"... I, too, have my farm that waits for me—my woman who waits for me—my country, my dream!... I build with you. I stand or fall with you!... We shall be better for this day, my children. This is a day for living men and comrades——"
He filled me with a kind of white flame.
Then the crash. After that, was a moment of silence and gloom like a cloud passing over the sun. Then our eyes began to reap.... A blizzard of hot, stinking metal had broken in front of us—in the midst of our marching and listening battalion. If you have ever felt the mockery and cruelty of raging seas, you can know something of the shock that twisted the core of me that instant. That which had been the white-haired peasants with open laughing mouths and lifted hands, their souls answering the leader who loved them, a song forming on their lips ... now it was as if a carcass had been moved—one that had lain long in the sun, the devastation long continued underneath....
These were my boys. Next to Varsieff and Paula Mantone, I loved them. Now they were down, dismembered, shaking—the air a whir of white to my tortured ears, like a shriek of bewildered ghosts. And here and there, like Varsieff and myself—men standing unhurt in the midst of human fragments, like maggots, shaking themselves to cover.
I wonder if you can understand? It seemed that I still could see the welter of our boys in the leader's face. Also I saw the death of my good friend—the death-stroke of that superb mind—the face of a man, whose soul had vanished.
Both our horses were down, though we were unhurt so far.... A distance of fifteen feet separated us. I called to him. I tried to tell him that he had not failed. I thought I should die before I moved, before I could get started toward him. The staring failure in his face paralysed me. For the time, he was cut off even from the spirit of Paula Mantone.
I had to look down and watch my steps as I made my way to him. I knew some hideous fear that he would fall in that blackness—if I looked away.... There were voices from the ground. None of the parts of men could be still. Lips writhed before my eyes—and words were spoken like little claps of force in thin air.... I caught his opened collar....
"It's all right, Varsieff," I whispered.
"You lie!" said he.
It was like a blow from a man's mother. I had to look into his face before my brain accepted his words. Then I remembered my lie.... The evil of it had not come to me until now, with him breaking down before my eyes.... I saw the look again—that I had seen by the peasant's yard long ago as we crossed the Torqueval Peaks—the look of a frightened child in that face of finished manhood.