Common to all university associations in Germany--whether Corps,
Landsmannschaft, Burschenschaft, or Turnerschaft--is the practice of
the _Mensur_, or student duel. It is not a duel in the sense usually
given to the word in England, for it lacks the feature of personal
hostility, hate, or injury, but is a particularly sanguinary form of
the English "single-stick," in which swords take the place of sticks.
These swords (_Schläger_), called, curiously enough, _rapiere_, are
long and thin in the blade, and their weight is such that at every
duel students are told off on whose shoulders the combatants can rest
their outstretched sword-arm in the pauses of the combat caused by the
duellists getting out of breath; consequently, an undersized student
is usually chosen for this considerate office. The heads and faces of
the duellists are swathed in bandages--no small incentive to
perspiration, the vital parts of their bodies are well protected
against a fatal prick or blow, and the pricks or slashes must be
delivered with the hand and wrist raised head-high above the shoulder.
It is considered disgraceful to move the head, to shrink in the
smallest degree before the adversary, or even to show feeling when the
medical student who acts as surgeon in an adjoining room staunches the
flow of blood or sews up the scars caused by the swords. The duel of a
more serious kind--that with pistols or the French rapier, or with the
bare-pointed sabre and unprotected bodies--is punishable by law, and
is growing rarer each year.

Take a sabre duel--"heavy sabre duel" is the German name for
it--arising out of a quarrel in a cafe or beer-house, and in which one
of the opponents may be a foreigner affiliated to some Corps or
Burschenschaft. Cards are exchanged, and the challenger chooses a
second whom he sends to the opponent. The latter, if he accepts the