ng leisurely home, he followed his train of thought. The
systematic brutality shown the common soldier--even the noncom.
(though not in so pronounced a manner)--by his fellow-officers had
from the start been very much against his taste. "They don't see the
defender of the fatherland in him," thought he, "but merely the green
man, unused to strict discipline and to the narrowly bound round of
dull duties, the clumsy, ungainly recruit, or the smarter, but even
more unsympathetic private of some experience whose drill is an
unpleasant task for them, and who, they know, hates and abominates
them in his heart." And he remembered scenes of such brutality, the
unwilling witness of which he had been. Such cruelty and abuse of
power, he felt, was playing into the hands of the Socialist Party.
"These young men, fresh from the plough or the workshop," he mused,
"cannot help losing all their love for the army. So long as they serve
in it, of course, they will not risk those punishments for expressing
their real thoughts which the military law metes out with such
draconic severity; they will prefer suffering in silence the
injustice, cruelty, and inhuman treatment to which, at one time or
another, nearly every one of them is subjected during their period of
active service. But once dismissed to the reserve, how many, many
thousands of them will naturally turn to the only political party with
us which dares to oppose with courage militarism and all its fearful
excrescences! And all this," he continued inwardly, "is the natural
result of a long period of deadening, enervating peace. Oh! If there
were but a war! All this dross would then glide off us, and the true
metal underneath would once more shine forth."

He went to bed with these ideas still humming in his brain.

Borgert had been enjoying himself meanwhile. His kind always does. He
had, for a few moments, tried to listen to the arguments of Captain
Koenig and Lieutenant Bleibtreu, while they were seated on the sofa;
but, pshaw! how absurd to philosophize about these things, he thought.
Far better to take life as it comes. And so he had joined the party at
the gaming-table, where one of the winners was just then standing
treat for a battery of Veuve Clicquot, and as he slowly sipped the
delicious beverage, the bubbles rising like rosy pearls from the
depths of his chalice, he smiled with self-satisfaction.

But at last he, too, left the house and directed his steps toward the