"It was just here. He was wounded a trifle. I left him to stop the troops. They were breaking a bit," I explained.
I had passed the place a dozen times. I remembered by the big Sanguinary—hot when I had let go of Varsieff's arm. The dead had been covered. The big gun was a wreck now—even the caisson with a broken wheel.
Then I realised it had been moved. There was a queer mound under the wreckage. I reached down; my hand felt warmth in the mud. The woman was with me.... I think we moved that mammoth caisson together.... There was no white on him—a coating of mud but warm. We lifted him and the woman's breast covered him from my eyes.... I heard him say her name. I heard him speak of the tropical island they would go to together....
I stood apart—I who had stood at his side so long.... There were seconds when I heard her low passionate whispers—when I watched the arch of her shoulder, the beauty of her bended brow.... I did not see his face again. She held it fast to her and talked somehow out of the world. Then I saw her raise her eyes as she had done that night in the tent. For the first time I realised that he had only kept alive for her coming.... But still I felt he must know the whole story. I did not go closer, but called in half a whisper:
"Tell him how the boys came together—arms out and laughing like brothers. Don't let him go without knowing that—tell him how they threw their guns away and then sat down on the ground together—singing of home and the rivers and the ploughed lands and the women waiting for us——"
"I told him—I told him!" she answered. "You may come to him ... but he—he only waited to see me.... Ah, Lange, you had him so much——"
I looked away. Dusk was falling, the white peaks like spirits.... I had not seen his face again, but it suddenly came to me how it had looked when I saw it before—that which was the bravest and most beautiful face that I knew in manhood—how it had been beaten and bruised under the boots of running peasants—crushed into the mire by the feet of the men he loved so well. For a moment, I was in the red world of rage that this should be, but then the mighty drama of it came nearer, the supreme laughing art of it all—that only the saviours call to them. And I smiled, looking away to the dusk falling on the cold mountains—and I knew that my friend's spirit was as close to us as the body she held against her breast....
Then back in the bivouacs a song began—the men of two armies roaring out a song of the great white democracy of the future....