St. Johann side of the Saar, where most of the Hohenzollern officers
frequented the _table d'hote_ and where quaint little Max, the drollest
imp of a waiter imaginable, and pretty Frauelein Sophie the landlord's
niece, did all that in them lay to contribute to the pleasantness and
comfort of the house. Not a few pleasant evenings did I spend at the table
of the long dining-room, with the close-cropped red head of silent and
genial Hauptmann von Krehl looming large over the great ice-pail, with its
_chevaux de frise_ of long-necked Niersteiner bottles--the worthy
Hauptmann supported by blithe Lieutenant von Klipphausen, ever ready with
the _Wacht am Rhein_; quaint Dr. Diestelkamp, brimful of recollections of
"six-and-sixty" and as ready to amputate your leg as to crack a joke or
clink a glass; gay young Adjutant von Zuelow--he who one day brought in a
prisoner from the foreposts a red-legged Frenchman across the pommel of
his saddle; and many other good fellows, over most of whom the turf of the
Spicheren, or the brown earth of the Gravelotte plain, now lies lightly.

But although the Rheinischer Hof associates itself in my mind with many
memories, half-pleasant, half-sad, it was not the most accustomed haunt of
the casuals in Saarbruecken, including myself. Of the waifs and strays
which the war had drifted down to the pretty frontier town the great
rendezvous was the Hotel Hagen, at the bend of the turn leading from the
bridge up to the railway station. The Hagen was a free-and-easy place
compared with the Rheinischer, and among its inmates there was no one who
could sing a better song than manly George--type of the Briton at whom
foreigners stare--who, ignorant of a word of their language, wholly
unprovided with any authorisation save the passport signed "Salisbury,"
and having not quite so much business at the seat of war as he might have
at the bottom of a coal-mine, gravitates into danger with inevitable
certainty, and stumbles through all manner of difficulties and bothers by
reason of a serene good-humour that nothing can ruffle and a cool