He had always been of a weakly constitution; but he had been seized by a violent fever the day when he had returned, overheated, and wet to the bones from rain, after hard drill on the parade ground, and had had to spend the evening and the night in a cold room, because Roth had refused to furnish coal. Two days later the surgeon of the regiment established the fact that inflammatory rheumatism had supervened, and this had taken so bad a turn within a short time that the heart had become affected. On Christmas Day the poor fellow had died.
His parents had been summoned by telegraph to attend the funeral of their only son; but sickness in the family and other circumstances had prevented their coming, and thus the funeral took place without a single friend or relative being present.
The day afterward the fat reserve man, the one who had been injured by “Napoleon,” left the hospital. His injuries seemed healed; but the whole face was horribly disfigured by livid marks left from the sutures of the surgeon’s needle, and the left eye had been removed by an operation, since it had been feared that the other eye might also be lost unless prompt and radical measures were taken.
Maimed and crippled for life, the man returned to his home, discharged from the army for physical inability. A monthly pension of nine marks had been “generously” allowed him by the government.
Schmitz, the ex-sergeant, on New Year’s Eve sat in a scantily furnished room.
To earn a living, even if but a very poor one, he had been forced to take work as a common laborer in a large factory of the neighboring city. He had engaged board in a tenement house, with the family of a fellow-workman.
There he sat now, his head buried in his hands. On a plate before him were the remnants of a frugal supper, and a small lamp with broken chimney threw a reddish sheen on his immobile figure. Against the wall, above his bed, were hung his sabre and its scabbard, crosswise. On a small wooden stool stood a bowl, in which he had performed his ablutions, and a soiled towel hung from it. 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. He was planning his revenge, ruminating deeply how best he should punish the rascal, and how to brand him with a life-long reminder of his infamous deed.
A while longer he thus sat, brooding darkly; then he rose with clouded face and stepped to the window. He breathed against the pane covered with rime, until a small space had been formed through which he could peer out into the open. He saw the dial opposite on the church steeple, from which the bells melodiously rang out in full-toned peals the closing moments of the old year, and proclaiming the advent of a new one.