human nature!

These thoughts, however, did not affect either Fritz or his mother at the time.

Not being the only son of a widow, in which case he might have been exempted from service, Fritz, when he had reached his eighteenth year, had been compelled to join the ranks of the national army; and, after completing the ordinary course of drill, had been relegated to the Landwehr and allowed to return home to his civic occupation. But, when the order was promulgated throughout the German empire to mobilise the vast human man-slaying machine which General Moltke and Prince Bismark had constructed with such painstaking care that units could be multiplied into tens, and tens into hundreds, and hundred into thousands—swelling into a gigantic host of armed men almost at a moment’s notice, ready either to guard the frontier from invasion, or to hurl its resistless battalions on the hated foe whose defeat had been such a long-cherished dream—the young clerk received peremptory orders to join the headquarters of the regiment to which he was attached. The very place and hour at which he was to report himself to his commanding officer were named in the general order forwarded along with his railway pass, so comprehensive were the details of the Prussian military organisation. This latter so thoroughly embraced the entire country after the absorption of the lesser states on the collapse of Koniggratz, that each separate individual could be moved at any given moment to a certain defined point; while the instructions for his guidance were so complete and perfect, that they could not fail to be understood.

Fritz had to proceed, in the first instance, to the capital city of his state, Hanover, now no longer a kingdom, but only a small division of the great empire into which it was incorporated. For him there was no chance of evasion or getting out of the obligation to serve, for the whilom “kingdom” having withstood to the last during the six weeks’ war the onward progress to victory of the all-devouring Prussians, her citizens would be at once suspected of disloyalty on the least sign of any defection. Besides, a keen official eye was kept on the movements of all Hanoverians, their patriotism to the newly formed empire being diligently nourished by a military rule as stern and strict as that of Draco.

“Oh, my boy, my firstborn! and must I lose thee too?” exclaimed Madame Dort, when Fritz made her acquainted with the news of his summons to headquarters. “Truly Providence sees fit to afflict me for my sins, to try me with this fresh calamity!”

“Pray do not take such a sombre view of my departure, dear mother,” said Fritz. “Why, probably, in a month’s time I will be back again in old Lubeck; for, I’m sure, we’ll double up the French in a twinkling.”

“Ah, my child, you do not know what a campaign is, yet! The matter will not be settled so easily as you think. War is a terrible thing, and the Prussians may not be able to crush the whole power of the French nation in the same way in which they conquered Austria and Saxony, and subdued our own little state four years ago.”

“But, mother recollect, that now we shall be fighting all together for the Fatherland,” said Fritz, who like most young Germans was well read in his country’s history, and to him the remembrance of the old war time, when Buonaparte trampled over central Europe, was as fresh as if it were only yesterday. “We’ve long been waiting for this day, and it has come at last! Besides, dear mutterchen, you forget that the Landwehr, to which I belong, will only act as a reserve, and will not probably take any part in the fighting—worse luck!” He added the latter words under his breath, for it was not so long since he had abandoned his barrack-room life for him to have lost the soldierly instincts there implanted into him; and, truth to say, he longed for the strife, the summons to arms making him “sniff the battle from afar like a young war-horse!” The French declaration of war and the proclamation of the German emperor had roused the people throughout the country into a state of patriotic frenzy; so that, from the North Sea to the Danube, from the Rhine to the Niemen, the summons to meet the ancient foe was responded to with an alacrity and devotion which none who witnessed the stirring scenes of that period can ever forget.

Fritz was no less eager than his comrades; and, considerably within the interval allowed him for preparation, he and the others of his corps living in the same vicinity were on their way to Hanover.

This second parting with another of her children almost wrung poor Madame Dort’s heart in twain; but, like the majority of German mothers at the time, she sent off her son, with a blessing, “to fight for his country, his Fatherland”; for, noble and peasant alike, every wife and mother throughout the length and breadth of the land seemed to be infected with the patriotism of a Roman matron. Madame Dort would be second to none.

“Good-bye, my son,” she said, “be brave, although I need hardly tell your father’s son that, and do your duty to God and your country!”

“I will, mother; I will,” said Fritz, giving her a last kiss, as the train rolled away with him out of the station to the martial strains of “Der Deutsche Vaterland,” which a band was playing on the platform in honour of the young recruits going to the war.

The widow had to-day no son left to support her steps homeward to the desolate house in the Gulden Strasse, now bereaved of her twin hopes, Fritz and Eric both; only old Lorischen was by her side, and she felt sadly alone.

“Both gone, both gone!” she murmured to herself as she ascended the outside stairway that led to her apartments in the upper part of the house. “It will be soon time for me to go, too!”

“Ach nein, dear mistress,” said the faithful servant and friend who was now the sole companion left to share the deserted home. “What would become of me in that case, eh? We will wait and watch for the truants in patience and hope. They’ll come back to us again in God’s good time; and they will be all the more precious to us by their being taken from us now. Himmel! mistress, why we’ve lots of things to do to get ready for their return!”