He promised with many oaths that he would do so. I don't know whether or not he kept his word, but I really do think that the unexpected money, and still more the unexpected amount of it, made him a good friend to the last to my poor comrade.
So Nicholas the Russian passes out of my story. I never saw him afterwards, for that evening my company left Lang-Son for an outside station about ten miles from the place. Some time afterwards a legionary of No. 2 Company told me that he had been in hospital with Nicholas, and that the Russian had died about four o'clock in the afternoon of the day I visited him, and was buried in the evening of the same day. He is out of the turmoil of the world now, and I wonder, had he in early youth understood life as he learned it in the Foreign Legion, would he have "played the game" in the same way? One never knows. Perhaps he would have lived and died that wretched nonentity, the respectable member of society—the Pharisee who has neither courage to do evil nor heart to do good—but who lives his life out in constant endeavour to equate God and the devil, to balance, for his own benefit of course, his duty to his fellow-man and his so-called duty to himself; perhaps he unknowingly thought at the end as the Dying Stockrider spoke:
"I've had my share of trouble, and I've done my share of toil,
And life is short, the longest life a span,
I care not now to tarry for the corn or for the oil
Or the wine that maketh glad the heart of man.
For gifts misspent, and chances lost, and resolutions vain
'Tis somewhat late to trouble: this I know—
I would live the same life over if I had to live again,
And the chances are, I go where most men go."
Anyway, whatever he was to others, he was good friend and good comrade to me, and if no one else regrets, I regret.
Amice mi, vale, vale, vale!
CHAPTER XV
One evening the sergeants and corporals were ordered to forewarn the men that the battalion would leave the neighbourhood of Lang-Son early the following morning. Where we were going we did not know; indeed, I believe that even the commandant himself was unaware of our destination when he ordered the battalion to hold itself in readiness for a march. When the morning parade had been inspected—we, of course, paraded in full marching order—the commandant ordered us to stand at ease. While thus waiting in the ranks, an officer of the staff came and gave a written paper to the commandant. Shortly afterwards the staff-officer went away, and we were marched off in column of fours for some place or other, where, we—sub-officers and men—knew not, nor did we care. Restlessness is the chief characteristic of the soldier; he stagnates in garrison, or, if he doesn't, he avoids ennui by illegitimate amusements—excitements, I should say, that sooner or later get him into trouble.