Part 18 (1/2)

Yes, the sacrifice is not yet entirely consummated.

But Leglise understood. He no longer weeps. He has the weary and somewhat bewildered look of the man who is rowing against the storm.

I steal a look at him, and he says at once in a clear, calm, resolute voice:

”I would much rather die.”

I go into the garden. It is a brilliant morning, but I can see nothing, I want to see nothing. I repeat as I walk to and fro:

”He would much rather die.”

And I ask despairingly whether he is not right perhaps.

All the poplars rustle softly. With one voice, the voice of Summer itself, they say: ”No! No! He is not right!”

A little beetle crosses the path before me. I step on it unintentionally, but it flies away in desperate haste. It too has answered in its own way: ”No, really, your friend is not right.”

”Tell him he is wrong,” sing the swarm of insects that buzz about the lime-tree.

And even a loud roar from the guns that travels across the landscape seems to say gruffly: ”He is wrong! He is wrong!”

During the evening the chief came back to see Leglise, who said to him with the same mournful gravity:

”No, I won't, Monsieur, I would rather die.”

We go down into the garden, and the chief says a strange thing to me:

”Try to convince him. I begin at last to feel ashamed of demanding such a sacrifice from him.”

And I too... am I not ashamed?

I consult the warm, star-decked night; I am quite sure now that he is wrong, but I don't know how to tell him so. What can I offer him in exchange for the thing I am about to ask him? Where shall I find the words that induce a man to live? Oh you, all things around me, tell me, repeat to me that it is sweet to live, even with a body so grievously mutilated.

This morning I extracted a little projectile from one of his wounds.

He secretly concluded that this would perhaps make the great operation unnecessary, and it hurt me to see his joy. I could not leave him this satisfaction.

The struggle began again; this time it was desperate. For we have no time to lose. Every hour of delay exhausts our man further. A few days more, and there will be no choice open to him: only death, after a long ordeal....

He repeats:

”I am not afraid, but I would rather die.”

Then I talk to him as if I were the advocate of Life. Who gave me this right? Who gave me eloquence? The things I said were just the right things, and they came so readily that now and then I was afraid of holding out so sure a promise of a life I am not certain I can preserve, of guaranteeing a future that is not in man's hands.

Gradually, I feel his resistance weakening. There is something in Leglise which involuntarily sides with me and pleads with me. There are moments when he does not know what to say, and formulates trivial objections, just because there are others so much weightier.

”I live with my mother,” he says. ”I am twenty years old. What work is there for a cripple? Ought I to live to suffer poverty and misery?”

”Leglise, all France owes you too much, she would blush not to pay her debt.”