Of course I said “Colossal” to the cousin, when he expressed his satisfaction more particularly to me.

“Dreckiges Yolk, die Russen” he remarked, twisting his little moustache’s ends up. “Werden lernen was es heisst, frech sein gegen uns.  Wollen sie blau und schwartz dreschen.”

You know German, so I needn’t take its peculiar flavour out by transplanting the young man’s remarks.

“Oh pardon—­aber meine Gnadigste—­tausendmal pardon—­” he protested the next minute in a voice of tremendous solicitude, having been pushed rather hard and suddenly against me by a little boy who had scrambled down off whatever it was he was hanging on to; and he turned on the little boy, who I believe had tumbled off rather than scrambled, with his hand flashing to his sword, ready to slash at whoever it was had dared push against him, an officer; and seeing it was a child and therefore not satisfactionsfahig_ as they say, he merely called him an infame and verfluchte Bengel and smacked his face so hard that he would have been knocked down if there had been room to fall in.

As it was, he was only hurled violently against the side of a man in a black coat and straw hat who looked like an elderly confidential clerk, so respectable and complete with his short grey beard and spectacles, who was evidently the father, for he instantly on his own account smacked the boy on his other ear, and sweeping off his hat entreated the Herr Leutnant to forgive the boy on account of his extreme youth.

The cousin, whom by now I didn’t like, was beginning very severely to advise the parent jolly well to see to it, or German words to that effect, that his idiotic boy didn’t repeat such insolences, or by hell, etc., etc., when there was such a blast of extra noise and hurrahing that the rest of his remarks were knocked out of his mouth.  It was the Kaiser, come out on the balcony of the palace.

The cousin became rigid, and stood at the salute.  The air seemed full of hats and handkerchiefs and delirious shrieking.  The Kaiser put up his hand.

“Majestat is going to speak,” exclaimed the Grafin, her calm fluttered into fragments.

There was an immense instantaneous hush, uncanny after all the noise.  Only the little boy with the boxed ears continued to call out, but not patriotically.  His father, efficient and Prussian, put a stop to that by seizing his head, buttoning it up inside his black coat, and holding his arm tightly over it, so that no struggles of suffocation could get it free.  There was no more noise, but the little boy’s legs, desperately twitching, kicked their dusty little boots against the cousin’s shins, and he, standing at the salute with his body rigidly turned towards Majestat, was unable to take the steps his outraged honour, let alone the pain in his shins, called for.