He lay there, suffering untold tortures—a man, and not a god—without hope or faith, passing through the sacrificial agony, and yet, hour after hour:
“Touché! Sales Boches! Vive la France!”
Then, at dawn, a final bullet, more merciful than the rest.
“Touché! Ah—” And silence.
When we got to him, two days later, there were twenty-two bullet wounds in him.
* * * * *
I put it down reverently, and reverently I compare that crucifixion that is a symbol of mankind dying for an ideal with the divine agony on Calvary. The agony was equal but no certainty of Paradise opened before the man, unless there came a glorified vision we could not share. Often, in the drab weariness of war, the sodden fatigue, the brutalizing of the instincts and the weakening of the spirit, I go back to the lingering horror and sublimity of that night and cling to my symbol. For me every crude wooden cross that rises in the fields has this human replica of the Calvary.
* * * * *
The strange thing, or perhaps the natural thing, is that I have little inclination to write about the war. It is rather myself in its past progression and the self which has come out of the reaction of the war which interests me.
* * * * *