198 199 THE CLASS STRUGGLE AN UNUSUAL FRIENDSHIP those nations with whom there was some likelihood of immediate conflict. Oriental troubles led him to the oriental languages; he steered clear of Arabic with its four thousand roots, but Persian is a veritable child play of a language. he would be through with it in three weeks. Then came the turn of the Germanic languages: am now buried in Ulfilas: simply had to get rid of this damned Gothic: have been so long carrying it on in a rather desultory manner. am surprised to find that know much more than expected. need one more book, and then ll be absolutely done with it in two weeks. And then for Old Norse and Old Saxon, with which have long been on terms of half acquaintance. As yet have absolutely no paraphernalia, not even a lexicon: nothing but the Gothic text and old Grimm, but the old fellow is really a brick. In the sixties, when the Schleswig Holstein question came up, Engels undertook some Frisian English JutianScandinavian philology and archaeology, and when the Irish question blazed up, some Celto Irish, and so on. In the General Council of the International his comprehensive linguistic accomplishments were of great value to him; Engels can stammer in twenty languages, was said of him, because in moments of excitement he displayed a slight lisp.
Another epithet of his was that of the General, which he earned by his still more assiduous devotion to the military sciences. Here also he was satisfying an old predilection at the same time that he was preparing for the practical needs of the revolutionary policy. Engels was counting on the enormous importance with the partie militaire would attain in the next commotion. The experiences with the officers who had joined the revolution in the years of rebellion had not been very satisfactory, and Engels declared that the military rabble has an incredibly dirty caste spirit. They hate each other worse than poison, envy each other like schoolboys at the slightest mark of distinction, but they show a united front against all civilians. Engels wanted to arrive at a point at which his theoretical remarks might have some weight and might not merely expose his ignorance.
He had hardly gotten established in Manchester, when he began to plug up military science. He began with the simplest and most rudimentary things, such as are asked in an ensign or lieutenant examination, and are therefore assumed by all authors as already known. He studied everything about army administration, down to the most technical details: Elementary Tactics, Vauban system of fortification, and all other systems, including the modern system of detached forts, bridge construction and fieldworks, fighting tools, down to the varying construction of carriages for fieldguns, the ravitaillement of hospitals, and other matters; finally he passed on to the general history of war, in which connection he paid particular attention to the English authority Napier, the French Jomini, and the German Clausewitz.
Far removed from any shallow attacks on the moral folly of warfare, Engels sought rather to recognize its historic justification, by which effort he more than once aroused the violent rage of declamatory democracy. Byron once poured the phials of his scorching rage over the two generals who, at the Battle of Waterloo, in the character of champions of feudal Europe, inflicted a deathblow on the heir of the Revolution; it was an interesting accident that made Engels, in his letters to Marx, outline historic portraits both of Wellington and Blücher, which in their small compass, are so complete and so distinct, that they hardly need to be altered in a single respect to make them fully acceptable to the present state of advancement of military science.
In a third field, too, in which Engels also labored much and with pleasure, namely, in that of the natural sciences, he was not to have the opportunity, during the decades in which he accepted the bondage of commerce in order to afford free rein to the scientific investigations of another man to put the finishing touches to his own Labors.
And this was really a tragic lot. But Engels never wailed about it, for sentimentality was as foreign to his nature as to his friend He always held it to be the great good fortune