his class. He had seen a year's service with the cavalry on the Eastern
front, had been seriously wounded and was now attached to the General
Staff in Berlin in what I judged to be a decorative rather than a useful
capacity, for, apart from what he had learnt in his own campaigning he
seemed singularly ignorant of the development of the military situation.
Particularly, his ignorance of conditions on the Western front was
supreme. He was full to the brim with the most extraordinary fables
about the British. He solemnly assured me, for example--on the faith of
a friend of his who had seen them--that Japanese were fighting with the
English in France, dressed as Highlanders--his friend had heard these
Asiatic Scotsmen talking Japanese, he declared. I thought of the
Gaelic-speaking battalions of the Camerons and could hardly suppress a
smile.

Young von Boden was superbly contemptuous of the officers of the obscure
and much reduced infantry battalion doing garrison duty at Goch, the
frontier station we had just left, where--as he was careful to explain
to me--he had spent four days of unrelieved boredom, waiting for me.

"Of course, in war time we are a united army and all that," he observed
unsophistically, "but none of these fellows at Goch was a fit companion
for a dashing cavalry officer. They were a dull lot. I wouldn't go near
the Casino. I met some of them at the hotel one evening. That was
enough for me. Why, only one of them knew anything at all about Berlin,
and that was the lame fellow. Now, there is one thing we learn in the
cavalry...."

But I had ceased to listen. In his irresponsible chatter the boy used a
word that struck a harsh note which went jarring through my brain. He
had mentioned "the lame fellow," using a German word "der Stelze." In a