Everywhere soldiering entails the same busily empty monotony; hour after hour is mapped out in accordance with inflexible antediluvian regulations, and even one’s leisure does not seem to offer much in the way of variety. In the officers’ mess, the same faces, the same conversation; at the café the same games of cards and billiards. Sometimes one is amazed that the good God should trouble to give the six or seven hundred roofs of a little town of this sort the background of a different sky and a different countryside.
