Love is more powerful than
man--that Death can fall before us if we believe that it will--that
the soul of man is Power and Love.... I believe in God...."

CHAPTER V

FIRST MOVE TO THE ENEMY

It was during two nights in the forest of S----, about which I must
afterwards write, that I had those long conversations with Trenchard,
upon whose evidence now I must very largely depend. Before me as I
write is his Diary, left to me by him. In this whole business of the
war there is nothing more difficult than the varied and confused
succession with which moods, impressions, fancies, succeed one upon
another, but Trenchard told me so simply and yet so graphically of the
events of these weeks that followed the battle of S---- that I believe
I am departing in no way from the truth in my present account, the
truth, at any rate as he himself believed it to be....

The only impression that he brought away with him from the battle of
S---- was that picture, lighted by the horizon fires, of Marie
Ivanovna kneeling with her hand on Semyonov's shoulder. That, every
detail and colour of it, bit into his brain.

In understanding him it is of the first importance to remember that
this was the one and only love business of his life. The effect of
those days in Petrograd when Marie Ivanovna had shown him that she
liked him, the thundering stupefying effect of that night when she had
accepted his love, must have caught his soul and changed it as glass
is caught by the worker and blown into shape and colour. There he was,
fashioned and purified, ready for her use. What would she make of
him? That she should make nothing of him at all was as incredible to
him as that there should not be, somewhere in the world, Polchester
town in Glebeshire county.

There had been with him, I think, from the first a fear that "it was
all too good to be true"--_Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes_. It is not
easy for any man, after thirty years' shy shrinking from the world, to
shake himself free of superstitions, and such terrors the quiet and
retired Polchester had bred in Trenchard's heart as though it had been
the very epitome of life at its lowest and vilest. It simply came to
this, that he refused to believe that Marie Ivanovna had been given to
him only to be taken away again. About women he knew simply nothing
and Russian women are not the least complicated of their sex. About
Marie Ivanovna he of course knew nothing at all.

His first weeks i