“For goodness’ sake, my dear Lieutenant, don’t let any such remarks escape you anywhere else,” said Captain König, in a scared voice. But they had reached the captain’s door, and so they shook hands and parted. Bleibtreu lived at the other end of the straggling little town. In walking 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 König 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.