Americans -- Europe -- Fiction; Europe -- Fiction; Humorous stories; Walking -- Fiction
It is said that the student likes to appear on the street and in other
public places in this kind of array, and that this predilection often
keeps him out when exposure to rain or sun is a positive danger for
him. Newly bandaged students are a very common spectacle in the public
gardens of Heidelberg. It is also said that the student is glad to
get wounds in the face, because the scars they leave will show so well
there; and it is also said that these face wounds are so prized that
youths have even been known to pull them apart from time to time and
put red wine in them to make them heal badly and leave as ugly a scar
as possible. It does not look reasonable, but it is roundly asserted
and maintained, nevertheless; I am sure of one thing--scars are plenty
enough in Germany, among the young men; and very grim ones they are,
too. They crisscross the face in angry red welts, and are permanent and
ineffaceable.
Some of these scars are of a very strange and dreadful aspect; and the
effect is striking when several such accent the milder ones, which form
a city map on a man's face; they suggest the "burned district" then. We
had often noticed that many of the students wore a colored silk band
or ribbon diagonally across their breasts. It transpired that this
signifies that the wearer has fought three duels in which a decision
was reached--duels in which he either whipped or was whipped--for drawn
battles do not count. [1] After a student has received his ribbon, he
is "free"; he can cease from fighting, without reproach--except some one
insult him; his president cannot appoint him to fight; he can volunteer
if he wants to, or remain quiescent if he prefers to do so. Statistics
show that he does NOT prefer to remain quiescent. They show that the
duel has a singular fascination about it somewhere, for these free
men, so far from resting upon the privilege of the badge, are always
volunteering. A corps student told me it was of record that Prince
Bismarck fought thirty-two of these duels in a single summer term when
he was in college. So he fought twenty-nine after his badge had given
him the right to retire from the field.
1. FROM MY DIARY.--Dined in a hotel a few miles up the Neckar, in a room
whose walls were hung all over with framed portrait-groups of the Five
Corps; some were recent, but many antedated photography, and were
pictured in lithography--the dates ranged back to forty or fifty years
ago. Nearly every individual wore the ribbon across his breast. In one
portrait-group representing (as each of these pictures did) an entire
Corps, I took pains to count the ribbons: there were twenty-seven
members, and twenty-one of them wore that significant badge.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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