This was not true. To think of such details so long beforehand was impossible, even for the commander of the most efficient battery in the whole army-corps. But it served its purpose. Falkenhein nodded pleasantly: "Quite right, my dear Wegstetten. You have hit the bull's-eye again! You see one can never deal with men all in a lump; you must take them separately. Some best serve the king with their sturdy arms and legs, but your gun-layer with his eyes and pen." He then raised his hand to his helmet, and the two men parted.
As they all repaired to their respective quarters they had very different thoughts in their minds. Reimers was full of admiration: "What a man is that," thought he, "who, with all his heavy duties, yet occupies himself with the insignificant destiny of a poor devil of a gunner!"
Wegstetten's face wore a rather self-satisfied smile. "One must speak up for oneself, and not hide one's light under a bushel! Better say too much than too little. In doing one's superior officer a small service, one may be doing the greatest of all to oneself."
Landsberg said to himself, with a sneer: "The man prates about that whipper-snapper of a gunner nearly as much as about my splendid firing. And so that's the celebrated Colonel von Falkenhein!"
Next day almost all the men would have liked to go on with the shell-firing; but the subsequent cleaning of the guns was not at all to their taste. The smokeless powder left in the bore of the gun a horrid, sticky slime that must not be allowed to remain there. This meant sousing with clean water again and again, washing out with soft soap, and then going on pumping and working with the mop until the water came out again as clean as it had gone in.
"Now, boys," Sergeant Wiegandt used to say, "if you don't feel inclined to drink the water as it comes out of the gun, then that means it isn't clean enough yet. So go ahead!"
And then the drying afterwards! They had to wrap rags and cloths round the mop until it was so thick that it would scarcely go through the muzzle of the gun. If this were not done the inside edges and corners remained wet; and one spot of rust on the bright metal--well! that would be almost as bad as murder! So they had to push and to twist, to pull and to drag, till the perspiration streamed from their foreheads. Finally the barrel was thinly oiled; and the next day the firing took place once more, and then there was the drudgery of the cleaning all over again.
Yet the men endured these exertions far better than the garrison life. This was partly owing to the variety of the work; but, above all, the greatest torment of a soldier's life had been left behind,--that monotonous drilling under which all groaned, and the object of which no one could ever pretend to understand. Even the dullest--to say nothing of Vogt with his simple, sound common-sense--could see that the gun-practice here in the practice-camp was the most important part of the whole training. What the men had already learnt was now found out practically. But where did the parade-marching and all the other display drill come in?
Here was Klitzing, who in the garrison had been looked on as the most feeble soldier of the lot, now all at once distinguishing himself! Vogt shook his head as he thought it over.
He often felt glad that at any rate he was an artilleryman, for others had a much worse time of it. A few days earlier an infantry regiment had moved into the neighbouring barracks; and looking through the palings of their parade-ground they could see the battalions exercising.