Under Galba, to the general astonishment, at the end of 68 he was chosen to command the army of Lower Germany, and here he made himself popular with his subalterns and with the soldiers by outrageous prodigality and excessive good nature, which soon proved fatal to order and discipline.
He was still in office when the final rising of the Cubans began in February 1895, and he had to resign in March because he could not find superior officers in the army willing to help him to put down the turbulent and disgraceful demonstrations of the subalterns of Madrid garrison against newspapers which had given offence to the military.
Promotion in the German army is excessively slow, the senior subalterns having eighteen to twenty years commissioned service and the senior captains sometimes thirty.
The Carlist lieutenantcolonel was glad to be re-admitted into the Prussian service as a second lieutenant, but he was still young, and few subalterns could at the age of twenty-four claim five years' meritorious war service.
The most irreconcilable Republicans knew that they could not expect much from popular risings in great towns or from the disaffected and anarchist peasantry iii Andalusia, so they resorted to the old practice of barrack conspiracies, courting especially the non-commissioned officers and some ambitious subalterns.