I am writing this for my friend in Scotland, whose strange name I cannot
spell. He wishes to, put it in the story-book he is writing. But his
book is mostly lies. This is truth. I saw these things, and I write them
down now because of the love I have for him, the young Herr who saved my
brother's life among the black men in Egypt. Did I tell how our Fritz
went away to be Gordon's man in the Soudan of Africa, and how he wrote
to our father and the mother at home in the village--"I am a great man
and the intendant of a military station, and have soldiers under me, and
he who is our general is hardly a man. He has no fear, and death is to
him as life"? So this young Herr, whom I love the same as my own
brother, met Fritz when there was not the thickness of a Wurst-skin
between him and the torture that makes men blanch for thinking on, and I
will now tell you the story of how he saved him. It was--

But the Herr has come in, and says that I am a "dumbhead," also
condemned, and many other things, because, he says, I can never tell
anything that I begin to tell straightforwardly like a street in Berlin.
He says my talk is crooked like the "Philosophers' Way" after one passes
the red sawdust of the Hirsch-Gasse, where the youngsters "drum" and
"drum" all the Tuesdays and the Fridays, like the donkeys that they are.
I am to talk (he says violently) about Paris and the terrible time I saw
there in the war of Seventy.

Ah! the time when there was a death at every door, the time which
Heidelberg and mine own Thurm village will not forget--that made grey
the hairs of Jacob Oertler, the head-waiter, those sixty days he was in
Paris, when men's blood was spilt like water, when the women and the
children fell and were burned in the burning houses, or died shrieking
on the bayonet point. There is no hell that the Pfaffs tell of, like the