ust returned from leave, gave
the last escort to a dead comrade. It was Dietrich, the good-service
man, who was carried out to the cemetery.

He had always been of a weakly constitution; but he had been seized by
a violent fever the day when he had returned, overheated, and wet to
the bones from rain, after hard drill on the parade ground, and had
had to spend the evening and the night in a cold room, because Roth
had refused to furnish coal. Two days later the surgeon of the
regiment established the fact that inflammatory rheumatism had
supervened, and this had taken so bad a turn within a short time that
the heart had become affected. On Christmas Day the poor fellow had
died.

His parents had been summoned by telegraph to attend the funeral of
their only son; but sickness in the family and other circumstances
had prevented their coming, and thus the funeral took place without a
single friend or relative being present.

The day afterward the fat reserve man, the one who had been injured by
"Napoleon," left the hospital. His injuries seemed healed; but the
whole face was horribly disfigured by livid marks left from the
sutures of the surgeon's needle, and the left eye had been removed by
an operation, since it had been feared that the other eye might also
be lost unless prompt and radical measures were taken.

Maimed and crippled for life, the man returned to his home, discharged
from the army for physical inability. A monthly pension of nine marks
had been "generously" allowed him by the government.

* * * * *

Schmitz, the ex-sergeant, on New Year's Eve sat in a scantily
furnished room.

To earn a living, even if but a very poor one, he had been forced to
take work as a common laborer in a large factory of the neighboring
city. He had engaged board in a tenement house, with the family of a
fellow-workman.

There he sat now, his head buried in his hands. On a plate before him
were the remnants of a frugal supper, and a small lamp with broken
chimney threw a reddish sheen on his immobile figure. Against the
wall, above his bed, were hung his sabre and its scabbard, crosswise.
On a small wooden stool stood a bowl, in which he had performed his
ablutions, and a soiled towel hung from it. The fire in the small
stove had long ago died down, and but a few coals were still
glimmering feebly.

To see the man one would have imagined him asleep; but Schmitz was
very much awake, and i