“'That's what I asked him,' answered Tomassov in a dazed tone, 'and he said that he wanted me to do him the favour to blow his brains out. As a fellow soldier he said. 'As a man of feeling—as—as a humane man.'     

       “The prisoner sat between us like an awful gashed mummy as to the face, a martial scarecrow, a grotesque horror of rags and dirt, with awful living eyes, full of vitality, full of unquenchable fire, in a body of horrible affliction, a skeleton at the feast of glory. And suddenly those shining unextinguishable eyes of his became fixed upon Tomassov. He, poor fellow,       fascinated, returned the ghastly stare of a suffering soul in that mere husk of a man. The prisoner croaked at him in French.     

       “'I recognize, you know. You are her Russian youngster. You were very grateful. I call on you to pay the debt. Pay it, I say, with one liberating shot. You are a man of honour. I have not even a broken sabre. All my being recoils from my own degradation. You know me.'     

       “Tomassov said nothing.     

       “'Haven't you got the soul of a warrior?' the Frenchman asked in an angry       whisper, but with something of a mocking intention in it.     

       “'I don't know,' said poor Tomassov.     

       “What a look of contempt that scarecrow gave him out of his unquenchable eyes. He seemed to live only by the force of infuriated and impotent despair. Suddenly he gave a gasp and fell forward writhing in the agony of cramp in all his limbs; a not unusual effect of the heat of a camp-fire. It resembled the application of some horrible torture. But he tried to fight against the pain at first. He only moaned low while we bent over him so as to prevent him rolling into the fire, and muttered feverishly at intervals: 'Tuez moi, tuez moi...' till, vanquished by the pain, he screamed in agony, time after time, each cry bursting out through his compressed lips.     

       “The adjutant woke up on the other side of the fire and started swearing awfully at the beastly row that Frenchman was making.     

       “'What's this? More of your infernal humanity, Tomassov,' he yelled at us.       'Why don't you have him thrown out of this to the devil on the snow?'     

       

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