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By Root 4597 0

I know better. I knew that first moment eleven years ago when I looked and saw you standing there in that gate. I knew. I wont be here to see it of course (my last medical survey, you know: that marvelous and amazing thing, a human life, spanned and then-what's the Boer word?--outspanned by one dry and dusty page of doctor's jargon. They are wrong of course. I mean in the Quai d'Orsay. They didn't want to post me here at all, since in doing it they would in their opinion simply double the work of whatever clerk would not only have to relieve me but discharge me from the army list also and then post my successor before my tour here was even completed) and at first I grieved a little because once I thought that you might need me. I mean, need me other than for my simple seniority of hope in the condition of man.-That's right,' he said, though the other had made no sound: 'Laugh, at that dream, that vain hope too. Because you will not need anybody wherever it is you are going now in order to return from it. Mind you, I dont ask where. I was about to say "to find whom or what you will need to be your instrument" but I refrained from that in time too. So at least you dont need to laugh at that, since I know that you are going wherever it is you are going, in order to return from it when the time, the moment comes, in the shape of man's living hope. May I embrace you?'

'Must you?' the other said. Then: 'Should you?' Then quickly: 'Of course.' But before he moved the taller one had stooped, loomed downward from his vast and depthless height and took the smaller man's hand and kissed it and released it and, erect again, took the other's face between his two hands almost like a parent, a mother, and held it for a moment, then released it.

'With Christ in God,' he said. 'Go now,'

'So I'm to save France,' the other said.

'France,' he said, not even brusquely, not even contemptuously. 'You will save man. Farewell,'

And he was right for almost two years. That is, he was almost wrong. He did not remember the camel or litter-whatever it had been-at all; only a moment-probably, without doubt, in the base hospital in Oran-a face, a voice, probably a doctor's, marvelling not that he had failed to keep consciousness over that fierce and empty distance, but that he had kept life at all; then not much again, only motion: the Mediterranean: then he knew peacefully, not with joy or exultation: just peacefully, almost unattentively, unable yet (nor did that matter either) to raise his own head to look, that this was France, Europe, home. Then he could move his head and lift his hands too, even if the vast peasant Norman frame did seem still to lie outside its transparent envelope; he said, weakly but aloud, with a sort of peaceful amazement, weakly, but at least aloud: 'I had forgot what winter looks like,' lying half-propped all day now on the glassed veranda above Zermatt watching the Matterhorn, watching not the ordered and nameless progression of days fade but rather the lesser earth, since always the great peak carried into the next one, as in a gigantic hand, one clutch of light. But that was only the body and it was mending too; soon it would be as strong, not perhaps as it ever was nor even as it ever would but rather as it would ever need to be, since they were the same-only the body: not the memory because it had forgotten nothing, not even for one second the face which had been the junior that afternoon two years ago around the table on the Quai d'Orsay terrace, come all the way from Paris just to see him-'Not Paris,' the other said. 'Verdun. We're building fortifications there now which they will never pass again,'

'They?' he said peacefully. 'It's too late now,'

Too late? Nonsense. The fever and the fury are still there, I Wednesday Night grant you. It seems to be bom in them; they probably cant help it. But it will be decades, perhaps a whole generation, before it reaches convulsion again,'

'Not for us,' he said. 'Too late for them,'

'Oh,' the other said, who did not see at all; he knew that. Then the other said: 'I brought