ar Wegstetten. You have hit the
bull's-eye again! You see one can never deal with men all in a lump;
you must take them separately. Some best serve the king with their
sturdy arms and legs, but your gun-layer with his eyes and pen." He
then raised his hand to his helmet, and the two men parted.

As they all repaired to their respective quarters they had very
different thoughts in their minds. Reimers was full of admiration:
"What a man is that," thought he, "who, with all his heavy duties, yet
occupies himself with the insignificant destiny of a poor devil of a
gunner!"

Wegstetten's face wore a rather self-satisfied smile. "One must speak
up for oneself, and not hide one's light under a bushel! Better say too
much than too little. In doing one's superior officer a small service,
one may be doing the greatest of all to oneself."

Landsberg said to himself, with a sneer: "The man prates about that
whipper-snapper of a gunner nearly as much as about my splendid firing.
And so that's the celebrated Colonel von Falkenhein!"

Next day almost all the men would have liked to go on with the
shell-firing; but the subsequent cleaning of the guns was not at all to
their taste. The smokeless powder left in the bore of the gun a horrid,
sticky slime that must not be allowed to remain there. This meant
sousing with clean water again and again, washing out with soft soap,
and then going on pumping and working with the mop until the water came
out again as clean as it had gone in.

"Now, boys," Sergeant Wiegandt used to say, "if you don't feel inclined
to drink the water as it comes out of the gun, then that means it isn't
clean enough yet. So go ahead!"

And then the drying afterwards! They had to wrap rags and cloths round
the mop until it was so thick that it would scarcely go through the
muzzle of the gun. If this were not done the inside edges and corners
remained wet; and one spot of rust on the bright metal--well! that
would be almost as bad as murder! So they had to push and to twist, to
pull and to drag, till the perspiration streamed from their foreheads.
Finally the barrel was thinly oiled; and the next day the firing took
place once more, and then there was the drudgery of the cleaning all
over again.

Yet the men endured these exertions far better than the garrison life.
This was partly owing to the variety of the work; but, above all, the
greatest torment of a soldier's life had been left behind,--that
monotono