Early Life and Napoleonic Wars
He was educated at the cadet school of Stolp in Pomerania from 1807 to 1811, in the midst of the misery and poverty caused by the French occupation. At the outbreak of the War of Liberation he and his elder brother made their way through the French positions to Breslau, where they were at once appointed to the army, the elder as ensign on probation, the younger to the substantive rank of second lieutenant. After a vain attempt to transfer to the Blücher Hussars, a regiment he had an intense boyish admiration for when it was quartered at Stolp, he was ordered to report to General Yorck, who treated him and the other officers from Breslau with coldness, until Steinmetz asked about returning to the king who had sent him.
The brothers were in the hardest fighting of the campaign of 1813, the elder being killed at the battle of Leipzig and the younger being wounded more than once. During the short halt on the Rhine he improved his military and general education. In the battles in France, he won the Iron Cross, Second Class. After the peace, he entered Paris only once, fearing to spend the ten ducats that sent monthly to his mother. For the same reason, he did not take part in the pleasures of his better off comrades.
Read more about this topic: Karl Friedrich Von Steinmetz
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or wars:
“The secret of heaven is kept from age to age. No imprudent, no sociable angel ever dropt an early syllable to answer the longings of saints, the fears of mortals. We should have listened on our knees to any favorite, who, by stricter obedience, had brought his thoughts into parallelism with the celestial currents, and could hint to human ears the scenery and circumstance of the newly parted soul.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We have good reason to believe that memories of early childhood do not persist in consciousness because of the absence or fragmentary character of language covering this period. Words serve as fixatives for mental images. . . . Even at the end of the second year of life when word tags exist for a number of objects in the child’s life, these words are discrete and do not yet bind together the parts of an experience or organize them in a way that can produce a coherent memory.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“Old France, weighed down with history, prostrated by wars and revolutions, endlesly vacillating from greatness to decline, but revived, century after century, by the genius of renewal!”
—Charles De Gaulle (1890–1970)