isa-normaladvance-1914-00090

Description: 90THE NORMAL ADVANCEerr &o£eB. H. SCHOCKELHERR ROSE was my boyhood friend and ideal
of all things brave and courageous. The Herr
camefrom Deutchland,asisattestedby his pale blue
eyes and wavy, flaxen hair, now turned white.
Furthermore, he is a Prussian, for his old should¬
ers even now have a distinctive, erect, military
squareness and his close cropped, stubby gray
mustache is wont to bristle fiercely.When I was a small boy Herr Rose used to come
every morning to help father with the work on
the garden. During early spring almost always
he arrived before the family had breakfasted, and
then it was my great delight to come tumbling
downstairs into the kitchen to find the Herr en-
sconsed in a corner on a tilted chair. Still dressed
in my nightgown, I would then climb onto his
blue jeans knee and away we would ride, Zum
zipfel, zum, zapfel, zum tra la, la la. Or he
would scratch my forehead and cheek with his
bristling chin while we both watched mother fry
the bacon. On those occasions no one but the
Herr could dress me for the day.But best of all were the long winter evenings,
when Herr Rose sometimes lingered after supper
in the living room at our house till my bed time.
Then with widening eyes and open mouth I heard
over and over again the ever new tales of those
wonderful wars, through which my hero had gone
in defense of the vaterland. Austria became my
personal enemy and Frankreich my persistent foe.
We two lived again the crude, harsh routine of
the training camp
we lay for weeks in the cold
rains before Metz, and with the Kaiser finally
triumphed at Paris. The table became our cam¬
paign ground, the plates the stragetic positions,
and the knives and forks the various cross roads
to be defended or captured. How he thrilled me
when, having recounted with many a flourish and
illustrative action, the deeds of some particularlyexciting brush, he would laugh long and silently,
and, slapping his thigh with the flat of his hand
or twitching my ears, would end with his never
failing 0 Yunge, Yunge, but dose vas days!The Herrs bowed legs became an object of
emulation when he confided that they grew that
way to follow the curves of his faithful and
famous horse. Sometimes when in a rare,
reminiscent mood, the Herr would let me take a
peep at two. long scars on the thigh and below the
knee (where the saber had got him, he explained)
and very, very seldom he would solemnly show me
two round, blue dimples in his left side, where
the bullets had gone in and whence they had been
extracted. Once he brought a small leather pouch
and disclosed a flattened lump of lead. The doc¬
tor, he said, had taken it from the largest of the
dimples. . .How seriously we used to discuss various meth¬
ods of physical culture! Sometimes, at the noon
hour, before I had grown too large and swift, we
used to run races around the house, at which he
nearly always won, for the Herr didnt like to be
beaten. Then his long and silent laugh would
be followed by the clapping of the hands on his
thigh and the familiar 0, Yunge, Yunge, for
he never called me anything else but Yunge, and
Boy I am to him even now. During these noon
hours he taught me how to level a broomstick car¬
bine, or to wield a lath saber.Those days are gone now. But sometimes of
summer evenings when I am home I visit the
Herr in his tiny, whitewashed cottage of slabs,
which is set in the woods at the head of a narrow
valley. There, out on his little porch, while the
gentle wind waves the branches of the swaying
trees, to make the shadows beckon across the
patches of moonlight, we three—the Herr, his
great, black bulldog, Bismark, and myself—live
Source: http://indstate.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/isuarchive/id/32538
Collection: Indiana State University Archives

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