Part 31

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."

And I promise again, in the name of our country, sure that she will never fall short of what I undertake for her. The whole French nation is behind me at this moment, silently ratifying my promise.

We are at the edge of the terrace; evening has come. I hold his burning wrist in which the feeble pulse beats with exhausted fury. The night is so beautiful, so beautiful! Rockets rise above the hills, and fall slowly bathing the horizon in silvery rays. The lightning of the guns flashes furtively, like a winking eye. In spite of all this, in spite of war, the night is like waters dark and divine. Leglise breathes it in to his wasted breast in long draughts, and says:

"Oh, I don't know, I don't know!... Wait another day, please, please...."

We waited three whole days, and then Leglise gave in. "Well, do what you must. Do what you like."

On the morning of the operation, he asked to be carried down to the ward by the steps into the park. I went with him, and I saw him looking at all things round him, as if taking them to witness.

If only, only it is not too late!

Again he was laid on the table. Again we cut through flesh and bones. The second leg was amputated at the thigh.

I took him in my arms to lay him on his bed, and he was so light, so light....

This time when he woke he asked no question. But I saw his hands groping to feel where his body ended.

A few days have passed since the operation. We have done all it was humanly possible to do, and Leglise comes back to life with a kind of bewilderment.

"I thought I should have died," he said to me this morning, while I was encouraging him to eat.

He added:

"When I went down to the operation-ward, I looked well at everything, and I thought it was for the last time."

"Look, dear boy. Everything is just the same, just as beautiful as ever."

"Oh!" he says, going back to his memories, "I had made up my mind to die."

To make up one's mind to die is to take a certain resolution, in the hope of becoming quieter, calmer, and less unhappy. The man who makes up his mind to die severs a good many ties, and indeed actually dies to some extent.

With secret anxiety, I say gently, as if I were asking a question:

"It is always good to eat, to drink, to breathe, to see the light. ..."

He does not answer. He is dreaming. I spoke too soon. I go away, still anxious.