"Well, well! And I thought you so emancipated!" He went on ironically. He only had one skin, and he meant to stick to it; he hadn't the slightest desire to fight for Serbia, as I was saying just now.... No, it was astounding! A nice mess our diplomatists must have made of it!... All the more so since, as we suspected nothing, we naturally were not ready! And so it meant catastrophe!... We were going to get a licking! He ended by taking me by the arm: "Come along and have a smoke and then we can chat." "No," I said decidedly. "I'm going up again." "In that case, my dear fellow, good-bye." "_Au revoir._" "Oh! there's not much chance of our ever meeting again!" Was it the effect of these banal remarks? Hardly had I regained my room and gone to lean my elbows on the rail of the balcony than I felt as if crushed by the revelation I had witnessed during the last three hours. A formidable adventure was in the making and my part as a finite being was to consider it as a spectator. The things I was saying just now, without attaching any definite meaning to them appeared to me clothed suddenly in their imperious significance: Yes, in three days I should be at F----, in four my rifle and my outfit would have been handed over to me, shortly afterwards I should be entrained.... Here the vision lost its clearness; only a few concise pictures rose from a sombre haze: marches and counter marches, the bleeding feet, the exhaustion, the cold, the filthy promiscuousness, nothing to eat; and then one day the battle; not an entertaining engagement like those during manoeuvres, interrupted towards 11 A.M. by the bugle call, but the grim struggle, glued to the ground advancing foot by foot, day after day and night after night, against an invisible opponent, desperate, superior in discipline and in numbers, armed with frightful machines ... the whistle of the bullet, the explosion of the shells ...! And one morning, in some hole or corner, an obscure and crushing death. Presentiments were unknown to me: I suddenly believed in them. I saw myself killed, it was all over and done with my career as a man, this life I had been pleased to order so ingenuously. The horror of the annihilation so near at hand suffocated me. I breathed the scented night air like a drowning man. At my feet was the dark terrace, a servant had just cut off the electricity. I heard the gravel crunching beneath a footstep. A shadow ascended the steps. It must be Cipollina. His words echoed in my ears, his "Not much!" I was suddenly seized with fury against him--the coward!--a fury which was almost immediately turned against myself. Was it not his conduct that was logical. He refused to sacrifice himself. He coldly applied his Doctrine, our Doctrine, of calm selfishness. I fumed to see this shopkeeper, this table d'hôte philosopher, superior in practical wisdom to myself, when I had ruminated my system for so long, and looked at it from every point of view.