The afternoon was coming to a close. A wild west wind raged through this war-scarred valley which, from ancient times, had borne the ravaging ebb and flow of invasion.
We were walking side by side, feeling rather chilled and silent, given up to those formless thoughts that find no expression in the spoken word and which are of the very colour and fabric of the soul.
We got rather warm in climbing a hill, and when we got to the top I suggested we should sit and rest ourselves on the trunk of a beech tree that lay mutilated on the ground, and from which oozed a yellow liquid streaked with purple.
I was worn out, without hope, without courage, having lost all interest in my doings, in the condition of a man whose will fails him and who gives up the agonising struggle.
Is it possible that there can be, between two beings, relations so mysteriously intimate? Is it true that it was I who on that day gave up the struggle?
Overwhelmed with misery, I stood up quite involuntarily, and, with unseeing eyes, I gazed towards the horizon at the leaping flight of hills bristling with trees.
Was it really a queer noise that made me turn round? Wasn’t it rather a shock or a lacerating sensation taking place within me? The fact is that, all of a sudden, I knew that behind me something was happening. And then my heart began to beat violently, for it could only be the thing—the frightful and expected thing....
It was!
Dauche had slipped from the tree-trunk. It was some time before I recognised him; his whole body was shaken by convulsions—hideous, inhuman, like an animal struck down by the butcher’s mallet. His feet and his hands were contracted and twitching. His face was purple and forced round towards the right shoulder. He foamed at the mouth and showed his white eyeballs.
I feel a kind of shame in describing this scene. I had often been in the presence of death, and the war had made me live in horrible intimacy with it; but I had never seen anything so frightful and so bestial. I, in my turn, began to tremble, as if the shiver of the victim was contagious, and my feeling of despair and nausea grew more intense.