"He will have me," he thought. General D'Hubert
was tasting every emotion that life has to give. He had in his dry mouth
the faint, sickly flavour of fear, not the honourable fear of a
young girl's candid and amused glance, but the fear of death and the
honourable man's fear of cowardice.
But if true courage consists in going out to meet an odious danger from
which our body, soul and heart recoil together General D'Hubert had
the opportunity to practise it for the first time in his life. He had
charged exultingly at batteries and infantry squares and ridden with
messages through a hail of bullets without thinking anything about
it. His business now was to sneak out unheard, at break of day, to
an obscure and revolting death. General D'Hubert never hesitated. He
carried two pistols in a leather bag which he slung over his shoulder.
Before he had crossed the garden his mouth was dry again. He picked two
oranges. It was only after shutting the gate after him that he felt a
slight faintness.
He stepped out disregarding it, and after going a few yards regained
the command of his legs. He sucked an orange as he walked. It was a
colourless and pellucid dawn. The wood of pines detached its columns of
brown trunks and its dark-green canopy very clearly against the rocks
of the gray hillside behind. He kept his eyes fixed on it steadily. That
temperamental, good-humoured coolness in the face of danger, which made
him an officer liked by his men and appreciated by his superiors, was
gradually asserting itself.
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