Boettcher now, there’s a model for you to learn from.”
I can hardly believe my eyes. Boettcher is there too, Boettcher, our school porter. And he is a model! Kantorek shoots a glance at me as if he would like to eat me. But I grin at him innocently, as though I do not recognize him any more.
Nothing could look more ludicrous than his forage-cap and his uniform. And this is the object before whom we used to stand in anguish, as he sat up there enthroned at his desk, spearing at us with his pencil for our mistakes in those irregular French verbs with which afterwards we made so little headway in France. That is barely two years ago—and now here stands Territorial Kantorek, the spell quite broken, with bent knees, arms like pothooks, unpolished buttons and that ludicrous rig-out—an impossible soldier. I cannot reconcile this with the menacing figure at the schoolmaster’s desk. I wonder what I, the old soldier, would do if this skin full of woe ever dared to say to me again: “Bäumer, give the imperfect of ‘aller.’ ”
Then Mittelstaedt makes them practice skirmishing, and as a favour appoints Kantorek squad leader.
Now in skirmishing the squad leader has always to keep twenty paces in front of his squad; if the
178
