only think of how best I could shield him from justice. But all that was changed.
I had become, as it were, a beast of prey. I wanted to kill, to appease the sickly hot thirst always in me. You do not know? Well, pray to God, if you have one, that you may never know.
No man, I think, is ever safe from coming to know it, if Fate so wills. A day can change us so that the very mother who bore us would not recognise her sons.
I hated myself, and yet I could not alter what I had become. If we are held accountable hereafter for such changes in us, it will be very unjust. We cannot escape from them.
By the time I reached the centre of France, they were everywhere forming new corps and bands of francs-tireurs. In one of these latter I enrolled myself. I was strong of body and of good height, though somewhat misshapen: they were glad of me. For me, I had only one idea—to strike for the country, and, soon or late, to reach him.
I fought several times, they said—well, I do not know. Probably I did, for I flew on them like a tiger—that I can remember—and of personal pain or peril I had never any consciousness. We lived in the woods. We hid by day: by night we scoured the country. We made fierce raids, we
