Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places | Page 2

in a prisoner from the foreposts a red-legged
Frenchman across the pommel of his saddle; and many other good
fellows, over most of whom the turf of the Spicheren, or the brown
earth of the Gravelotte plain, now lies lightly.
But although the Rheinischer Hof associates itself in my mind with
many memories, half-pleasant, half-sad, it was not the most
accustomed haunt of the casuals in Saarbrücken, including myself. Of
the waifs and strays which the war had drifted down to the pretty
frontier town the great rendezvous was the Hôtel Hagen, at the bend of
the turn leading from the bridge up to the railway station. The Hagen
was a free-and-easy place compared with the Rheinischer, and among
its inmates there was no one who could sing a better song than manly
George--type of the Briton at whom foreigners stare--who, ignorant of
a word of their language, wholly unprovided with any authorisation
save the passport signed "Salisbury," and having not quite so much
business at the seat of war as he might have at the bottom of a
coal-mine, gravitates into danger with inevitable certainty, and
stumbles through all manner of difficulties and bothers by reason of a
serene good-humour that nothing can ruffle and a cool resolution
before which every obstacle fades away. Was there ever a more
compositely polyglot cosmopolitan than poor young de Liefde--half
Dutchman, half German by birth, an Englishman by adoption, a
Frenchman in temperament, speaking with equal fluency the language
of all four countries, and an unconsidered trifle of some half-dozen
European languages besides? Then there was the English student from
Bonn, who had come down to the front accompanied by a terrible brute
of a dog, vast, shaggy, self-willed, and dirty; an animal which, so to
speak, owned his owner, and was so much the horror and disgust of
everybody that on account of him the company of his master--one of
the pleasantest fellows alive-- was the source of general apprehension.

There was young Silberer the many-sided and eccentric, an Austrian
nobleman, a Vienna feuilletonist and correspondent, a rowing man, a
gourmet, ever thinking of his stomach and yet prepared for all the
roughness of the campaign--warm-hearted, passionate, narrow-minded,
capable of sleeping for twenty-three out of the twenty-four hours, and
the wearer of a Scotch cap. There was Küster, a German journalist with
an address somewhere in the Downham Road; and Duff, a Fellow of
---- College, the strangest mixture of nervousness and cool courage I
ever met.
We were a kind of happy family at the Hagen; the tone of the coterie
was that of the easiest intimacy into which every newcomer slid quite
naturally. Thus when on the 31st July there was a somewhat sensational
arrival, the stolid landlord had not turned the gas on in the empty saal
before everybody knew and sympathised with the errand of the
strangers. The party consisted of a plump little girl of about eighteen
with a bonny round face and fine frank eyes; her sister who was some
years older; and a brother, the eldest of the three. They had come from
Silesia on rather a strange tryst. Little Minna Vogt had for her
_Bräutigam_ a young Feldwebel of the second battalion of the
Hohenzollerns, a native of Saarlouis. The battalion quartered there was
under orders to join its first battalion at Saarbrücken, and young
Eckenstein had written to his betrothed to come and meet him there,
that the marriage-knot might be tied before he should go on a campaign
from which he might not return. The arrangement was certainly a
charming one; we should have a wedding in the Hagen! There was no
nonsense about our young Braut. She told me the little story at supper
on the night of her arrival in the most matter-of-fact way possible,
drank her two glasses of red wine, and went off serenely to bed with a
dainty lisping _Schlafen Sie wohl!_
While Minna was between the sheets in the pleasant chamber in the
Hagen her lover was lying in bivouac some fifteen miles away. In the
afternoon of the next day his battalion approached Saarbrücken and
bivouacked about two miles from the town. Of course we all went out
to welcome it; some bearing peace-offerings of cigars, others the
drink-offering of potent Schnapps. The Vogt family were left the sole
inmates of the Hagen, delicacy preventing their accompanying us. The
German journalist, however, had a commission to find out young

Eckenstein and tell him of the bliss that awaited him two short miles
away. Right hearty fellows were the officers of the second
battalion--from the grizzled Oberst down to the smooth-faced junior
lieutenant; and the men who had been marching and bivouacking for a
fortnight looked as fresh as if they had not travelled five miles. Küster