“Well, and if the prisoner, your father, runs away?” I asked a young soldier.
“I can run the bayonet through him,” he replied, in the peculiar, senseless voice of a soldier. “And if he ‘removes himself,’ I must shoot,” he added, apparently proud of his knowledge of what to do when his father “removes himself.”
When he, the good young man, is brought to a condition lower than an animal, he is such as those who use him as an instrument of violence want him to be. He is all ready: the man is lost, and a new instrument of violence has been created.
And all this takes place every year, every autumn, everywhere, in the whole of Russia, in broad daylight, in a populous city, in the sight of all men, and the deception is so clever, so cunning, that all see it and in the depth of their hearts know all its baseness, all its terrible consequences, and are unable to free themselves from it.