Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/194

cunning, and that already the Kaiser had ordered the menu which should be served him when he entered Paris.

The wave of war struck the laboratory and the pension in the Dahlmannstrasse together with the rest of Berlin.

People assumed new duties, new garb, new language, new dignity—and new psychology. The old Germany was gone. A new Germany had arisen—a colossus, a huge, crunching animal of a country, straddling Europe on massive legs, head thrown back, shoulders flung wide; proud, defiant! And sullen!

Takagawa did not understand. He had come to Berlin to learn honorably. He was not familiar with European politics, and Belgium was only a geographical term to him.

War? Of course! War! It meant honor and strength and sacrifice. But—

There was Hans Grosser, the only son of Frau Grosser, the comfortable, stout Silesian widow who kept the pension. Long, lean, pimply, clumsy, an underpaid clerk in the Dresdner Bank, he had been heretofore the butt of his mother's boarders. When at the end of the meal the Kompottschale, filled with stewed fruit, was passed down the table, he was the last to help himself, and then apologetically. The day after war was declared he came to dinner—his last dinner before leaving for the front—in gray-green, with a narrow gold braid on his buckram-stiffened collar, gold insignia on his epaulet, a straight saber dragging behind his clicking spurs like a steel-forged tail. Overnight the negligible clerk had become Herr Leutnant—second lieutenant in the reserves, detailed to the I24th Infantry. The butt had become the potential hero.