Did I tell how our Fritz
went away to be Gordon's man in the Soudan of Africa, and how he wrote
to our father and the mother at home in the village--"I am a great man
and the intendant of a military station, and have soldiers under me, and
he who is our general is hardly a man. He has no fear, and death is to
him as life"? So this young Herr, whom I love the same as my own
brother, met Fritz when there was not the thickness of a Wurst-skin
between him and the torture that makes men blanch for thinking on, and I
will now tell you the story of how he saved him. It was--

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 hav