Samuel Rutherford Crockett – The Complete Collection

Chapter 18

But the Herr has come in, and says that I am a "dumbhead," also condemned, and many other things, because, he says, I can never tell anything that I begin to tell straightforwardly like a street in Berlin. He says my talk is crooked like the "Philosophers' Way" after one passes the red sawdust of the Hirsch-Gasse, where the youngsters "drum" and "drum" all the Tuesdays and the Fridays, like the donkeys that they are. I am to talk (he says violently) about Paris and the terrible time I saw there in the war of Seventy.

Ah! the time when there was a death at every door, the time which Heidelberg and mine own Thurm village will not forget--that made grey the hairs of Jacob Oertler, the head-waiter, those sixty days he was in Paris, when men's blood was spilt like water, when the women and the children fell and were burned in the burning houses, or died shrieking on the bayonet point. There is no hell that the Pfaffs tell of, like the streets of Paris in the early summer of Seventy-one. But it is necessary that I make a beginning, else I shall never make an ending, as Madame Hegelmann Wittwe, of the Prinz Karl, says when there are many guests, and we have to rise after two hours' sleep as if we were still on campaign. But again I am interrupted and turned aside.

Comes now the young Herr, and he has his supper, for ever since he came to the Prinz Karl he takes his dinner in the midst of the day as a man should.

"Ouch," he says, "it makes one too gross to eat in the evening."

So the Herr takes his dinner at midday like a good German; and when there is supper he will always have old Jacob to tell him tales, in which he says that there is no beginning, no era, nor Hegira, no Anno Domini, but only the war of Seventy. But he is a hard-hearted young Kerl, and will of necessity have his jesting. Only yesterday he said--

"Jacob, Jacob, this duck he must have been in the war of Siebenzig; for, begomme, he is tough enough. Ah, yes, Jacob, he is certainly a veteran. I have broken my teeth over his Iron Cross." But if he had been where I have been, he would know that it is not good jesting about the Iron Cross.

Last night the young Herr, he did not come home for supper at all. But instead of him there came an Officier clanging spurs and twisting at seven hairs upon his upper lip. The bracing-board on his back was tight as a drum. The corners stretched the cloth of his uniform till they nearly cut through.

He was but a boy, and his shoulder-straps were not ten days old; but old Jacob Oertler's heels came together with a click that would have been loud, but that he wore waiter's slippers instead of the field-shoes of the soldier.

The Officier looked at me, for I stood at attention.

"Soldier?" said he. And he spoke sharply, as all the babe-officers strive to do.

I bowed, but my bow was not that of the Oberkellner of the Prinz Karl that I am now.

"Of the war?" he asked again.

"Of three wars!" I answered, standing up straight that he might see the Iron Cross I wear under my dress-coat, which the Emperor set there.

"Name and regiment?" he said quickly, for he had learned the way of it, and was pleased that I called him Hauptmann.

"Jacob Oertler, formerly of the Berlin Husaren, and after of the Intelligence Department."

"So," he said, "you speak French, then?"

"Sir," said I, "I was twenty years in France. I was born in Elsass. I was also in Paris during the siege."

Thus we might have talked for long enough, but suddenly his face darkened and he lifted his eyes from the Cross. He had remembered his message.

"Does the tall English Herr live here, who goes to Professor Müller's each day in the Anlage? Is he at this time within? I have a cartel for him."

Then I told him that the English Herr was no Schläger-player, though like the lion for bravery in fighting, as my brother had been witness.

"But what is the cause of quarrel?" I asked.

"The cause," he said, "is only that particular great donkey, Hellmuth. He came swaggering to-night along the New Neckar-Bridge as full of beer as the Heidelberg tun is empty of it. He met your Herr under the lamps where there were many students of the corps. Now, Hellmuth is a beast of the Rhine corps, so he thought he might gain some cheap glory by pushing rudely against the tall Englander as he passed.

"'Pardon!' said the Englishman, lifting his hat, for he is a gentleman, and of his manner, when insulted, noble. Hellmuth is but a Rhine brute--though my cousin, for my sins.

"So Hellmuth went to the end of the Bridge, and, turning with his corps-brothers to back him, he pushed the second time against your Herr, and stepped back so that all might laugh as he took off his cap to mock the Englishman's bow and curious way of saying 'Pardon!'

"But the Englander took him momently by the collar, and by some art of the light hand turned him over his foot into the gutter, which ran brimming full of half-melted snow. The light was bright, for, as I tell you, it was underneath the lamps at the bridge-end. The moon also happened to come out from behind a wrack of cloud, and all the men on the bridge saw--and the girls with them also--so that you could hear the laughing at the Molkenkur, till the burghers put their red night-caps out of their windows to know what had happened to the wild Kerls of the _cafés_."

"But surely that is no cause for a challenge, Excellenz?" said I. "How can an officer of the Kaiser bring such a challenge?"

"Ach!" he said, shrugging his shoulders, "is not a fight a fight, cause or no cause? Moreover, is not Hellmuth after all the son of my mother's sister, though but a Rhineland donkey, and void of sense?"

So I showed him up to the room of the English Herr, and went away again, though not so far but that I could hear their voices.

It was the officer whom I heard speaking first. He spoke loudly, and as I say, having been of the Intelligence Department, I did not go too far away.

"You have my friend insulted, and you must immediately satisfaction make!" said the young Officier.

"That will I gladly do, if your friend will deign to come up here. There are more ways of fighting than getting into a feather-bed and cutting at the corners." So our young Englander spoke, with his high voice, piping and clipping his words as all the English do.

"Sir," said the officer, with some heat, "I bring you a cartel, and I am an officer of the Kaiser. What is your answer?"

"Then, Herr Hauptmann," said the Englishman, "since you are a soldier, you and I know what fighting is, and that snipping and snicking at noses is no fighting. Tell your friend to come up here and have a turn with the two-ounce gloves, and I shall be happy to give him all the satisfaction he wants. Otherwise I will only fight him with pistols, and to the death also. If he will not fight in my way, I shall beat him with a cane for having insulted me, whenever I meet him."

With that the officer came down to me, and he said, "It is as you thought. The Englishman will not fight with the Schläger, but he has more steel in his veins than a dozen of Hellmuths. Thunderweather, I shall fight Hellmuth myself to-morrow morning, if it be that he burns so greatly to be led away. Once before I gave him a scar of heavenly beauty!"

So he clanked off in the ten days' glory of his spurs. I have seen many such as he stiff on the slope of Spichern and in the woods beneath St. Germain. Yet he was a Kerl of mettle, and will make a brave soldier and upstanding officer.

But the Herr has again come in and he says that all this is a particular kind of nonsense which, because I write also for ladies, I shall not mention. I am not sure, also, what English words it is proper to put on paper. The Herr says that he will tear every word up that I have written, which would be a sad waste of the Frau Wittwe's paper and ink. He says, this hot Junker, that in all my writing there is yet no word of Paris or the days of the Commune, which is true. He also says that my head is the head of a calf, and, indeed, of several other animals that are but ill-considered in England.

So I will be brief.

In Seventy, therefore, I fought in the field and scouted with the Uhlans. Ah, I could tell the stories! Those were the days. It is a mistake to think that the country-people hated us, or tried to kill us. On the contrary, if I might tell it, many of the young maids--

Ach, bitte, Herr--of a surety I will proceed and tell of Paris. I am aware that it is not to be expected that the English should care to hear of the doings of the Reiters of the black-and-white pennon in the matter of the maids.

But in Seventy-one, during the siege and the terrible days of the Commune, I was in Paris, what you call a spy. It was the order of the Chancellor--our man of blood-and-iron. Therefore it was right and not ignoble that I should be a spy.

For I have served my country in more terrible places than the field of Weissenburg or the hill of Spichern.

Ja wohl! there were few Prussians who could be taken for Frenchmen, in Paris during those months when suspicion was everywhere. Yet in Paris I was, all through the days of the investiture. More, I was chief of domestic service at the Hôtel de Ville, and my letters went through the balloon-post to England, and thence back to Versailles, where my brothers were and the Kaiser whom in three wars I have served. For I am Prussian in heart and by begetting, though born in Elsass.

So daily I waited on Trochu, as I had also waited on Jules Favre when he dined, and all the while the mob shouted for the blood of spies without. But I was Jules Lemaire from the Midi, a stupid provincial with the rolling accent, come to Paris to earn money and see the life. Not for nothing had I gone to school at Clermont-Ferrand.

But once I was nearly discovered and torn to pieces. The sweat breaks cold even now to think upon it. It was a March morning very early, soon after the light came stealing up the river from behind Notre-Dame. A bitter wind was sweeping the bare, barked, hacked trees on the Champs Élysées. It happened that I went every morning to the Halles to make the market for the day--such as was to be had. And, of course, we at the Hôtel de Ville had our pick of the best before any other was permitted to buy. So I went daily as Monsieur Jules Lemaire from the Hôtel de Ville. And please to take off your _képis, canaille_ of the markets.

Suddenly I saw riding towards me a Prussian hussar of my old regiment. He rode alone, but presently I spied two others behind him. The first was that same sergeant Strauss who had knocked me about so grievously when first I joined the colours. At that time I hated the sight of him, but now it was the best I could do to keep down the German "Hoch!" which rose to the top of my throat and stopped there all of a lump.