Your voice is changing. Are you in love yet?”

Carl Joseph turned red. His face burned like a red lantern, but he held it bravely toward his father.

“So, not yet!” said the district captain. “Don’t let me disturb you. Carry on!”

Carl Joseph gulped, the redness faded, he was suddenly freezing. He reported slowly and with many pauses. Then he produced the reading list from his pocket and handed it to his father.

“Quite an impressive list!” said the district captain. “Please give me a plot summary of Zriny.”

Carl Joseph outlined the drama act by act. Then he sat down, weary, pale, with a dry tongue.

He stole a glance at the clock, it was only ten–thirty. The examination would drag on for another hour and a half. It might occur to the old man to test him in ancient history or German mythology. The father walked through the room, smoking, his left hand behind his back. The cuff rattled on his right hand. The sunny stripes kept growing stronger and stronger on the carpet; they kept edging closer and closer to the window. The sun must be high by now. The church bells started clanging; they tolled all the way into the room as if swinging just beyond the thick blinds. Today the old man tested him only in literature. He articulated his detailed opinion of Grillparzer’s significance and recommended Adalbert Stifter and Ferdinand von Saar as “light vacation reading” for his son. Then the father jumped back to military topics: guard duty, Military Regulations Part Two, makeup of an army corps, wartime strength of the various regiments. All at once he asked, “What is subordination?”

“Subordination is the duty of unconditional obedience,” Carl Joseph declaimed, “which every inferior and every lower rank—”

“Stop!” the father broke in, correcting him. “As well as every lower rank.” And Carl Joseph went on.

“—is obligated to show a superior when—”

“As soon as,” the old man rectified. “As soon as the latter takes command.”

Carl Joseph heaved a sigh of relief. The clock struck twelve.

Only now did his vacation begin. Another quarter hour, and he heard the first rattling drumroll from the band leaving the barracks. Every Sunday at noontime it played outside the official residence of the district captain, who, in this little town, represented no lesser personage than His Majesty the Emperor. Carl Joseph, concealed behind the dense foliage of the vines on the balcony, received the playing of the military band as a tribute. He felt slightly related to the Hapsburgs, whose might his father represented and defended here and for whom he himself would some day go off to war and death. He knew the names of all the members of the Imperial Royal House. He loved them all sincerely, with a child’s devoted heart—more than anyone else the Kaiser, who was kind and great, sublime and just, infinitely remote and very close, and particularly fond of the officers in the army. It would be best to die for him amid military music, easiest with “The Radetzky March.” The swift bullets whistled in cadence around Carl Joseph’s ears, his naked saber flashed, and, his heart and head brimming with the lovely briskness of the march, he sank into the drumming intoxication of the music, and his blood oozed out in a thin dark-red trickle upon the glistening gold of the trumpets, the deep black of the drums, and the victorious silver of the cymbals.

Jacques stood behind him and cleared his throat.