When the Arabs came rushing like things gone
mad, and he had received his wound, he had known that in his own
village, among his own dear ones, there was recovery. Love would heal
the wounds, the home country was a lover who would heal all her sons'
wounds with love.
Among the grey desolate crowd were sharp, rending 'Bravos!'--the people
were in tears--the landlord at my side was repeating softly,
abstractedly: '_Caro--caro--Ettore, caro colonello_--' and when it was
finished, and the little colonel with shabby, humiliated legs was gone
in, he turned to me and said, with challenge that almost frightened me:
'_Un brav' uomo_.'
'_Bravissimo_,' I said.
Then we, too, went indoors.
It was all, somehow, grey and hopeless and acrid, unendurable.
The colonel, poor devil--we knew him afterwards--is now dead. It is
strange that he is dead. There is something repulsive to me in the
thought of his lying dead: such a humiliating, somehow degraded corpse.
Death has no beauty in Italy, unless it be violent. The death of man or
woman through sickness is an occasion of horror, repulsive. They belong
entirely to life, they are so limited to life, these people.
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