Forced to Fight - The Tale of a Schleswig Dane #260587

HE was a boy at the time when I first met him — a little lad of four, with sun-bleached hair and bright eyes; a child of the fields and the soil, of the stable and the barn. We were sitting that day above a roadside ditch, the bright summer sun shining down upon us, and around us the fragrance of wild roses in the hedges. I had to tell him stories, but they all had to be about noble knights clad in gilded armour and carrying good gleaming swords. The knights all had to slay the Wicked dragon and rescue the fair princess. Unless they did that, neither they nor the stories were any good. All the time While I was telling him these tales his ardent, enraptured eyes were fastened upon me, while his soft and yielding child's mouth looked like a big note of interrogation.