blinding flash, a deafening report.

Andersen saw the guard lift his hands and then sit down on the ground
clasping his bosom. From all directions short, crackling sparks
flashed up which combined into one riving roar. The subaltern jumped
up and dropped straight into the fire. Grey soldiers' figures moved
about in all directions like apparitions, throwing up their hands and
falling and writhing on the black earth. The young officer ran past
Andersen, fluttering his hands like some strange, frightened bird.
Andersen, as if he were thinking of something else, raised his cane.
With all his strength he hit the officer on the head, each blow
descending with a dull, ugly thud. The officer reeled in a circle,
struck a bush, and sat down after the second blow, covering his head
with both hands, as children do. Some one ran up and discharged a
revolver as if from Andersen's own hand. The officer sank together in
a heap and lunged with great force head foremost on the ground. His
legs twitched for a while, then he curled up quietly.

The shots ceased. Black men with white faces, ghostly grey in the
dark, moved about the dead bodies of the soldiers, taking away their
arms and ammunition.

Andersen watched all this with a cold, attentive stare. When all was
over, he went up, took hold of the burned subaltern's legs, and tried
to remove the body from the fire. But it was too heavy for him, and he
let it go.

IV

Andersen sat motionless on the steps of the town hall, and thought. He
thought of how he, Gabriel Andersen, with his spectacles, cane,
overcoat and poems, had lied and betrayed fifteen men. He thought it
was terrible, yet there was neither pity, shame nor regret in his
heart. Were he to be set free, he knew that he, Gabriel Andersen, with
the spectacles and poems, would go straightway and do it again. He
tried to examine himself, to see what was going on inside his soul.
But his thoughts were heavy and confused. For some reason it was more
painful for him to think of the three men lying on the snow, looking
at the pale disk of the far-off moon with their dead, unseeing eyes,
than of the murdered officer whom he had struck two dry, ugly blows on
the head. Of his own death he did not think. It seemed to him that he
had done with everything long, long ago. Something had died, had gone
out and left him empty, and he must not think about it.

And when they grabbed him by the shoulder and he rose, and they
quickly l