The children and their mother found Wusterhausen very unattractive. The only pets they were allowed were two black bears, very ugly and vicious. They had no comforts indoors, and were treated as though they were children of the meanest peasant. Some boys might have found sport in the fish-ponds, the groves and the streams about the place, filled as they were with fish and game, but Fritz cared nothing for such things. Their loneliness drew the two children closer and closer together, and their dislike of their father increased with each year that he took them out to Wusterhausen.
The father, on his part, was growing more and more contemptuous of his son. He found Fritz cared nothing for the army, nothing for the chase, that the hardship and exposure of rough life were torture to him. Worse than that, he had discovered some verses in French that Fritz had written, and spoke of him scornfully to the men of his court as "the French flute-player and poet." It would have been very hard for the boy if he had not had a mother and sister who were so devoted to him, and did everything they possibly could to protect him from his father's tyranny.
When he was fourteen, Frederick William appointed Fritz captain of his Grenadier Guards. This was the regiment made up of giants, and was one of the most singular passions of the very singular old King. He sent men through the whole of Europe and Asia to search for very tall men. Some of the regiment were almost nine feet high. When a foreign monarch wished to curry favor with the King of Prussia he would send him a giant. The King showered favors on these men. He had court painters paint portraits of each one of them. They were the very centre of that great army which was the sole pride of the old warrior, and which he was building up so that it should become the greatest military force in Europe.
Fritz tried to do his duty as captain of the regiment, and gradually acquired something of a military bearing. For a short time his father was pleased, but his pleasure did not last long; for the boy could not keep away from the fascinations of music and of books, and all of the various arts which were constantly coming into Prussia from France.