"
"Have you corrected the grammatical blunders?"
"I have, your excellency; I have erased them so cautiously that no
one can see that any thing has been corrected."
"Well, then, be so kind as to dispatch a courier."
"But, your excellency," said Gneisenau, "shall the courier take only
these two dispatches? Have you forgotten that you promised Madame
von Blucher to write to her after every battle, whether victorious
or not, and that I solemnly pledged her my word to remind your
excellency of it?"
"Well, it is unnecessary to remind me," cried Blucher, taking up the
letter he had first written. "Here is my letter to Amelia. She is a
faithful wife, and I surely owed it to her to tell her first that
the Lord has been kind and gracious enough toward me to let me gain
the battle. But you need not correct it. My Amelia will not blame me
for my grammatical blunders, and to her I freely speak my mind."
"Did you inform your wife, too, that you drew your sword yourself,
and rushed into the thickest of the fray?"
"I shall take good care not to tell her any thing of the kind,"
exclaimed Blucher. "As far as that is concerned, I did not speak my
mind to her. It is true I had promised my dear wife to be what she
calls sensible, and only to command and play the distinguished
general who merely looks on while others do the fighting.
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