"Whatever Zwilk's origin might have been, his tastes were severely aristocratic. He never would let himself be introduced to a woman unless she belonged in 'Society.'
"Others of the corps recognized his exclusiveness by nicknaming him the 'Countess's Zwilk,' 'the Nobl' Zwilk,' and 'Batiste.' These were not very good jokes, but they never lost their charm for us, and we laughed at them just as much the hundredth time as the first. Zwilk laughed with us: his laugh used to make me nervous; it sounded like a bleat, and seemed to come out of his nose and ears. He was undeniably a handsome man, tall, blonde, broad-shouldered, stiff and slender, with a regular profile and a thick blonde beard.
"He had great success with women: that is, with young widows and elderly pensioners, and the blowsy provincial beauties, to whom, as I said, he would never be presented, but with whom he danced, all the same, at balls in the early morning hours.
"You might think these ladies would consider his pompous impertinence an insult. On the contrary they were greatly impressed by his 'exclusiveness,' and when he waltzed with one of them she talked about it for a fortnight afterward.
"He wore his uniforms too tight, and his cuffs too long, and he used to pull the latter down over his knuckles. Those hands of his were incurably coarse, in spite of all the care they got, and he was always fussing with them. Sometimes he trimmed the flat, uneven nails in public; sometimes he crooked the little fingers with graceful ease. His manners were stiff, and his German was florid, but ungrammatical. He spoke like a dancing master, who, having 'had a great deal to do with society,' feels obliged, for that reason, to pronounce the most teutonic words with a French accent.
"He was at home in danger. Not only did he distinguish himself by reckless bravery in the field, but he showed in duels a cold indifference, which gave him great advantage over those of his opponents, who, though his equals in courage and his superiors in skill, were yet unable wholly to control a certain sentimental nervousness. The superior officers all praised him, for he was able, and he knew how to obey as well as to command. But he was very unpopular with his subordinates, to whom he showed himself extremely harsh, and with whom he never exchanged a joke, or a bit of friendly chat about their families, as the rest of us liked to do.
"As much audacity as he showed in great matters, just so little did he possess in small ones. Nothing could have induced him to tell a prince who said a horse had five legs, that it only had four.
"I am aware that this manner of judging him is retrospective. In those days, while we were in service together it hardly occurred to us, with our Austrian good humor, easy going, and perhaps a little bit superficial, to examine critically him or his failings. If we found him uncongenial, we hardly confessed it among ourselves, still less would we have acknowledged it to a civilian.
"He had one pronounced enemy in the corps, and that was little Toni Truyn, cousin of Count Erich Truyn, the Truyn von Rantschin. Poor Toni! He was the black sheep, the Karl Moor of his distinguished family, and if he never got so far as to turn incendiary and robber-chief, that was from lack of energy and of genius. The requisite number of paternal letters were not wanting.
"His family had a right to lecture Toni, for he had cruelly disappointed all their hopes. Destined from infancy to the Church, he suddenly, in his eighteenth year, developed religious scruples. His family regarded these as a symptom of nervous derangement, arising from too rapid growth, and they sent him to Rome to be scared back into an orthodox frame of mind by the hierarchy. To help matters, they provided him with an Abbé as a traveling companion.