"By a strange chance," the doctor went on, "I was summoned to attend the wounded man, and although it was a desperate fight, I was after some days satisfied that I could save his life." "But," I interrupted, "I don't see why you should try to save his life if you were of those who doomed him to death in the first place." He looked at me piercingly. "You forget," he answered, "that I was called to him as a physician. It is the duty of a physician to save life, as it may be the duty of a patriot to take it. I was trying to do my best in both capacities. I had given the best counsel I could in the Section and, when he was on his feet, I would have shot him myself if it had seemed to my superiors that I was the best person to do it. Does it seem to you that I could have taken advantage of his helplessness, of his confidence, of my skill as a physician, to deprive him of the life which it is the aim of a physician's existence to preserve?" He waited for me to reply, but I had no answer to give him. The situation was one so far outside of my experience, so fantastically unreal as measured by my own life, that I could not even judge of it. "See," he went on, leaning forward with shining eyes and with increasing excitement of manner, "the patient puts himself into the hands of his physician, body and soul. To betray that trust is to strike at the very heart of the whole sacred art of healing. If I, as a physician, took advantage of this sick man, I not only betrayed the personal trust he put in me, but I was false to the whole principle on which the relation of doctor and patient rests. Don't you see what a tremendous question is involved? That to harm Kakonzoff was to go beyond the limits of human possibility?" "Yes," was my answer; "I can understand how a doctor might feel that; but I don't know how far the feeling of a patriot might overbalance this; how far the idea of serving his country would overcome every other feeling." Polnitzski gave me a glance which made me quiver. "It is a question which I found I did not readily answer," he said, "when I received from the chief of our Section an order not to let Kakonzoff recover." He sprang up from his chair and began to pace the floor.