‘Of course I had recognised Tomassov instantly. A very familiar appearance in long boots, tall and ending in a pointed hood. But by his side advanced another figure. And it was amazing! I mistrusted my eyes at first. It had a shining crested helmet on its head and was muffled up in a white cloak. The cloak was not as white as snow. Nothing in the world is. It was white more like mist. And the whole aspect was ghostly and martial to an extraordinary degree. It was as if Tomassov had captured the god of war himself. I perceived at once that he was holding this resplendent vision by the arm. Then I saw that he was holding it up.

‘While I stared and stared, they crept on—for indeed they were creeping—and at last they crept into the light of our bivouac fire and passed beyond the log I was sitting on. The blaze played on the helmet. It was extremely battered and the face under it was wrapped in bits of mangy fur. No god of war this, but a Frenchman. The great white cuirassier’s^* cloak was scorched, burnt full of holes. The man’s feet were wrapped up in old sheepskins, over rags or remnants of boots. They were monstrous and he tottered on them, sustained by Tomassov who most carefully lowered him on to the log on which I sat.

‘My amazement knew no bounds.

‘ “You have brought in a prisoner,” I said to Tomassov, as if I could not believe my eyes.

‘You must understand that unless they surrendered in bodies we made no prisoners. But what was the good. Our Cossacks^* either killed the stragglers or else let them alone, just as it happened. And it came really to the same thing in the end.

‘Tomassov turned to me with a very troubled look.

‘ “He sprang up from the ground somewhere, as I was leaving the outpost. I believe he was making for it, but he walked blindly into my horse. He got hold of my leg and of course none of our chaps dared touch him then.”

‘ “He had a narrow escape,” I said.

‘ “He didn’t appreciate it,” returned Tomassov, looking even more troubled than before. “He came along holding on to my leg. That’s what made me so late. He told me he is a staff officer. And then talking in a voice such, I suppose, as the damned alone use, a croaking of rage and pain, he said he had a favour to beg of me. A supreme favour. ‘Do you understand me,’ he says in a sort of fiendish whisper.

‘ “Of course I told him I did. I said: ‘Oui! Je vous comprends.’^*

‘ “ ‘Then,’ says he—‘do it. Now! At once—at once—in the pity of your heart.’ ”

‘Tomassov ceased and stared queerly at me above the head of the prisoner.

‘I said, “What did he mean?”

‘ “That’s what I asked him,” answered Tomassov in a dazed tone. “He wanted me to do him the favour to blow his brains out. As a fellow soldier he said. As a man of feeling—as—as—a humane man.”

‘Between us two the prisoner sat like an awful black mummy as to the face, a martial scarecrow, a grotesque horror of rags and dirt with awful living eyes, full of vitality, full of unquenchable fire in a body of horrible affliction, a skeleton at the feast of glory. And suddenly those shining, inextinguishable eyes of his became fixed upon Tomassov. He poor fellow, fascinated, returned that ghastly stare of a suffering soul in that mere husk of a man. The prisoner croaked at him in French.

‘ “I recognise you now. You are her Russian youngster. You were very grateful. I call on you to pay the debt. Pay it, I say, with one liberating shot. You promised. You are a man of honour. I have not even a broken sabre. All my being recoils from my own degradation. You know me.”