Many pitiful sights were seen by the Airship Boys on their tour of the fortress, but none impressed them more deeply than that of a young man in one of the hospital wards. He was wasted to mere skin and bones with fever which flamed insanely in his eyes. His feet they had swathed in great layers of bandages, at the ends of which wooden splints protruded. All the time in his delirium he would keep whispering in the most heart-rending accents:
“Ah, Liebchen, dich kann ich nicht mehr gruessen!”
“What is that he keeps saying?” asked Alan of their guide.
“He is speaking of his young bride in Vienna—bemoaning the fact that he may never see her again. Lieutenant Racoszky here came of a comparatively poor middle-class family but fell in love with the heiress of Count Polnychek, one of the most influential noblemen of Budapest, and the head of one of the oldest families in Hungary. The girl was a reigning beauty of the fashionable set, but that did not keep her from falling in love with Racoszky here. He was handsome, gay, dashing, in those days before the war. So they were married secretly.
“By and by the old Count found out about it and would not permit Racoszky to see his girl-wife any more. Then she eloped one night and they fled together. They settled in a little town not far from Budapest and were happy. And one day she told Racoszky that she was about to bear him a child.
“That was one week after war had been declared. Already the Serbs were across our borders and Montenegro was daily threatening to join them. The war office was in a panic. All available troops were rushed to the southern frontier, where we were defeated badly. A second army was sent and it too met with reverses. Then the Russians began to cross our northeastern frontier by the millions. Every able-bodied man in the land was drafted.
“Racoszky here hoped to escape until after his child was born, but that he was not permitted to do. It was the hard-hearted old count, her father, who himself told the recruiting officers that Racoszky was a coward and was trying to avoid his duty. So one day they came and seized him in the market place as he was coming out of the doctor’s office.
“‘Come with us. You are called to the colors!’ they told him sternly.
“Racoszky was desperate. He tried to plead off.
“‘Good sirs,’ he pleaded, ‘I am but now come to hasten a doctor to the bedside of my wife. See, he is running there now. Let me at least wait until the crisis is past.’