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.