'It is my duty.'
'What we are enduring now,' said Osman, in a dull, painful voice, 'is nothing to what I foresee. At present we make some small attempt to collect bodies and ... and limbs, and bury them. Soon that will be impossible, for we shall want all our men at the guns and in the redoubts. The winter is coming on—food is already scarce—the wounded cannot be cared for. They and the dead will lie about the streets rotting in their own blood. My friend! this place will be a hell on earth!'
'Nevertheless, I stay.'
'Disease will take the town before the Russians break through—few of us will live to see Christmas!' pleaded Osman.
The Englishman looked up, pen in hand. There was actually a smile hovering upon his firm lips.
'It is useless,' he said very gently. 'I stay till the end.'
'As you like,' murmured the soldier, leaving the room.
Trist did not begin work again for some time. The pile of papers around was of sufficient dimensions to alarm a less methodical labourer, but in the apparent disorder there was really a perfect system. Darkness closed in soon, and the war-correspondent lighted a small lamp. Then he laid aside the larger mass of paper, and selected a sheet which he doubled carefully into the form of a letter.
'It is better,' he said, 'to face all probabilities. I shall write to her now, in case we are starved to death in here like rats.'
Far into the night this strange, restless Englishman sat at the little table writing. Heedless of the roar of artillery, the merry call of the bugle, and the groan of the dying, he wrote on at a great speed, for above all he was a writer. His pen sped over the paper with that precision which only comes from long practice—line after line, page after page of the small paper, perfect in punctuation, ready for the press in true journalistic form.