“Why, I think I have made that plain,” replied Hugo.  He appeared no less weary than Westerling over continual beating of the air to no purpose.  “We should retreat to our own soil, where we belong.”

“And you are ready to be shot for that principle?”

The question was sharp and final.

“Yes, if being shot for what I did is dying for it—­though I prefer to live for it!” said Hugo, still without any pose.  He refused to play for a chapter in the future book of martyrs to peace.  This was the irritating thing about him to a soldier, who deprecated all kinds of personal bravado and show as against the efficiency of the modern military machine, when men were supposed to respond to duty in the face of death as automatically as in any business requiring team-work, with an every-day smile like Hugo’s on their lips.

“Then,” Westerling began, and broke off abruptly.  His eyes sought Marta.

The affair seemed to have worn on her nerves also.  There was a distinctly appreciable effort at self-control in the slow way that she turned her head.  The flame in her eyes was suddenly suffused in a liquid glance which slowly brightened with a suggestion.

“It is extraordinary!” she breathed.  “Don’t you think that the blow on his head and the fever afterward has something to do with it?”

Hugo answered for himself.

“My views are the same as they were before the blow and the act that brought the blow!” he said, with a slight cast of the eye toward Marta which intimated that he wanted no help from the deserter of the principles which she had professed to him previously.

She shuddered as if hurt, but only momentarily.

“Psychological, I suppose—­psychological and irresponsible abnormality!” she murmured, avoiding Hugo’s look and bending her own on Westerling persistently.

“Long words!” said Hugo.  “Insanity is shorter.”

But Westerling did not seem to hear.  His thought was shaped by the superb misery and sensitiveness in Marta’s face.  He had done wrong to ask her to remain.  Of course the scene had been painful to her.  She would not be herself if she wanted to see a man tried for his life.  He knew that views not unlike Hugo’s were latent in many minds lacking Hugo’s initiative that would respond to the right impulse.  A way out occurred to him as inspiration, which pleased his sense of craft.  The press, which the premier reported was irritated by his censorship—­the press which must have sensation, the traffic of its trade—­should have a detailed account of how one of our indomitable regiments placarded a private as coward, proving thereby that the army was a unit of aggressive zeal.

“You are alone—­one man in a million in your ideas!” he declared, with judicial gravity.  “We shall postpone your trial and leave public opinion to punish you.  Your story will be given to the press in full; your name will be a byword throughout the land, an example, and while you are convalescing you will remain a prisoner.  When you are well we shall have another talk I may give you a chance, for the sake of your father and mother and your sweetheart and the good opinion of your neighbors, to redeem yourself.”