one turned his head round.

"Yes. Tomassov had done it. Destiny had led that De Castel to the man
who could understand him perfectly. But it was poor Tomassov's lot to be
the predestined victim. You know what the world's justice and mankind's
judgment are like. They fell heavily on him with a sort of inverted
hypocrisy. Why! That brute of an adjutant, himself, was the first to set
going horrified allusions to the shooting of a prisoner in cold blood!
Tomassov was not dismissed from the service of course. But after the
siege of Dantzig he asked for permission to resign from the army, and
went away to bury himself in the depths of his province, where a vague
story of some dark deed clung to him for years.

"Yes. He had done it. And what was it? One warrior's soul paying its
debt a hundredfold to another warrior's soul by releasing it from a fate
worse than death--the loss of all faith and courage. You may look on
it in that way. I don't know. And perhaps poor Tomassov did not know
himself. But I was the first to approach that appalling dark group on
the snow: the Frenchman extended rigidly on his back, Tomassov kneeling
on one knee rather nearer to the feet than to the Frenchman's head. He
had taken his cap off and his hair shone like gold in the light drift
of flakes that had begun to fall. He was stooping over the dead in a
tenderly contemplative attitude. And his young, ingenuous face, with
lowered eyelids, expressed no grief, no sternness, no horror--but was
set in the repose of a profound, as if endless and endlessly silent,
meditation."