“Just his face.”
“Stay by—some of the soldiers might be rough—”
They were carried forward in the resistless interference of great numbers.
Chapter 6
Peter had pitied the infantry formerly from a hill, having stood with a battery as it sprayed the Austrian lines. He had watched the Austrian machines pouring steel upon the Russians also. There had been emotion; he had felt the shame of it powerfully on this very morning; but now he reflected, with a touch of levity, that his pity had not been adequate. At the present juncture he belonged to the sacrifice. The process was reversed; the globe of his experience shortly to be made complete. He would have the effects of light and darkness from the vantage of the preying and the preyed upon.
Peter had never been actually down among men before. He had watched men, studied them sincerely, passed them in the street, reflected upon their problems. At the same time, his personal impetus had always been away from men, his a different purpose, a different aim. He was one now, one in the massed destiny of the command, one to obey. Only by falling could he be free from this extraordinary authority of the army.
Moreover, he felt that the motive energizing this authority was not of the human but of the tiger.
He might have thought of all this before, as he had thought of death as one thing for the outsider and a different thing for the little lens-maker he liked so well. But this was experience, not conjecture. He was an atom of the charge. The army authority disrupted his moral sense. It bound and gagged him. No imagination could have constricted his vital and creative force as this adventure, in which he was caught up like a chip and carried forward in a rush of animal power. Fear had no part of his revulsion, but the break of his will. It was not like a man drowning, in an insensible element; this that carried him had a consciousness and it was unclean.