In a few minutes the sheet-iron stove was aglow, and sent waves of warmth into the cold cell. Röse stood in front of it, and by the flickering light of the flames he slowly perused the letter of his parents. While he read tears were streaming down his face. Then he hid away under his pillow the other treasures,--a sausage and a cake,--wrapped himself into his blanket and lay down to sleep. In his dreams Röse was standing beneath the Christmas tree, and around him were his dear ones at home. The twenty-eighth of December was a day of mourning for the fourth squadron. All the men, including those who had just returned from leave, gave the last escort to a dead comrade. It was Dietrich, the good-service man, who was carried out to the cemetery. He had always been of a weakly constitution; but he had been seized by a violent fever the day when he had returned, overheated, and wet to the bones from rain, after hard drill on the parade ground, and had had to spend the evening and the night in a cold room, because Roth had refused to furnish coal. Two days later the surgeon of the regiment established the fact that inflammatory rheumatism had supervened, and this had taken so bad a turn within a short time that the heart had become affected. On Christmas Day the poor fellow had died. His parents had been summoned by telegraph to attend the funeral of their only son; but sickness in the family and other circumstances had prevented their coming, and thus the funeral took place without a single friend or relative being present. The day afterward the fat reserve man, the one who had been injured by “Napoleon,” left the hospital. His injuries seemed healed; but the whole face was horribly disfigured by livid marks left from the sutures of the surgeon’s needle, and the left eye had been removed by an operation, since it had been feared that the other eye might also be lost unless prompt and radical measures were taken. Maimed and crippled for life, the man returned to his home, discharged from the army for physical inability. A monthly pension of nine marks had been “generously” allowed him by the government. * * * * * Schmitz, the ex-sergeant, on New Year’s Eve sat in a scantily furnished room. To earn a living, even if but a very poor one, he had been forced to take work as a common laborer in a large factory of the neighboring city. He had engaged board in a tenement house, with the family of a fellow-workman. There he sat now, his head buried in his hands. On a plate before him were the remnants of a frugal supper, and a small lamp with broken chimney threw a reddish sheen on his immobile figure. Against the wall, above his bed, were hung his sabre and its scabbard, crosswise. On a small wooden stool stood a bowl, in which he had performed his ablutions, and a soiled towel hung from it. The fire in the small stove had long ago died down, and but a few coals were still glimmering feebly.