This hour then may be regarded as in some ways the
most important of all my experiences. It is certainly the occasion to
which if I were using my invention I should make the most. Here then
is my difficulty.
I have nothing to say about it. There's nothing at all to be made of
it....
I may say at once that there was no atom of drama in it. At one moment
I was standing with Marie Ivanovna under the sunrise, at another I was
standing behind a trench in the heart of the forest with a battery to
my left and a battery to my right, a cuckoo somewhere not very far
away, and a dead man with his feet sticking out from under the cloth
that covered him peacefully beneath a tree at my side. There had, of
course, been that drive in the wagons, bumping over the uneven road
whilst the sun rose gallantly in the heavens and the clanging of the
iron door grew, with every roll of our wheels, louder and louder. But
it was rather as though I had been lifted in a sheet from one life--a
life of speculation, of viewing war from a superior and safe
distance, of viewing indeed all catastrophe and reality from that same
distance--into the other.
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