"Are you going to the review tomorrow?" I asked.
I expected a formal negative, and my surprise was great when he told me he would not fail to attend the ceremony.
"We have seats reserved in the Royal Stand," he said unctuously, "next to the Corps Diplomatique."
I was very much tickled at the child-like delight of this barrack-room savant at having an official place at a military ceremony. "What a world of difference from our anti-militarist intellectuals," I thought, without knowing for certain which of the two attitudes was the better.
The entire palace was in a state of extreme confusion. Officers in full-dress uniform swarmed like ants. I met Kessel up to the eyes in it.
"The King arrives at nine o'clock," he said. "You should go to the station. It will interest you. Meanwhile, if you like, you can watch the review which the Grand Duke is holding at three o'clock on the parade-ground."
I thanked him, but not wishing to take the gilt off the next day's spectacle, and, if the truth must be told, feeling rather small and absurd among all these folk in brilliant uniforms, I hid myself in the library. There I began to jot down a few notes bearing on the young Duke's next lesson on the history of Alexandrine Philosophy.
When I came out darkness had fallen, and I decided to go for a stroll in the town. It was already illuminated. When I reached the middle of the parade-ground I looked back, and the whole castle appeared before me in a blaze of light. My childish pleasure in the coloured lights and fairy lamps prevented me from noticing that the exhibition did not err on the side of good taste. But in Germany there is always too much of everything except that.
In the centre there was an enormous imperial eagle, ten yards high, carried out in yellow lights. On the left the Würtemberg lion in red, and on the right the Lautenburg lion in green. The difficulty of distinguishing these animals with electric lamps had been a very serious problem for the artist in charge, but in the end a fair measure of success had been achieved.
A confused murmur of admiration rose from the shadowy groups about me. At the far end of the parade-ground the Royal Stand was all ready for the next day's review. The Hanover Strasse, the finest street in Lautenburg, was thronged with people, who were walking up and down on the pavements, as if impelled by some mechanical device. At a given moment the barracks poured out a stream of uniforms. The red tunics of the Lautenburg Hussars blended with the blue of the Detmold Dragoons and the dark jackets of the infantrymen. Students who had come specially from Hanover, flaunted their various caps and duelling scars with an arrogance which vanished quickly whenever they passed an officer. Thanks to the approach of Christmas, the brilliantly-lighted shop-fronts were crammed with a mass of weird and fantastic wares, the childishness of which was enough to make you weep. The provision stores were crammed with geese absurdly decorated with the colours of the twenty-seven German States. A goose adorned with the Rudolstadt blue was cheek by jowl with a goose in Würtemberg red. The pork butchers exhibited pyramids of sausages made in the shape of the most famous public buildings in the Empire—the Reichstag, the Central Station at Berlin, Cologne Cathedral, etc. But the masterpiece was a triumphal arch of lard, with bas-reliefs in red jelly and an entablature of foie gras.