Hydrocyanic acid." He picked up the die, and showed me six sides. I smiled. "You want me to throw?" "I offer you an entire war in one second." "Supposing I don't want it?" "Think. In a minute from now you could be saying, I risked death. I threw for life, and I won life. It is a very wonderful feeling. To have survived." "Wouldn't a corpse be rather embarrassing for you?" I was still smiling, but it was wearing thin. "Not at all. I could easily prove it was suicide." He stared at me, and his eyes went through me like a trident through a fish. With ninety-nine persons out of a hundred, I would have known it was a bluff; but he was different, and a nervousness had hold of me before I could resist it. "Russian roulette." "But less fallible. These pills work within a few seconds." "I don't want to play." "Then you are a coward, my friend." He leant back and watched me. "I thought you believed brave men were fools." "Because they persist in rolling the die again and again. But a young man who will not risk his life even once is both a fool and a coward." And he had me. It was absurd, but I could not let my bluff be called. I reached for the shaker. "Wait." He leant forward, and put his hand on my wrist; then placed a tooth by my side. "I am not playing at make-believe. You must swear to me that if the number is six you will take the pill." His face was totally serious. I felt myself wanting to swallow. "I swear." "By all that is most sacred to you." I hesitated, shrugged, and said, "By all that is most sacred to me." He held out the die and I put it in the shaker. I shook it loosely and quickly and threw the die. It ran over the cloth, hit the brass base of the lamp, rebounded, wavered, fell. It was a six. Conchis was absolutely motionless, watching me. I knew at once that I was never, never going to pick up the pill. I could not look at him. Perhaps fifteen seconds passed. Then I smiled, looked at him and shook my head. He reached out again, his eyes still on me, took the tooth beside me, put it in his mouth and bit it and swallowed the liquid. I went red. Still watching me, he reached out, and put the die in the shaker, and threw it. It was a six. Then again. And again it was a six. He spat out the empty shell of the tooth. "What you have just decided is precisely what I decided that morning forty years ago at Neuve Chapelle. You have behaved exactly as any intelligent human being should behave. I congratulate you." "But what you said? The perfect republic?" "All perfect republics are perfect nonsense. The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?" "But the die was loaded." "Patriotism, propaganda, professional honour, _esprit de corps_--what are all those things? Cogged dice. There is just one small difference, Nicholas. On the other table these are real." He put the remaining teeth back in the box. "Not just ratafia in coloured plastic." He turned out the lamp.
20
"The middle six hours of that day we passed in waiting. The Germans hardly shelled us at all. They had been bombarded to their knees. The obvious thing would have been to attack at once. But it takes a very brilliant general, a Napoleon, to see the obvious. "About three o'clock the Ghurkas came alongside us and we were told an attack on the Aubers Ridge was to be launched. We were to be the first line. Just before half-past three we fixed bayonets. I was beside Captain Montague, as usual. I think he knew only one thing about himself. That he was fearless, ready to swallow the acid. He kept looking along the lines of men beside him. He scorned the use of a periscope, and stood and poked his head over the parapet. The Germans still seemed stunned. "We began to walk forward. Montague and the sergeant major called incessantly, keeping us in line. We had to cross a cratered ploughfield to a hedge of poplars, and then, across another small field, lay our objective, a bridge. I suppose we had gone about half the distance we had to cover, and then we broke into a trot and some of the men began to shout.