And it comes over me as a great thing, a pathetically great thing--now I know what my destiny is--lowering, I watch my own actions, and wait to see how I shall accomplish it--I mark how I am slowly putting my hand into my pocket--before I left home I took my pocket-pistol with me. I am holding the toy in my hand--the steel is looking up at me and blinking at me--I am gazing with a smile into its black, confiding muzzle--I am holding it against my temples--I pull the trigger, and fall over backward--the last of mankind on this dead earth!
They have now covered up our hot breath with earth. Why are you blinking at me with your bleared eyes, my brother? Are you not glad? Don't they envy us our sweet death? They have laid us out in a picturesque row, and you need only turn your head to rub against human flesh at once, and if you turn your yellow eyeball, you can see nothing but corpses in the twilight. One beside the other, that is how they are sleeping. And corpse upon corpse, ever more of them, through the whole length of the loose soil of the potato-field, and we even fill the whole adjoining field of roots.
Wonder whether the sun still goes on shining above us?--whether they still know how to laugh in the towns as we used to in our time? Wonder whether my wife still goes on remembering her dead husband--and my two kiddies--whether they have already forgotten their father? They were so tiny at the time--another man'll come along--they will call another fellow father--and my wife is still so young and fair.
We poor dead heroes! So do not disturb our last sleep any longer. We had to die to enable the others to live. We died for our native land in its straits. We are victorious now, and have won land and fame, land enough for millions of our brothers. Our wives have land, our children, our mothers, our fathers have land. And now our poor native land has air to breathe. It need no longer be stifled. They have cleared the air of us. They have got rid of us, of us who were far too many. We are no longer eating the bread away from other folks' mouths. We are so full-fed, so full-fed and quiet. But they have got land! Fertile land! And ore! Iron mines! Gold! Spices! And Bread!