"All. Safe and sound. Get up, my Lord Count, for the train is starting already."
Ian clambered up and squeezed himself in between the blacksmith and Ostap, who indignantly asked where he had been hiding.
"We searched high and low. If not for this blacksmith, who sat as broad as he could, we'd never have been able to keep your place." He did not tell them where he had been. Heart and head were filled with new emotions, and a new struggle. The idea of going to Rome fascinated him. He found so much in its favor, so little to say against it. Only that Cossack colonel would ever know he had drawn back. None shared his plans. And the soldier would forget him.
He was no longer the man who urged Platov to take him at the beginning of the war; then, he could not realize the love that had grown with each month of strife and anxiety, till it now overwhelmed every other feeling. Destiny led him to the tent wherein he found a promise of happiness. And a loud voice within cried not to give it up.
It was an endless journey and very uncomfortable. They were perpetually stopping to make way for other trains, filled with troops, whole and wounded. From time to time some of the little party got down to stretch their legs, one keeping the place for another with that ready comradeship which war's vicissitudes breed between men of vastly different race and caste. Jew elbowed Gentile; patrician drank with outcast in their flight before the stupendous Hun. It seemed to Ian that all the trains in Russia passed them; troops in open trucks, who made an infernal noise with their balalaikas and their voices. He wondered sadly that they could abandon Poland to her fate with such light hearts ... and then remembered that they were Russians, brave as lions, but mentally children yet; so the direction in which they traveled was no affair of theirs.
He thought of his ruined home and the many other ruined homes they passed and wondered where their late owners were, that cool, starry night. Some, he knew, lay quiet and still by the wayside, for he had seen such in his flight. Some, like Father Constantine, had found rest in a soldier's graveyard before friends left them, to seek a new life in exile. And, as his memory dwelt on the last year, as he passed farm after farm alight with the fires of destruction, the weakness born of the sudden knowledge that Vanda was free left him. He knew he could not go to Rome; knew he would not have a quiet hour if he chose the easier road; that every devastated home, every orphan in his native land would ring a terrible chorus of reproach into his soul. Roman's words of that evening at the "Oaza," came back:
"There is no love without sacrifice."
How little he had known of love then; how much now! He wondered at the craven Ian who had planned a safe journey to Rome whilst his native land was bleeding. There was nothing for him but to fight. Oh, he would marry Vanda, and perhaps live through the war. Then they would return to a free Poland and a free Ruvno, to build and plant afresh for their children, freed from bondage and all persecution. In the trenches, on the battlefield, he would have that lodestar. Now, he knew not how he ever could have imagined the war without himself in it.
These thoughts ran through his mind, accompanied by visions of burning houses, huddled, hungry refugees, suffering, struggling humanity. Through all was the joy of knowing Vanda would be his--and over all came Ostap's voice as he held forth to others on the roof.
"Yes; we spit upon life. So we shall win, in the end. And our children will be freed."