Fritz Oswald Bilse

“ Shielded against indiscreet spies by the interlacing vines creeping all over this arbor, his love-making had proceeded at such a rapid pace that within an hour the little woman did not thrust her gallant wooer aside when he dared imprint a kiss on her swelling lips.
In another arbor, more in proximity to the champagne bar, First Lieutenant Leimann sat in lonely misery and shed rivulets of tears. His intoxication, in its more advanced stage, always took that form known technically as “howling desolation.” On this occasion it had seized him promptly after the ninth glassful. ”

“ I am not accustomed to knock about the woods so early in the morning.”
“I feel sincerely sorry that I hit the major so unluckily,” replied Kolberg; “but I didn’t mean to, and the devil take the women! It’s always their doing. I don’t know anyway what made me take up with that silly Kahle woman!”
“Don’t bother your head about that, my dear fellow,” said Borgert. “The major alone is to blame, for he ought to have looked out better for that handsome wife of his. And as for her, she is not worth a thought, as we all know. One must treat a woman as she deserves.” ”

“ To learn anew, after losing all caste, after dismissal from the army in disgrace and dishonor, to learn a bread-winning calling and to have to work like everybody in that despised throng of perspiring, vulgar toilers—surely, that was not at all to his taste. From infancy up he had been reared in disdain of labor—had acquired, one by one, tastes and habits of thought that seemed irreconcilable with a life of sober, plain living and thinking, with a life where his part would be that of a subordinate. ”

“ There must be a remedy.”
“There is!” retorted Borgert, throwing a loaded revolver on the crazy table.
A tremor shot through the woman, and for a moment she leaned against the wall as if ready to swoon, while her wide-opened eyes stared with fear at the little instrument, the glittering [307] steel of which reflected the glowing embers in the grate.
“By all that is sacred,” her voice came hysterically, “are you out of your senses!”
“On the contrary,” replied Borgert, coolly; “it is the only way out of all our difficulties, and it is not the first time I have had the thought. ”

“ Leimann meanwhile was on his way to Berlin. His wife, however, was still very busy,—burning up packages of letters which she did not wish either her husband or her companion to read, and then put into a handbag a few objects of the kind which only women cherish, and the sole value of which lies in the recollections clinging to them. It is astonishing what resplendent images a woman can conjure before her inner vision when in the possession of such faded flowers, bits of ribbon, and the like. ”

“ And if, a short time before, when she had hastily parted from Borgert, she had felt something like remorse,—something of shame in having abused the confidence placed in her by her husband,—she now regarded herself as a victim, and her fault only in the light of a just revenge for his heartless conduct.
For at no time is the heart of woman more susceptible to temptation than at the moment when she feels herself betrayed and outraged in her best feelings. ”

“ The fire in the small stove had long ago died down, and but a few coals were still glimmering feebly.
To see the man one would have imagined him asleep; but Schmitz was very much awake, and in his head wild thoughts were whirling. He was thinking of times past and gone; and the more his present circumstances contrasted with former ones, the more grimly rose his hatred against the man who had brought him to his present plight. ”

“ When Borgert entered the ballroom the band struck up the latest waltz,—“Over the Waves,”—and he noticed Frau Stark, flaming like a peony, perspiration streaming down her rubicund face, being handed, true to his programme, by Lieutenant Specht to his smiling comrade, von Meckelburg. Frau Stark just took the time to gulp a glass of lemonade, and then was off again, breathing hard, but still in the ring. The atmosphere in the room was stifling, but all the ladies, at least, seemed to enjoy themselves. Officers’ wives are proverbially insatiable dancers. ”

“ Must we extend militarism to the point where it smothers and throttles all other organs of the state machine?
“If we but devoted to other institutions of the empire a modest portion of the untold money that is swallowed up every year by the army, there would be no necessity for laying tax upon tax upon the citizens until what remains to them of the fruits of their labor hardly suffices for bare needs. If we did that, we should be a wealthy country; the citizen would acquire material wellbeing. Industry would revive and yield to the people all its blessings. ”

“ Far better to take life as it comes. And so he had joined the party at the gaming-table, where one of the winners was just then standing treat for a battery of Veuve Clicquot, and as he slowly sipped the delicious beverage, the bubbles rising like rosy pearls from the depths of his chalice, he smiled with self-satisfaction.
But at last he, too, left the house and directed his steps toward the far end of the garden, where a small gate led directly into the street at the end of which he dwelt. There! Again Frau Kahle and uncouth, elephantine Lieutenant Pommer! ”

“ Schmitz shiveringly turned up his coat collar, sank both his hands into his pockets, and went briskly, the cane under his arm, to the railway station. There he bought a ticket for his former garrison, but a few minutes away by rail, and stepped on board the train which had just rolled in.
Arrived there, he found the small town buried [135] under a thick blanket of snow. From the barracks row upon row of lighted windows glimmered like stars from the distance. Every little while snatches of song or single chords, wafted towards him by the wind, gave sound in the night. ”

“ Misled by the captain’s own words on a previous occasion of similar kind, he had taken it for granted that König had really been guilty of diverting some of the moneys under his care to oblige a needy comrade,—Borgert himself. In his vindictiveness he had spared no pains in the course of his conversations with fellow-officers at the Casino to spread rumors as to this alleged fact, magnifying the matter or distorting its details, as it suited his purpose; and even after Borgert’s flight these rumors had been scattered broadcast by the idle tongue of gossip. ”

“ Colonel von Kronau, the pompous and infallible, was very much cast down. There were some smart gentlemen in the regiment who now claimed to have suspected the facts for a long time, and to have seen such a catastrophe approaching. But there are always such people, [267] and as a matter-of-fact neither these wiseacres nor their less astute comrades had ever expected Borgert to turn out badly. For his case, although somewhat worse, was substantially the epitome of their own cases, and it is a truism that we never see ourselves as others see us. ”

“ Still another evil, and one which of late has been much ventilated in Germany, is the abuse of power by officers and non-commissioned officers towards their subordinates. There has [xxiii] always been too much of this in the German army, and it would carry us too far afield to trace here the causes. In itself it seems a strange anomaly that in an army which calls itself by the proud term of a “nation in arms,” and whose membership is recruited from every stratum of society, there should be such wholesale maltreatment of the privates by their superior officers. ”

“ The men were in a rage. What folly to dance, with the thermometer so high! Much more sensible to sit down quietly on the veranda and drink cool, frothy beer! Lieutenant Specht felt particularly enraged, for he was to meet his flame at the train about ten. He exploded his anger, saying to Borgert:
“The old woman is crazy, with her eternal dancing; but let us keep her in perpetual motion to-night, just to teach her a lesson, until she herself gives in!”
While the ballroom was being cleared of chairs and got ready for the hop, couples were promenading in the garden. ”

“ As long as his personal example all tells the other way, how can we expect the army to become prudent and economical?”
“However, Captain, that is not the sole trouble. I think as long as we as a class—or caste—are taught that we are something better [58] than the civilian population, so long as we are guided by another code of ethics, erecting an insurmountable barrier around us, there can be no real reform. Such prejudices, or rather such systematic teaching, must inevitably lead to sharp separation between the professional soldier class and the rest of the people. ”

“ The causes that have been at work for thirty years past, undermining and honeycombing the whole structure of the German army, are too manifold, too much ingrained in the very fibre of the German people of to-day, and too complex to yield at the mere bidding of even so [xviii] imperious a voice as the Kaiser’s. Bilse, in his book, lays a pitiless finger on the ulcers that have been festering and growing in the bosom of the army; but his story, after all, is that of only one small garrison, and refers to but a brief period in the very recent past. ”

“ Housewives dreaded him, for his appetite was Gargantuan. With stoic defiance of all warning glances he was in the habit of demolishing thrice the quantity of the daintiest eatables apportioned [6] to each guest. After everybody else had put down his fork, his invariable way was to help himself once more liberally, saying it was his favorite dish.
The last of the trio was Lieutenant Kolberg, an amazingly pale young man with moustaches à la Kaiser. He led a life against which moralists might have urged arguments, and there had been various scandals connected with his past. ”

“ Meanwhile on the floor below Borgert was reading a book; but his thoughts were far away. He had serious forebodings that all his creditors, like a pack of hungry wolfhounds, were about to engage in a joint hunt for him, or rather for the money that he didn’t have. He was afraid that the colonel would soon demand the immediate payment of his load of debts, and that, if unable to comply with the order, resignation from the army was the only possible outcome. ”

“ But before doffing his uniform he went to the neighboring city and purchased for himself a civilian’s suit, a collar, and a hat. These took about all the money which had been paid him.
Then he carried everything of the government’s outfit to the quartermaster, to whom he likewise sold some of the private regimentals he had bought with his own money. The sabre he kept as a memento.
And then came the hardest of all,—the farewell from his comrades and his horses. Every one had a friendly word for him, for he had been a good comrade and had never been puffed up with his own importance. ”

“ Roth had been detailed as sergeant-major for the first reserve squadron, and he was glad of it. There were among these reserves a number of men he knew to be “flush” of money, and whom he understood how to handle. There were also some “one year’s men,” who, nearly all of them, had open hands and well-filled pockets. By shutting an eye, or maybe both sometimes, thus easing the severe discipline for them, he was sure, at the end of their brief term of supplementary service, to have the larger portion of their “gold foxes” in his own pocket. ”

“ So, you see, she saved the colonel’s life, for the civilian is known as a dead shot. Since then she has the colonel completely in her power, and no matter what she tells him to do, he executes her orders like a docile poodle dog,—a fact which we all see illustrated every day.”
“Well, that explains the whole mystery, of course,” delightedly shouted Borgert. “Don’t you know any more such stories? For it is really high time to call a halt. He has manners like a ploughboy’s, and she like a washerwoman’s. ”

“ A direct outgrowth of the luxuriousness prevalent in the German army of to-day is two other evils which in their consequences on the morals [xxi] of the officers can scarcely be overrated. They are epitomized by the two words “army usury” and “money marriages.” To live beyond one’s means leads to indebtedness. And there we have the simple genesis of the army usurer, so-called. He exists and thrives in every garrison in the empire, and the broad swath he mows within the ranks of the army testifies to his diligence and to his successful methods. ”