‘Another long pause ensued. With an effort he whispered hoarsely, “Isn’t this enough to move a heart of stone? Am I to go on my knees to you?”

‘Again a deep silence fell upon the three of us. Then the French officer uttered his last word of anger.

‘ “Milksop!”

‘Tomassov didn’t budge a feature. I made up my mind to go and fetch a couple of our troopers to lead that miserable Frenchman away to the village. There was nothing else for it. I had not made ten paces towards the group of horses and orderlies in front of our squadron when … But you have guessed it. Of course. And so did I. For I give you my word that the report of Tomassov’s pistol was the most insignificant thing imaginable. The snow certainly seems to absorb sounds. It was a mere feeble pop. Of the orderlies holding our horses I don’t think one turned his head.

‘Yes. He had done it. Destiny had led that Frenchman to the only man who could understand him perfectly. But it was poor Tomassov’s lot to be the predestined victim. You know what the world’s justice is and mankind’s judgment. It fell heavily on him, with a sort of inverted hypocrisy. Why that brute of an adjutant himself was the first to set going horrified allusions to the shooting of a prisoner in cold blood! Tomassov was not dismissed from the service of course. But after the siege of Dantzic^* he asked for permission to resign from the army, and went away to bury himself in the depths of his province where a vague story of some dark deed clung to him for years.

‘Yes. He had done it. And what was it? One warrior’s soul paying its debt a hundredfold to another warrior’s soul by releasing it from a fate worse than death—the loss of all faith and courage. You may look on it in that way. I don’t know. And perhaps poor Tomassov did not know himself. But I was the first to approach that appalling dark group of two: the Frenchman extended rigidly on his back, Tomassov down on one knee rather nearer to the feet than to the Frenchman’s head. He had taken his cap off and his hair shone like gold through the light snow that had begun to fall. He was stooping over the dead in a tenderly protecting attitude; and his young, ingenuous face with lowered eyelids expressed no grief, no sternness, no pity; but was set in the repose of a profound, as if endless and endlessly silent meditation.’