In the reading-room the orderlies were busy filling tulip glasses with that fragrant mixture, a May bowl, so grateful in its delicious iced condition, and yet so deceptive. Around a plain table in the small side room, away from the throng and undisturbed, several of the captains, the colonel, and two of the younger officers were playing “skat” at a penny the point. One of the lieutenants, to judge from his heated face and the anxious look on it, must be losing heavily. Had this “little game” been arranged to encourage the men under him in the economies Colonel von Kronau had but now so strongly recommended to them?
Lieutenant Specht just then was taking French leave. It was necessary for him to run to the station and meet the young lady—a lovesick, pretty little milliner from Cologne—who for the time being dwelt in his unstable heart.
Lieutenant Bleibtreu sat in a brown study, a few feet away from the players, deep in his melancholy thoughts. The army, his military career, intercourse with his brother officers and their ladies—it was all a grave disappointment to him. His illusions were gone, though it was but a couple of years since he had donned the bright, showy, glittering dragoon uniform, so attractive to the neophyte. He was thinking of home, of his dear, patient, loving mother, whose constant preoccupation he was; of his lovely, self-denying sisters, whose dowry was fast going while he was himself enjoying himself in the “king’s service.” Was he? Was he “enjoying” himself? Was this—this hollow, stupid round of the coarsest pleasures and the equally coarse and stupid round of duties—really what he had looked forward to?
The young man sighed. The absence of the wife of his captain, Frau König, rendered him still more melancholy. Bah, it was disgusting. And to think that this was the profession most highly honored, most envied in the fatherland! To think that it had always been drummed in his ears, ever since early childhood, that to “wear the king’s coat” would exalt him high above his fellow mortals!
Comradeship! What a fine word when it bears out its full meaning, thought Lieutenant Bleibtreu. But what was it here? What had he found the practical construction of the term? To follow, day by day, step by step, in the same treadmill of dull routine, only relieved by occasional but all too brief glimpses of the freedom that lay beyond “the service”—that was the meaning of comradeship. There was none of that unselfish intimacy, that ready sympathy and help between the members of the caste into which he had risen on the proud day he first read his name among the Kaiser’s appointments in the Armee-Verordnŭngsblatt. Dead sea fruit! Ashes that taste bitter on the tongue.
Certainly there were exceptions. He himself had heard of some such cases of comradeship as he had dreamed of when still a slim little cadet in the military academy: cases where one comrade lifted the other, the younger and less experienced, up to his higher level; cases where one comrade sacrificed himself for the other. But these must be very rare, he thought, for he had never seen such a case himself. What he had seen was the casting into one stiff, unchanging form of so many individualities not suited to each other. It was the hollow mockery of the thing that palled so on him. And what would be the end?
Though young in the service, he had seen men meant for better things broken as a reed on the wheel of military formalism; he had seen them retiring when but in the prime of life, broken in spirit, unfit for any new career, impaired in health, perfectly useless—victims of the conventional ideas that rule supreme in the army. Others he had seen forced to resign, overloaded with a burden of debt, ruined financially, physically, morally bankrupt,—all due to the tinsel and glitter, to the ceaseless temptations thrown into the path of the German army officer. A young civilian, even when the son of wealthy parents, is not coaxed and wheedled into a network of useless expenditure, as is the youngest army officer, waylaid everywhere by the detestable gang of “army usurers,” who follow him to the bitter end, knowing that to repudiate even the shadiest debt means disgrace and dismissal from the army to every officer, no matter if his follies have been committed at an age when other young boys are still subject to closest supervision.
Deep lines had formed on Bleibtreu’s smooth forehead, and he was visibly startled when the cheery, round voice of his squadron commander, Captain König, recalled him to his surroundings.
“And that’s what they call pleasure,” said he, sitting down on the sofa beside his young lieutenant, for whom he felt something like paternal affection. “If such entertainments were at least arranged beforehand, with the consent or at the instance of the juniors themselves,—for I will say nothing about us older men,—but no! Frau Stark commands, and the whole regiment, from the colonel down to the youngest cornet, has simply to obey. Disgraceful, I say. Why, we cannot even choose our own tipple on such occasions. The colonel simply orders that a May bowl be composed, and we have to brew it, drink it, and—pay for it. This evening will cost us a pretty penny again. A glass of apollinaris would be far more palatable, and certainly much cheaper and appropriate at this temperature than this confounded sweetish stuff, which gives one a headache fit to split the skull next morning.”
“Quite true, Captain,” replied the young man. “This form of quasi-official pressure, even in one’s private expenditures, is one of the worst curses of our profession. It has indirectly caused the ruin of many a promising young officer, I’ve been told.”