A TRAMP ABROAD By Mark Twain

Bismarck fought thirty-two of these duels in a single summer

term when he was in college. So he fought twenty-nine

after his badge had given him the right to retire from

the field.

1. FROM MY DIARY.–Dined in a hotel a few miles up the Neckar,

in a room whose walls were hung all over with framed

portrait-groups of the Five Corps; some were recent,

but many antedated photography, and were pictured in

lithography–the dates ranged back to forty or fifty

years ago. Nearly every individual wore the ribbon across

his breast. In one portrait-group representing (as each

of these pictures did) an entire Corps, I took pains

to count the ribbons: 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 Go”ttingen,

to fight with a Go”ttingen 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. While the trick

lasted he won in sixteen successive duels in his university;

but by that time observers had discovered what his charm was,

and how to break it, therefore his championship ceased.

A rule which forbids social intercourse between members

of different corps is strict. In the dueling-house, in