[I was without electricity for nearly six full days and was unable to post this on time. I'm five days late, but I'm back-dating the post. With little else to do without power, I workt on catching up, and while I made considerable progress, I'm still a couple weeks behind.]
This Month's Installment
"The thought came to me quite vaguely when the grenades whistled around me for the first time and then never again. Then, I always thought only: Forwards!"
"And are you also thinking the same thing now..."
"Yes. Can you blame me? It can go better for me nowhere than here. I have the fresh country air, a comfortable bed - that for nights I no longer knew - I have you for a nurse. But everything that was otherwise dear and valuable to me pesters me here. The country quiet, which was a refreshment earlier, begins to press all of a sudden; I shouldn't have promised the physician two days; I should have gone to-day yet, to-morrow at the latest."
She had pulled herself together until now, but now she appeared hurt. "Go then! Don't you have a horse? The grandfather will drive you to the train station with his wagon, provided that it is still running."
He noticed that she had become ill. "No," he said with considerable warmth and yet very definitely, "you may not speak to me that way! You think much too healthy and much too German, just what I have always liked in you. We may not allow anything personal now, neither you nor I. To-day, only the Fatherland, the cause, lives and speaks."
She reached out to him. "Forgive me; I was simply unjust and petty. It has passed."
Her eye lingered on his face with a quiet sparkle. "I wanted to have you like this! Thank you; now everything is good."
He still held her hand in his and continued:
---203---
"You know words are not my thing. Indeed, I do not need to tell you; you feel it as I do, Hanna, that in the not very long time in which I have known you, you have come to mean much to me. If it didn't concern such a holy cause, the farewell would become difficult for me. Perhaps I wouldn't come to you at all. But let me take along one thing in the battle that now waits for me again: the awareness that I am also become something to you, so that when I have to return again"- he released his hand from hers and broke off; he wanted to say nothing more in this hour.
But she stood there, incapable of any word, her eye a little stunned and yet full of a warm, proud light directed at him.
