There Were Twenty-Seven Members,
And Twenty-One Of Them Wore That Significant Badge.
The statistics may be found to possess interest in
several particulars.
Two days in every week are devoted
to dueling. The rule is rigid that there must be three
duels on each of these days; there are generally more,
but there cannot be fewer. There were six the day
I was present; sometimes there are seven or eight.
It is insisted that eight duels a week - four for each
of the two days - is too low an average to draw a
calculation from, but I will reckon from that basis,
preferring an understatement to an overstatement of the case.
This requires about four hundred and eighty or five hundred
duelists a year - for in summer the college term is about
three and a half months, and in winter it is four months
and sometimes longer. Of the seven hundred and fifty
students in the university at the time I am writing of,
only eighty belonged to the five corps, and it is only
these corps that do the dueling; occasionally other
students borrow the arms and battleground of the five corps
in order to settle a quarrel, but this does not happen
every dueling-day. [2] Consequently eighty youths furnish
the material for some two hundred and fifty duels a year.
This average gives six fights a year to each of the eighty.
This large work could not be accomplished if the badge-holders
stood upon their privilege and ceased to volunteer.
2. They have to borrow the arms because they could not
get them elsewhere or otherwise. As I understand it,
the public authorities, all over Germany, allow the five
Corps to keep swords, but DO NOT ALLOW THEM TO USE THEM.
This is law is rigid; it is only the execution of it that
is lax.
Of course, where there is so much fighting, the students
make it a point to keep themselves in constant practice
with the foil. One often sees them, at the tables in the
Castle grounds, using their whips or canes to illustrate
some new sword trick which they have heard about;
and between the duels, on the day whose history I
have been writing, the swords were not always idle;
every now and then we heard a succession of the keen
hissing sounds which the sword makes when it is being
put through its paces in the air, and this informed us
that a student was practicing. Necessarily, this unceasing
attention to the art develops an expert occasionally.
He becomes famous in his own university, his renown spreads
to other universities. He is invited to Goettingen,
to fight with a Goettingen expert; if he is victorious,
he will be invited to other colleges, or those colleges will
send their experts to him. Americans and Englishmen often
join one or another of the five corps. A year or two ago,
the principal Heidelberg expert was a big Kentuckian;
he was invited to the various universities and left
a wake of victory behind him all about Germany;
but at last a little student in Strasburg defeated him.
There was formerly a student in Heidelberg who had picked
up somewhere and mastered a peculiar trick of cutting up
under instead of cleaving down from above.
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