I could not stay in the cinema, but crawled through the trenches. On
the hill towered the two huge crosses; sitting down beneath their
shadow, I clenched my hands, and murmured:
"Darling, darling, darling! Beloved and tender one! I am waiting."
Far in the distance, the green rockets soared skyward, the same as
those we used to send up over the river Oka. Then the gargantuan
fingers of a searchlight began to sweep the area, my uniform appeared
white in its gleam, and all at once a shell fell by the crosses. I
had been observed, I had become a target.
The bullets fell zip-zip-zip into the earthworks. I lay in my bunk
and buried my head in the pillow. I felt horribly alone as I lay
there, murmuring to myself, and breathing all the tenderness I was
capable of into my words:
"Darling, darling, darling!..."
III
Love!
Can one credit the romanticists that--across the seas and hills and
years--there is so strange a thing as a single-hearted love, an all-
conquering, all-subduing, all-renovating love?
In the train at Budslav--where the staff-officers were billeted--it
was known that Lieutenant Agrenev had such a single, overmastering,
life-long love.
A wife--the woman, the maiden who loves only once--to whom love is
the most beautiful and only thing in life, will do heroic deeds to
get past all the Army ordinances, the enemy's reconnaissance, and
reach her beloved.
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