“Yes,” he said musingly; “it was pure joy.”
I looked at him furtively and withdrew nothing. But that evening, alone with my thoughts in the dark, I understood that chance had reserved for me a strange rôle to play in the fate of my friend—Dauche was doomed: he had to die: he was about to die; but some one else, in some kind of way, had to suffer his death-agony....
I am not, I protest, different from other people. The war had severely tried me, but my imagination remained unclouded, and my wound was not of such a kind as to impair the normal working of a healthy average brain.
I am, therefore, thoroughly persuaded that the tense experience I was to undergo, from that day, would have equally afflicted any man confronted with the same calamitous circumstances.
In spite of the sinister life of the battlefield, I was to be in the presence of a form of death new and terrible in its duration. It is hardly possible to live without at every moment visualising what is going to happen at the next; and it was tragic to bear in one’s consciousness a certainty which froze, at birth, every plan and intention. Illness creates, in ordinary life, like conditions; but their misery is tempered by hope, or even by the relief which comes from resignation. On account of the war I was to undergo an agonising experience that was unique, and to live by the side of a man to whom I knew the frightful day of reckoning would suddenly come, and who had no future except that which existed in hope and ignorance.
This ignorance of ourselves is extremely precious, and makes us envy that sovereign ignorance of the beasts and plants. It enabled Dauche to live cheerfully on the edge of the abyss. I was there to assume the burden of the tragedy, as if it were alien to the human rightness of things that so much suffering should take place without a conscious victim.
The first days of November had come. Autumn was growing less resplendent. We had not given up our walks. I was forced to continue them in spite of myself, for dying Nature seemed to be giving intense expression to our tragic friendship.
We often climbed the hill which looked over the plain of Rheims. Military life seemed, like the sap of the plants, to be getting stiff and cold and withdrawing into the earth. The armies were preparing for their winter sleep. The guns boomed wearily and without vigour. The bareness of the trees revealed the signs of war which during summer were hidden beneath the foliage.
Autumn made me feel more acutely the fate that was to strike down my friend, and Dauche himself made me realise with a cruel relentlessness the fate of all men. The thought that this man was going to die weighed so much on my mind that I was left without courage, weak and useless. And, in fact, it was the helplessness of man which seemed to me to be solely evident as I gazed at the curtain of poplar trees lit up with an elusive glory.