“I cannot endure force and compulsion,” Hartmut broke out passionately.  “And the service is nothing else but force and slavery.  Always and eternally, obedience; never to have your own way, but ever, day after day, to bow to an iron discipline.  Always the same still, cold forms, with your own feelings never allowed to come to the surface—­I cannot bear it longer!  Everything within me strives for freedom, for light and life.  Let me leave it, father; do not confine me longer in such chains.  I shall die, I shall suffocate!”

He could not have chosen more ill-advised words with which to plead his cause, to a man who was heart and soul a soldier.  They sounded passionate and bitter, yet his arm was still on his father’s shoulder; but the Major pushed him back now.

“I had thought the service an honor, and no slavery,” he said cuttingly.  “It is pretty bad when my own son is the first one to bring it to my notice.  Freedom, light and life!  Perhaps you think when one reaches his seventeenth year he has acquired the right to plunge into life without any further care or guidance.  For you, freedom from restraint would mean destruction.”

“And if it did?” cried Hartmut, quite beside himself.  “Rather destruction with freedom, than longer life with such restraint.  For me the army means bondage and slavery—­”

“Silence!  Not a word more,” ordered Falkenried, so threateningly that the youth, in spite of his fearful passion, was awed.  “You have now no choice, and woe to you if you forget your duty.  First you must become an officer and do your duty as such to the full, like your comrades; then, if you are still of the same mind and I have no power to prevent it, you can leave, but if I am alive then, I will receive my death blow when my only son—­runs away from the service.”

“Father, do you take me for a coward?” interrupted Hartmut.  “If there were only a war and I could stand in battle—­”

“Yes, you would plunge madly and blindly into danger, and, with that very self-will which knows no discipline, rush on to destruction.  I know, only too well, this wild, measureless desire for freedom from every restraint, which knows no limits, recognizes no duties; I know from whom you have inherited it, and to what it will eventually lead.  But as long as you are under my jurisdiction I will hold you fast to that ‘slavery’ whether you hate it or not.  You shall obey and learn to yield while there is yet time; and you shall learn it.  I give you my word for that.”

His voice had again the old harsh sound to which his son was so well accustomed, and every vestige of tenderness had died out of his face.  Hartmut knew that prayers or defiance were alike useless now.  He uttered no syllable, but the old demon-like gleam in his eyes, which robbed him of all his beauty, was again manifest land on the lips so tightly pressed together lay a strange, evil expression as he turned silently to leave the room.  His father followed him with his eyes, again he heard the warning voice which came to him as a presentiment of coming evil, and he called his son back.