The other face in the doorway, that of Adjunct Koch, the same who in after years became Dean of the Domkirke, I can never see without thinking of the hour of my great triumph. He and Herr Trugaard were my history teachers. History as taught in the schools of those days was largely made up of interminable files of kings, with the years of their reign, nothing else, to be memorized that way. This I could not do, or would not; the result was the same,—a bad examination. But these two had discovered something. When the Great Examen came round again, instead of bringing up the tedious kings, they asked me to tell about the Hundred Days of Napoleon after Elba. Napoleon had not been dead forty years then, and there were people everywhere who had fought in his wars. We had one in our school, an old sergeant who drilled us in gymnastics. He had been through the campaign that ended at Waterloo, and was never tired of telling how it froze so hard in the winter of 1814 that they cut the wine for the army rations with axes, and of the fighting he had seen, of course. Poor fellow! He looked too long upon the wine when it was red, and marched to his death in the river one winter’s night singing a war-song, thinking perhaps he was at Borodino. They found him standing dead in the mud, upright, as a man and a soldier should, with his face to the foe who he imagined held the other shore.
I had sat at his feet when they strayed unsteadily toward the great past, many a time. And I needed no second invitation to enter upon the campaign of the Hundred Days. A sudden transformation came over that dusty class-room; for veterans sat in the Board of Censors. In five minutes I had them sitting up, eagerly scanning the camps of the French and the Allied Armies as I drew them. In ten they were on their feet, striding from Ligny to Quatre Bras, to the Wavre turnpike, objecting, applauding, disputing with me and with one another as I led them from field to field of slaughter and finally rounded them up at Waterloo, brought Blucher to the relief of Wellington in the nick of time, and charged the Old Guard with a yell of “Surrender!” only to be met with the immortal reply: “The Old Guard dies, but never surrenders.”
We sat down, a hot, excited band. There was a quiet gleam in Herr Trugaard’s eye as he pronounced the unanimous judgment of the Board: “ug+,” that is, A1 and to spare. It was the only “ug” I earned in my school days. It ought to have given the pedagogues food for thought, and perhaps it did.
The bell that once called the monks to prayers summoned us to school at a quarter to eight, and in the long winter we sang our morning hymn with the dawn struggling through the windows. When we trooped home again with knapsacks strapped on our backs, it was night once more. From eight to five was our day, with two hours for noon, the rule in all the Old Town’s affairs. The bell regulated our lives as it had done since hour-glasses marked the time. It rings yet at the old hours, though the school-day is entirely changed, and Venus who rang it has long been gathered to her fathers. But when the Great Examen drew near, it was too slow for our guilty consciences, and the night-watchman was bribed to wake us up. So that he should not rouse the whole house, a string was hung out of the window, the other end of which was tied securely to the sleeper’s toe or ankle. The watchman’s order was to pull it till the boy responded, and he did. Perhaps he took the chance to pay off old scores. He pulled and pulled with might and main, until a red and swollen foot shot up to the window and behind it an angry face yelling to let go. The boy was awake and up, and the watchman clattered on his way, chanting his morning verse:
Ho! Watchman, our clock it has struck four!
Eternal God, all honor
In Heaven’s choir to Thee,
Thou who art watchman ever
For us on earth that be.
Now ended is our watch,