"And I've got
it. It had to be done. But I feel yet as if I could never forgive the
necessity to the man I had to save."
General Feraud, totally unable as is the case with most men to
comprehend what was happening to him, received the Minister of War's
order to proceed at once to a small town of Central France with feelings
whose natural expression consisted in a fierce rolling of the eye and
savage grinding of the teeth. But he went. The bewilderment and awe at
the passing away of the state of war--the only condition of society he
had ever known--the prospect of a world at peace frightened him. He went
away to his little town firmly persuaded that this could not last. There
he was informed of his retirement from the army, and that his pension
(calculated on the scale of a colonel's half-pay) was made dependent on
the circumspection of his conduct and on the good reports of the police.
No longer in the army! He felt suddenly a stranger to the earth like a
disembodied spirit. It was impossible to exist. But at first he reacted
from sheer incredulity. This could not be. It could not last. The
heavens would fall presently. He called upon thunder, earthquakes,
natural cataclysms. But nothing happened. The leaden weight of an
irremediable idleness descended upon General Feraud, who, having no
resources within himself, sank into a state of awe-inspiring hebetude.
He haunted the streets of the little town gazing before him with
lack-lustre eyes, disregarding the hats raised on his passage; and the
people, nudging each other as he went by, said: "That's poor General
Feraud.
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