s this--this hollow,
stupid round of the coarsest pleasures and the equally coarse and
stupid round of duties--really what he had looked forward to?

The young man sighed. The absence of the wife of his captain, Frau
Koenig, rendered him still more melancholy. Bah, it was disgusting.
And to think that this was the profession most highly honored, most
envied in the fatherland! To think that it had always been drummed in
his ears, ever since early childhood, that to "wear the king's coat"
would exalt him high above his fellow mortals!

Comradeship! What a fine word when it bears out its full meaning,
thought Lieutenant Bleibtreu. But what was it here? What had he found
the practical construction of the term? To follow, day by day, step by
step, in the same treadmill of dull routine, only relieved by
occasional but all too brief glimpses of the freedom that lay beyond
"the service"--that was the meaning of comradeship. There was none of
that unselfish intimacy, that ready sympathy and help between the members
of the caste into which he had risen on the proud day he first read
his name among the Kaiser's appointments in the _Armee-Verordnungsblatt_.
Dead sea fruit! Ashes that taste bitter on the tongue.

Certainly there were exceptions. He himself had heard of some such
cases of comradeship as he had dreamed of when still a slim little
cadet in the military academy: cases where one comrade lifted the
other, the younger and less experienced, up to his higher level; cases
where one comrade sacrificed himself for the other. But these must be
very rare, he thought, for he had never seen such a case himself. What
he had seen was the casting into one stiff, unchanging form of so many
individualities not suited to each other. It was the hollow mockery of
the thing that palled so on him. And what would be the end?

Though young in the service, he had seen men meant for better things
broken as a reed on the wheel of military formalism; he had seen them
retiring when but in the prime of life, broken in spirit, unfit for
any new career, impaired in health, perfectly useless--victims of the
conventional ideas that rule supreme in the army. Others he had seen
forced to resign, overloaded with a burden of debt, ruined
financially, physically, morally bankrupt,--all due to the tinsel and
glitter, to the ceaseless temptations thrown into the path of the
German army officer. A young civilian, even when the son of wealthy
parents, is not