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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