, a new threat rose out of the west.  France, with the young and brilliant Napoleon at its head, was sweeping east and devouring all in its way.  For 35-year-old Adelrich--an age at which most men would be questioning their priorities in life--his allegiance was never a question.  The same day he received word of the declaration of war, he rode west to meet the threat.

For the next two years, Adelrich never saw home.  The French continued to push Germanic forces back, and by 1794 the Rhineland was completely overrun.  As winter settled in, however, the previously unflagging advance faltered as both sides settled to wait out the weather.  At the northern end of the front, Adelrich gave his men leave to visit their families but chose to remain behind himself with the remainder of the battalion and sought quarter at a landlord's manor to the east of the front.

Enter Elenore, the landlord's daughter-in-law, widowed not a month after her wedding by an unlucky assault from a single small band of Napoleon's soldiers.  Half Adelrich's age, with hair like the sun and eyes of a blue that he had only seen in a newborn's gaze, she opened his eyes to the world.  He wooed the girl awkwardly, secretly, and she returned his small advances with a certain innocence that warmed his heart.  Their trysts were breathless and wordless, often no more than hurried kisses in the halls after midnight, occasionally guiltily delighted meetings on the family farms, far from the manor.  She became pregnant with his child as the thaw came; he worshipped her and she accepted him, and in their own ways they loved each other.  The winter of 1794 was a happy one.

With the spring came trouble.  The French war machine woke from its hibernation and ground eastward.  Adelrich commanded as he had never commanded before, fought as he had never fought before, defending every square inch between the front and his lover's estate with more fervor than he might have guarded his own life with.  Throughout the spring and into the summer the war raged on, but it was not enough.  By autumn, the Prussian lines were falling back at a frightening pace.  By winter, musket shots sounded in the distance in the dead of the night as they wrestled and fought with one another in a haunted, desperate sort of silence beneath the blankets.

The long-dreaded order for retreat came at last, in late December of 1795.  For three days his men fought on, ignoring the order, hiding it from their commander; on the fourth day, the eve of the new year, a second missive came through.  It is said Adelrich was on the verge of madness that night, that he snatched up his saber when he heard and spurred his warhorse westward to face the French army alone.  Only the news that Elenore had gone into labor turned him back from his suicide run.  Regardless of the consequences, he came to her side as shells tore the ground apart outside.

Elenore was a small-boned woman, fragile and delicate.  Rations had been growingly scarce as the war progressed, and her constitution was flagging.  The labor was long and difficult--too long, too difficult.  When her screams began to fade, Adelrich knew it would not end well.

Her child was born with the new year, but Elenore died with the old.  Her last word became the newborn boy's name--Nikolaus.

His men told him, afterwards, that it was a miracle of God he survived the ride back to the encampment.  Three horses were shot out from under him.  He took two bullets himself, one in the calf, one in the shoulder, and kept riding--the child cradled to his breast.  Adelrich himself remembers nothing of it.  The next morning he and his newborn son were sent home.  To treat his wounds, the official papers said, but the wounds Adelrich received that night were not the sort mortal doctors could heal.

He was never the same after the winter of 1795.  Prussia relinquished the Rhineland, having turned its focus to Poland once more, and some measure of peace was restored to the country.  Adelrich was honorably discharged from service and returned to a home he hardly remembered, to a family he hardly knew.  His daughter was married by then, and two of his sons.  The eldest was a man now, ready for his inheritance.  Even the youngest of his legitimate children was well past his tenth birthday.  It was time to choose an heir.

Adelrich named his newborn son, his illegitimate bastard, as heir to his title and his lands.

The history grows blurry here.  Some say his eldest son died of anger.  Some say he disowned his father and walked out on his family.  Some say his own father killed him when he dared insult his infant half-brother.  At any rate, the eldest was never heard from again, and his wife and her remaining three children were never again on speaking terms with him.  A lonely, broken man, Adelrich finally learned to settle himself at home, and devoted himself to the education of his one living memoir of Elenore.

Childhood and Adolescence (1796 - 1812)

Adelrich was never an emotional man.  Nor was he playful.  While he lacked no love for the boy, he knew of only one way to raise Nikolaus—the same way Bastian had raised him.  As a soldier.  While Adelrich never neglected his youngest son, he was not a warm father.  Critical, rarely pleased and frequently frowning, Adelrich was as much feared by his son as he was admired.  Having no mother and never daring to ask of her fate, the boy sought comfort in wet nurses, and having no siblings, sought playmates in the children of the servants and in occasional visits from neighboring lords who brought their offspring.  To young Nikolaus, Father was not a giver of love, nor a source of entertainment.  ‘Father’ was synonymous with unquestionable authority.

Father was also synonymous with martial education.  Nikolaus would not only have the discipline of a military man; he would be a commanding officer in the Prussian army, a field marshal, a general.  From the time he could make a fist of his infant hands, Adelrich placed a miniature saber in his hands.  From the time he could walk, his father taught him to ride.  From the time he could run, he learned to shoot.  And from the time he learned to read, he learned the art of military strategy.

Despite the strictures, Nikolaus’ childhood was not an unhappy one.  For the first ten years of his life, France’s attention was focused on Austria.  While Austria was an ally of Prussia, the wars did not immediately affect the citizens of the latter.  Always, his father’s imposing figure loomed in the background, but Nikolaus remembers his childhood primarily as a time of laughter and games, as the deep blue skies of the Prussian summers and the golden fields of the Doenhoff estate in autumn.

Nikolaus’ childhood ended prematurely in 1805.  Austria’s bid to crush France had failed, and Napoleon now turned his insatiable eye on all lands west of the Elbe River.  Again the war struck too close to home, and again Adelrich, now nearly 50, prepared to take up his saber in defense of his loved ones.  As it turned out, it was not necessary; Napoleon halted at the Elbe, and in 1806 consolidated the fractured states west of it into the puppet Confederation of the Rhine.  Nonetheless, Nikolaus had seen what his father had been willing to do for him, and it left an indelible mark.  Adelrich was no longer merely feared by his son; he was respected.  No longer was he merely admired; he was loved.

The day Nikolaus turned 10 was the day he ceased to be a child.  While he had never resisted his military education before, he took up his studies with a new fervor, striving to live up to the impressive wall of medals that adorned his father’s chest.  Over the next several years, academics, strategy, swordplay, marksmanship and riding became his life, just as they had been his father’s for over half a century.  The Kasch blood was strong in the young man, and he excelled  at all that he put his mind to.  By his sixteenth birthday it became apparent that if he continued at this rate, he would make his father very proud.

Yet that was when he decided to leave his chosen path.

Elschen von Schafstaedt (1812 - 1813)

Love.  Marriage.  They were rarely synonymous among nobles, who married with one eye on the treasury and one on land titles.  Yet Adelrich remembered well his year with Elenore, and he remembered well the consequences of a loveless marriage paired with a merciless military career.  In all other things Adelrich was relentlessly pragmatic; in matters of the heart, he was not.  His son would marry for love or not marry at all—regardless of succession.

But young Nikolaus did not need such instructions.  He had had his eye set upon black-eyed Elschen von Schafstaedt, daughter of their neighbor two baronies to the south, since before he could clearly remember.  Childhood playmates, the close friendship of their youth was one of the few that blossomed into what could have been a storybook romance.  When Nikolaus turned sixteen, his father proposed the betrothal to the Freiherr of Schafstaedt, whose estate was failing, but not hopeless.  In comparison, the Doenhoff estate was on the rise, and the younger Kasch already had a reputation as a promising young officer.  The pairing was favorable to both parties.  Elschen’s father gave the nod.

Courtship was brief, the betrothal briefer still.  By autumn of 1812, they were married.  Young, headstrong and hopelessly in love, they were oblivious to the rising resentment among the Prussian people against the French.  Nikolaus let his dreams of military glory fall by the wayside, and Adelrich checked his rebuke with much difficulty.  Sooner or later, the youth would wake to the reality of the war already brewing beneath their feet.

A year passed.  Napoleon’s armies again began to press east, though the bulk of the war passed far to the south of Doenhoff land.  Yet occasionally the battles grew close, and his father’s patriotism and love of the battle would surface in him.  Nikolaus would stand at the window and watch the flash of distant artillery while his wife slept—would wish in brief, illogical bursts that he were not safe behind walls but astride a warhorse, leading his men in a bold charge.  When he tried to push the thoughts from his head, he would find them instead replaced by another, even more scandalous notion: that it was not too late to change his mind.

Then, in the late spring of 1813, Elschen became pregnant with his child.  His madman’s midnight musings were laid aside for good.  Nikolaus contented himself keeping track of his tenants, learning the ropes of landlording from his young wife, taking on responsibilities that had previously fallen to his father’s accountant.  He contented himself being a civilian, a loving husband, and a father-to-be.  The days at the manor were carefree, and the nights were filled with laughter.  It was a good time to be alive.

Spring turned to summer, and summer wound toward late summer.  When August opened her lazy petals, Napoleon’s troops seemed to have halted their advance in deference to the heat.  It was then that Elschen made the decision to travel to Dresden, the childhood home of her mother, and seek the blessings of her grandfather for her child.  Nikolaus had his doubts, for word had it Napoleon was camped not far to the north of Dresden, just west of the trail Elschen would follow to the city, but he was not one to deny his wife her small request.  He agreed, reluctantly, on the sixth of August.  That night, after her breath upon his skin became slow and even, he stared at the ceiling and found he could not sleep.

On the morning of the seventh, she left for Dresden.  The sky was clear that day, but dawn was fog-enshrouded.  He watched her carriage until it was devoured by the fog and continued watching even after.  He did not stop watching until the morning sun burned the fog away and revealed the empty road.  Three days later, Napoleon crushed the Prussian army, slew the Prussian nobles, and conquered the city of Dresden.  Of the aristocracy, a scarce handful was left alive.  Elschen was not among them.  Nikolaus would not know until two weeks later, when her body was delivered in a sealed coffin with a brief, impersonal note nailed atop.

He did not say a word when he found out.  He did not open the coffin.  He did not want to see her dead.  The Elschen he would remember would be his smiling, dark-haired wife.  Elschen, who rode with him on the cliffs over the Elbe.  Elschen, who laughed with him over supper, or by the fireside.  Elschen, who loved him deep into the night.  Instead, he kissed the coffin gently, turned, and strode into the manor.  When he reemerged he wore his father’s uniform, carried his father’s saber and his father’s pistol.  Leaving a note to his father on the same piece of paper that bore the news of his beloved’s death, he mounted the fastest charger in the stable and rode south without a glance back.  By nightfall he had run across a company of Prussian soldiers.  The morning after he rode into war for the first time, and they called him fearless.

They were wrong.  He was numb.

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