The Shadow of Great Britain

Chapter 1114: Chapter 104: Beer Hall Riot

The stars in the sky appear beautiful and pure only because they are so far from us, and we have no idea about their private lives.

——Heinrich Heine

“Sorry, who wants to fight?”

Arthur’s voice wasn’t particularly loud, but among a group of impassioned young people, his voice was quickly drowned out by a wave of cheers.

The tavern was filled with students expressing their indignation over the tragic experiences of their senior alumnus, Heine.

Although these students imagined Heine’s impoverished life in Paris, some even added detailed descriptions.

But as far as Arthur knew, when Heine was with him, not only did they never eat black bread, but they also tried almost every high-end restaurant in Paris.

And when Arthur told Heine that he was about to leave Paris to take up a post in Germany, Heine enthusiastically recommended the Jaco restaurant in Berlin. According to Heine, the culinary excellence there was on par with Paris.

Roasted swans flew everywhere, carrying a small dish of soy sauce in their beaks. If you tore one apart to eat, it would revel in delight. Deliciously soft cream cakes grew like sunflowers in the wind; streams of fresh meat juice and champagne flowed everywhere, carrying rings of napkins on branches.

Even when wiping mouths at the Jaco restaurant, they used white bread. Arthur wasn’t even sure if they had mastered the art of making black bread there.

As for Göttingen, which held Heine as a hero, the place he had stayed in for several years, he described it quite succinctly, summing up his view of Göttingen in a few words.

Göttingen City, famous for its sausages and university, belonged to the King of Hanover. It had nine hundred ninety-nine furnaces, an assortment of churches, a maternity home, an observatory, a student detention room, a library, and a City Hall basement hotel, where the beer was excellent.

A small river called the Leine River flowed past the city; people bathed there in summer. The water was very cold, and there were sections so wide that even William Rudel, the best athlete in my class, would need a considerable run-up to jump across.

The watchman, lab attendant, doctoral dissertation, dance tea party, washerwoman, curriculum, roast pigeon, Guelphic Order Medal, doctoral carriage, pipe, privy council advisor, legal advisor, student committee members, professors, and other fools were all aplenty.

Some even believed that the city was built during the era of the great migrations, with every branch of the Germanic people leaving behind a sample of their members’ free-spirited nature, eventually breeding Vandals, Frisians, Swabians, Teutons, Saxons, Thuringians, and so on.

In today’s Göttingen, they still formed gangs, distinguished by the different colors of their caps and tassels, loitering on Weind Street, fighting incessantly in meadows, dueling taverns, and the bloody battlefield of Bovenden.

Their customs still lingered in the era of the great migrations, partly led by some dubbed as “leading roosters,” partly managed by their ancient codes—university fraternity laws, which hold a place in the “barbarian laws.”

On this point, Heine’s description was accurate, only Arthur hadn’t yet experienced the pleasant things like Göttingen’s dance tea party before encountering the university students governed under the “barbarian laws” fraternity regulations.

Even more unfortunately, his current identity was still as a professor at the University of Gottingen and likely to become the Chairman of the Student Council’s disciplinary committee. In Heine’s list of things in Göttingen, these two identities were put in the same category as fools.

But not everyone present was as conflicted as Arthur.

For example, Schneider wasn’t surprised by today’s events.

To this pure British gentleman, this was his homeland Germany; without the tavern’s clamor and the trouble-causing university students creating countless hassles for neighbors, it would feel lacking.

However, what pleased Schneider more was that he wasn’t responsible for supervising these overly energetic university students eager to try everything but studying, as this task was assigned to the authority of electromagnetism, the reactionary academic Professor Arthur Hastings.

He led Clara and Arthur to a corner of the tavern to sit down, but before they could even warm the seat, they saw the student standing on stage pull a black-red-gold tricolor flag out of a nearby box.

Black and gold, the traditional colors of the Holy Roman Empire, now represented German nationalism, while red symbolized freedom and revolution.

Yet at this moment, what the flag represented wasn’t important. What was important was that this flag was currently banned from appearing on campus grounds.

But students are inherently rebellious; the more they are forbidden from doing something, the more they want to do it.

For a seasoned police officer like Arthur, confining such a group of young people within the university was an exceptionally clever tactic. It restricted their destructive nature to a small area like a campus, rather than letting them run amok in the streets and alleys of the East End of London, engaging in mischief.

The purpose of compulsory education wasn’t just to teach them the alphabet and basic knowledge so that, in the near future, they could become qualified skilled workers. It was also to provide a place where they could vent their excess energy, thus reducing the overall crime rate in society.