Overwhelmed with misery, I stood up quite involuntarily, and, with unseeing eyes, I gazed towards the horizon at the leaping flight of hills bristling with trees. Was it really a queer noise that made me turn round? Wasn’t it rather a shock or a lacerating sensation taking place within me? The fact is that, all of a sudden, I knew that behind me something was happening. And then my heart began to beat violently, for it could only be the thing--the frightful and expected thing.... It was! Dauche had slipped from the tree-trunk. It was some time before I recognised him; his whole body was shaken by convulsions--hideous, inhuman, like an animal struck down by the butcher’s mallet. His feet and his hands were contracted and twitching. His face was purple and forced round towards the right shoulder. He foamed at the mouth and showed his white eyeballs. I feel a kind of shame in describing this scene. I had often been in the presence of death, and the war had made me live in horrible intimacy with it; but I had never seen anything so frightful and so bestial. I, in my turn, began to tremble, as if the shiver of the victim was contagious, and my feeling of despair and nausea grew more intense. That lasted for an eternity of time, during which I never moved. I let death do its work and I waited until it had finished. Gradually, however, I became aware of a lull, and the grip on the victim seemed to relax. Dauche’s body remained rigid, inert. A feeble moan escaped his lips. At the same moment I recovered from my stupor and, in spite of my paralysed will, I set about removing from this place what had once been my friend. In raising him from the ground I suffered terrible pain. His muscles were contracted and he was terribly heavy. I caught hold of him with my arms round his body and carried him with his breast on mine, like a sleeping child. A thin stream of frothy saliva oozed from the corners of his mouth, as from the snouts of cattle in harness. His head began to sway heavily. Night was falling. I had to put my burden down every few yards, then take it up again. My wound caused me acute suffering, but my mind was benumbed and my movements almost involuntary. I do not know how I came within sight of the Château. On reaching the foot of the hill, suddenly, in the bend of an avenue, I met the doctor, who had been taking a solitary walk. It was almost dark; I did not see the expression on his face. I placed the body on the ground, kneeled down beside it, my face streaming with perspiration, and said, “Here he is.” Then I began to weep. There were cries, shouts and lights. They carried away Dauche’s body, and I was carried too. * * * * * It was really two days later that Dauche died. I did not wish to see him again. I had been placed in a room far removed from him, where I lived in a kind of semi-delirium, asking from hour to hour, “Has the end come? Has it ended?”