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I had my quarters at the Rheinischer Hof, a right comfortable hotel on the 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.
They had no illusions that such thinking would become the daily custom of the people; they kept their eyes open to that which went on about them, and though they no more dared than the earlier group to work directly upon the political conditions of the day as did Görres later in his Rheinischer Merkur, they attempted indirectly to react on the broad mass by branching out into religion and other folk-interests as the earlier school never cared to do.
Then Minna and her sister retired, followed by Herr Pastor; and after a considerable number of more bottles of Blume de Saar had met their fate we formed a procession and escorted the happy Eckenstein to the Rheinischer Hof where he was to sleep. Next morning by eleven, we had all reassembled in the second saal of the Hagen.
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 resolution before which every obstacle fades away.
It was a beautiful sight; but I am not going to describe it here. Ere an hour was over the shells and chassepot bullets were sweeping across the Exercise Platz, and it was no longer a safe spot for a non-combatant like myself. Before I got back into the Hagen after paying my bill at the Rheinischer and fetching away my knapsack, the French guns were on the Exercise Platz.
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