"You needn't be frightened," he continued, "that we shall plague you with curious questions. From the first we got into the way of looking on you as a sort of mystery. When we others used to lie by the bivouac fire and talk of our homes and parents, our sweethearts and sisters, your lips were resolutely sealed as they are now. And if one of us plucked up courage to ask you where you came from, and what you had been before the war, you always got up and walked away. We gave up questioning you at last, and thought to ourselves, 'He has gone through a furnace, may be, that has spoilt his life, and what concern is that of ours?' You were a good comrade, all of us can testify to that, and what is more, the most fearless, the bravest.... Ah, well, the fact is, that you had only to tell one of us to cut off his right hand, and he'd have done it without a murmur. Isn't it true, lads?"
An exclamation of assent went round the table.
"For mercy's sake, say no more," said the young lieutenant. "I don't know which way to look because of all this undeserved praise."
"Wait, I've more to say yet," the master of the house insisted on continuing. "Once we were really almost angry with you. You know why that was. During the armistice, shortly before we joined forces with the Lithuanians under Platen and Bülow, you were in the guard-room one evening, when you suddenly made a clean breast of it and announced that you must go away. You said, 'Don't ask me the reason, lads. But believe me, I can't help myself. The Landwehr wants officers. I know it is not much of an honour to leave the Jägers, for the Landwehr; but I'm going to do it, all the same.' Those were your very words, weren't they, Baumgart?"
The lieutenant nodded, and a bitter smile played round his lips.
"Tears were in your eyes as you spoke, otherwise one or other of us would have asked you if that was all the thanks we were to get for the confidence we had placed in you, to be deserted just then ... just when we longed to show those Platen fellows what baiting the French really meant.... We let you go without raising an objection, but our hearts bled.... Afterwards we heard nothing of you, no news in reply to all our inquiries; but I can tell you this much, we never ceased to talk of you every night for months. We racked our brains to think what had taken you away; speculated on where you were gone, and the like, till the men who joined later and had known you got sick of it, and implored us to give up talking about you, and to consign you to the Landwehr refuse-heap once for all. So you see how we pined for you; and now, after two days, you actually propose to turn your back on us again! It's a long journey from the Marne to the Weichsel, and a solitary one to walk, and your wounds still smarting. Stay and take a good rest, and relate at your leisure what your adventures with the greybeards really were, and how you came to be taken prisoner ... it must have been a strange accident that betrayed you into captivity?"
He glanced down with ingenuous pride at the iron cross which dangled between the froggings of his coat. It had been bestowed on him in reward for the intrepidity with which he had, unpardoned, hewn his way out of a nest of French Hussars and regained his liberty.
The lieutenant's breast was bare of ornament. At the end of the campaign, when a shower of decorations had rained down on the victorious warriors, he had not been present to receive his share. A painful sensation of being passed in the race, almost akin to shame, swept over him. He pushed his cap farther on to his brow, and drew himself erect in his chair, as if its fusty cushions threatened to suffocate him.
"Thank you," he said, "for your kind intentions, but I must go to Königsberg directly to report myself to the Commandant."
"I'm afraid you'll have some difficulty in finding him there," put in a curly-headed young man with twinkling dark eyes, who wore his right arm in a black sling.