FOOTNOTES:
[19] “Commiss-fortune”—the term applied to the dowry of an officer’s wife, which must reach a certain figure.—Tr.
Chapter VIII
CHANGES IN THE GARRISON
The flight of First Lieutenant Borgert could not long remain a secret.
When he did not return at the expiration of his short leave, and a telegraphic query brought the answer from his father that he had not seen him, the assumption began to take shape that he had tried to escape the consequences of his misdoings by deserting.
It is true that no one aside from Leimann had known precisely his bad financial status. But when the Jewish dealer came to claim the furniture sold him, and at the same time the bailiff arrived with the intention of seizing the very same objects on the strength of a new process of attachment begun in court, the catastrophe could no longer be hidden from the world. Everybody then began to see, detail after detail, the whole system of fraud erected by Borgert, with the passive connivance of his friend Leimann.
The court ordered that the entire property of the deserter be placed in legal custody. A term was fixed when the horde of creditors whom he had so shamefully deceived were to be adjudged pro-rata shares of the whole. Advertisements were inserted in the papers, calling upon all those having claims against the estate of the defaulter to come forward. Hundreds of bills came by mail from all the cities and towns, and even from the villages surrounding the little garrison, and the amounts in their totality figured up to a considerable sum.
Borgert’s father, too,—a worthy old gentleman, broken-hearted at the downfall of his only son,—had to appear in court and depose as to his son’s past and present misdoings, as far as he was aware of them. Even that portion of the estate which, according to the father’s intentions, was to fall to his son’s share at his father’s death, was sequestrated by a mandate of the court and added to the assets left behind by Borgert. In addition, the state’s attorney issued a “Steckbrief”[20] against the ex-officer, in which he was charged with a whole list of offences.
The dwelling itself had the court seals attached to it, and even the poor horses in the stable had fastened to their manes small, leaden seals tied on with string, to denote that the state had taken possession of them.
It stands to reason that all these interesting events travelled through the little town on the wings of gossip, and no village or city within a radius of ten miles failed to regard the matter as a delicious bit of local scandal. The small penny sheets printed in a number of these places were in clover. Nothing like such a genuine sensation had come to their hands for some time.
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, 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.
The colonel remarked to Captain König, shaking his head with a melancholy smile, that this new turn of affairs was the “last nail in his coffin,” and henceforth he was seen going about with a face gloomy and expectant of the worst. For gradually he came to the conclusion that to keep in good order a garrison and its corps of officers, some other methods must be employed than those to which he had clung, at the advice of Frau Stark, for years. It dawned on him that his type of discipline had wrought a train of evils which had grown avalanche-like, and which now at last was likely to bury his official head under a load of opprobrium.
The fact that Frau Leimann had followed the First Lieutenant became known a few days later. This was when her husband returned from Berlin and found a letter from her, in which she implored his forgiveness, and assured him she had acted under an impulse too strong to resist. Of their unhappy married life she said nothing.
Thus Leimann was punished doubly. He had been made ridiculous before the world, and was laughed at behind his back by all those who belonged to his extensive circle of acquaintances. And Borgert’s flight had precipitated Leimann’s own financial downfall. His creditors and those of Borgert obtained orders in court which forced him to sell the larger part of his small private fortune, consisting of sound investments, to satisfy their claims. A goodly proportion of his enforced payments was for those sums guaranteed by him in Borgert’s behalf. When all his affairs had been unravelled, he had but a very small sum remaining to him.
Meanwhile no trace of Frau Leimann and of her companion was found, although detectives of various countries were several times on their tracks. Nobody knew where they had found a refuge.
A fortnight after his desertion poor Röse was discovered and arrested. He had been seized at the Belgian frontier. A court-martial was quickly summoned, and during the trial it became apparent that the motive which alone had driven him to desertion had been the brutal maltreatment to which his master, Borgert, had subjected him. The court regarded that, however, as a mitigating circumstance of such slight value that it reduced the measure of the punishment meted out to him in only a small degree. The poor fellow was universally commiserated by high and low, and even among the officers a voice was raised now and then in exculpation. Many of their subordinates expressed privately the opinion that a poor soldier, even if only the son of an humble peasant, like Röse, ought to have some rights, and that he ought to be treated humanely by his superiors. But these were but private opinions, stated in a barely audible voice, and in the seclusion of the men’s own quarters. As such, naturally, they had not the slightest value in changing the fortunes of poor Röse, who was sentenced to undergo a term of many years of hard labor in a military penitentiary.
At the divorce trial, which took place at Leimann’s instance, a great many unpalatable facts were brought to light.
The two servant-maids in his house, as well as the orderly, gave testimony of such a character that the few remaining hairs on Leimann’s pear-shaped skull rose in affright. He could not understand how he had been so blind as not to have perceived the treachery of his friend and the faithlessness of his wife. A decree of divorce was pronounced by the court, and Leimann shortly after handed in his resignation. He was forced to that step by several considerations. On the one hand he was compelled to turn to a more profitable calling than that of serving his country in the army, since he had now but very slender means at his command; on the other hand, all the events in which he had been a conspicuous figure had damaged his reputation so greatly as to make his further stay in the corps of officers almost impossible.
He accepted a position for which he was eminently qualified by natural taste and long experience,—that of drummer for a wholesale wine firm. His little boy he intrusted to the care of some humble relatives, and his pension as First Lieutenant was just sufficient to pay for the little fellow’s board.
Almost simultaneously, with the acceptance of Leimann’s resignation, formal sentence was pronounced against Borgert. He was condemned to a jail term of five years, to deprivation of all civic honors for ten years, and to expulsion from the army, brought about by a series of frauds, by desertion and by maltreatment of subordinates in ten cases.
The newspapers published this sentence, and with it came to a close the career of this miscreant, as far as the army was concerned.
Meanwhile there sat in the bureau of a large factory ex-Sergeant Schmitz, busy at his desk with a row of figures.
The other employees had already risen from their places and were taking their overcoats from a rack in the corner, for the large factory bell announcing the close of the day’s labor had rung out ten minutes since.
But Schmitz did not allow himself to be disturbed by the loud conversation going on about him. He continued writing as if he were in the midst of silence. The large office-room had almost emptied itself of its inmates when Master Worker Maurer entered.
Maurer was a squat-built man, and his pale, oval face was strangely illuminated by piercing eyes of a forbidding expression. His moustache hung straggling about the corners of his mouth, and there was something indicative of cruelty and meanness about his whole face.
“I suppose you can’t tear yourself away from your work again? Aren’t you coming soon?” he called over to Schmitz. But the latter did not even look up from his work, and briefly answered:
“In a moment; sit down!”
The two men were good friends.
Only a few weeks before Schmitz had stood amidst the mechanics at the lathe, pushing mechanically one cube of wood after the other into the sharp teeth of the rotating steel. This sort of activity had permitted him to indulge in his own thoughts, for it did not require him to expend his intellect as well as his brawn.
But in a short while qualities had been detected in the quiet, diligent workingman which brought him advancement. His military training and the self-sufficing determination which he had acquired in dealing with raw recruits had given him a knack of controlling his fellow-workers. Thus it came about that Schmitz was promoted to the position of overseer in the machine hall, the same in which he had so far toiled with the rest. His fellow-workers, of course, looked with envy upon this parvenu, who had only recently appeared among them and who now played the part of commander. There was no dearth of scornful remarks at his expense, but the old soldier understood very well how to baffle such behavior.
In the morning, after he had seen his men busily at work at their various tasks, he frequently paid a visit to Maurer, who was employed as an engineer.
And during these matutinal chats Maurer discovered in Schmitz a man whom it would be easy to gain for his cause,—the cause of Socialism. Maurer himself was one of the most notorious local leaders of the Socialist hosts, and he felt sure that this new man would become a valuable addition to the ranks of the forces acting under his supervision.
In this assumption, indeed, Maurer was not mistaken. Schmitz was still harboring the hatred against militarism and the government, which had been engendered in him by his own experience in the army. A deep-seated, grim feeling fermented in his soul because of the bitter injustice done him. He could not forget that the best years of his life had been frittered away in a service which in the end proved of no avail to him. Thus, he had become a recruit for the Socialist cause, and it had scarcely needed the persuasions of his new comrade, Maurer, to induce him to forswear all allegiance to the ancient cause of king and fatherland, and to vow service with body and soul to the red flag. The loyal soldier had become a strong pillar of the Socialist Party. On the morrow Schmitz was to make a speech before a large circle of men holding similar views, and it was for that Maurer was now waiting for him. He meant to inculcate another lesson or two in his friend’s mind, and to talk over with him a few important points in the programme of the evening.
When Schmitz had laid aside his work and locked up his sheets in the desk,—sheets on which the list of names of the men under him and the respective amounts of work done by each were marked down,—he joined Maurer. Both then walked on in silence through the narrow lanes towards Maurer’s dwelling.
At a nearby dramshop they jointly purchased a jugful of beer; then took it home, lit the lamp, and began their conversation.
It turned particularly on a new tax bill, which would add another serious burden to those under which the working classes were groaning. The aim was to gain as many opponents to it as possible, so that at the last reading in the Reichstag an overwhelming majority could be secured against the measure, sufficient to bring about its defeat.
The two friends were engaged in eager discussion until after midnight. When they parted they had reached perfect agreement.
On the day following Schmitz was in a state of feverish agitation. It seemed strange to him, after all. But a short while ago he was wearing the “king’s coat.” A short twelvemonth previously he had been a soldier of the Kaiser’s,—a man sworn to defend the fatherland and to aid and further its interests,—and to-day?—to-day he was one of those who are accused of shaking the foundations of the state edifice, those who are aiming to erect a new commonwealth more in consonance with their own ideas and interests.
But when he on the same evening ascended the speaker’s stand, carrying himself erect as a freeman, and when a crowd of many hundreds welcomed the new comrade with enthusiastic shouts, he felt differently. Even before he had said a word to his new friends they saluted him joyously as one of themselves,—as one to bring about the new millennium,—and his confidence in himself grew apace, and a mighty longing to achieve fame in this new army clutched his soul. It was his full intention to please this heterogeneous mass of men; he meant to force them into the circle of his own conceptions and beliefs, so that all of them should follow him, without a will of their own, as sheep follow a shepherd.
And he began his address. He first described the provisions of this new bill, and then laid bare the consequences to the laboring multitude that the adoption of such a measure would have.
A new tax, he explained, meant a further step in the pauperization of the masses. He showed that this new tax was a superfluity, provided the attempt was abandoned by the government to increase still further the strength of the army.
“Gigantic sums of money are annually wasted by the government for the military,” said he, in a ringing voice. “Scarcely have millions upon millions been voted for the introduction of new rifles and new guns; scarcely have new regiments been formed and the conformation of existing ones altered, when all these measures are found to be worse than useless. Errors of calculation are discovered when it is too late to retrieve them, and new sums of enormous size are demanded in order to overcome innovations conceived in haste and executed without judgment.
“Germany’s reputation and her power in the world have been won by the army, and it is her army which neighbors begrudge us. But have we not arrived on the summit of military power? 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. But if it is not intended to cease favoring the army to such an unreasonable extent, let them take the money needed from the pockets of those who are spending their days in sloth and wilful luxury. As it is, the wealthy are not burdened any more than the poor laborer, while the latter really has to surrender a portion of the scant bread he has earned for himself and his family to maintain a state of things in which capital enjoys all those advantages which are denied to him.
“Then I ask of what blessing is the army to the citizen, to the people as a whole? It takes away his children; it uses up the best years in their lives,—those years in which the youth ripens into a man, and in which his character matures. It is during those years that our sons are often treated with injustice and brutality, and, as a natural consequence, they return from the army into work-a-day life, as the bitter enemies of a government which dismisses many of them as helpless cripples or as physical wrecks without ever thinking of making suitable award. Then, still more frequently, our sons, after spending the best strength they have in the service of the state, in hard toil, and in exposing themselves to all rigors of a changeable climate, are sent back into the world, dismissed from the army, just because of some trivial offence,—kicked out into the cold as one might a dog, compelling him to hunt for food and to seek a new master. Therefore, I say, let us compel the government to spend hereafter the money so uselessly wasted for the enlargement of an army that has already overgrown its proper size, rather for more useful purposes, so that the people, the masses, will know what they have sacrificed themselves for.”
The words of the speaker, drawn so largely from his own bitter experiences, were frequently interrupted by a loud acclaim; but as Schmitz now stepped down from his eminence to mingle with his auditors, the large crowd that filled the hall to suffocation began to rend the air with frantic cheers. They threw up their caps and shouted approval; scores of them cried: “Bravo, Schmitz!”; while others crowded up to him to shake him by the hand. It was an ovation as enthusiastic as Schmitz had never aspired to in his boldest moments, and his natural vanity felt intensely gratified. As to these people, he had indeed gained them over to his way of thinking.
His words had sounded so convincing, they had struck the popular chord so accurately, that many a one in this dense throng who had merely come that night as a spectator, drawn by idle curiosity, had been convinced of the justice of the Socialist cause, and resolved to join the party which espoused the claims of the poor.
And so Schmitz had that night become not only an adherent but a leader of the “red” party,—a party which in this large manufacturing town was becoming more and more formidable.