nant gossip
increased in volume, so that Captain Koenig at last resolved to give
the commander of the regiment a hint of affairs in a spirit of strict
privacy.

But the colonel asked, as soon as the ticklish subject was broached:

"Do you report this to me officially? No? Well, then, I don't want to
know anything about it. I won't burn my fingers in meddling with a
matter of that kind."

Koenig himself did not feel like becoming the instigator of a most
disastrous scandal. After all, it was not primarily an affair where he
ought to take the initiative, and this aside from the further
consideration that he would probably become involved in a duel by
taking the lead in exposing the guilty parties. He therefore also made
up his mind to keep quiet.

Thus it was that nothing was done by anybody to put a stop to all this
mischievous talk, and to put out of the world a matter which was of
the greatest injury to the regiment and to the whole corps of
officers,--a matter, too, in which the civilian population was
perfectly justified in pointing the finger of scorn at them. And
whereas in other circles, in civilian ones, the guilty parties would
under similar circumstances have been called to account, in this
instance a state of things was permitted to exist for a number of
months which scandalized every decent person who, while forced by
social conventions to meet the offenders on terms of equality, would
have entirely shunned them once proper steps were taken to conciliate
outraged public opinion. And this was all the more reprehensible
because it affected a caste which deems itself superior to any other
within the monarchy, and which believes itself to be the guardian of
good manners and morals, and of a high conception of honor.

The largest measure of blame necessarily fell to the share of Colonel
von Kronau. This gentleman, at all other times ready to proceed with
stringent severity wherever he discovered slight breaches of
discipline or of the mechanical details of drill, and who knew no
clemency where nothing was to be feared for himself by playing the
rigid taskmaster, in this instance tolerated this shameful thing; for
he knew that interference in this particular would mean for him, in
any case, serious inconvenience. Two things were possible. Either he
would be charged with falsely accusing others, or else his position as
commander would receive such a blow as to make it perhaps untenable,
once his superiors sho