X
My work is finished, and now the time has come for me to part with it.
It is going off into this misty autumn night. My heart is both glad and sorrowful.
It is going away from me, henceforth to follow a destiny of its own that will no longer depend only upon my love.
I shall turn to other duties, I shall assume other cares. A voice tells me that they will always be the same duties, the same cares, and that there is no longer but one great task for men, one single task with a hundred radiant aspects.
It is late. The night is drawing to a close; it is calm and yet penetrated with a vast, subdued murmur of joy. They say it is one of the last nights of the war.
I hear about me the panting breath of the wounded. There are several hundred of them; they are sleeping or longing for sleep and rest. Their burning breath is like a lamentation. Many of them will never see the peace they have so dearly bought. They are perhaps the wounded of the last battle, the last victims, the last martyrs.
Over the whole face of the world souls are suffering with them, for them, souls which the angel of death laboring here this night will not deliver.
My work is finished. It begins to withdraw from me. If it can bring any consolation to a single one of these suffering souls, let me believe that it has fulfilled its destiny.
THE END