On Death-Bed
While all these activities were carried on with zest during the later years of the war, I found my health completely shattered, as I wrote in the letter I had sent to my brother; and I was removed to the Hospital for rest and treatment. When my fever was ever hundred degrees on my body, and the dysentery had become very acute, the hospital Authorities began to attend to me with greater care and undertook regular treatment of my disease. Every prisoner when taken to the hospital does get some rest in that place, and, therefore, it was no wonder that I got it because when I went in I wan worse in health than any other prisoner. It was in the eighth year of my residence in this jail, that they gave me this relief. Otherwise whenever I was ill before, the only treatment for me was solitary confinement.
Once removed to the hospital, the Superintendent saw to it that I was well-cared for. They changed my food from time to time to find out what suited me best in the present state of my health. This change in prison management, it must be pointed out, was the result of the criticism passed upon it in the Legislature and in the newspaper world of India; and my letters had helped materially in ventilating that grievance. But this reform had come so late that, speaking for myself, the care that the hospital bestowed upon me did not lead to any change for the better in my declining health. My fever did not abate although they gave me dose after dose of quinine to drive it out of my body. And the quinine brought on dysentery and blood in the stools in a very acute form. I was unable to digest rice and milk which passed out as It had gone in. In the Andamans and especially at Port Blair, T. B., Malaria, and dysentery marched on together. They stalked the land and took heavy toll of its inhabitants. I was already in the grip of dysentery and malaria,& six or seven months later, the doctor himself suspected that I had a touch of T. B. In the hospital there were many patients around me who were stronger and belter-built and yet affected by these three maladies. I had passed eight long years of imprisonment and hard labour, and my constitution had completely gone under. It would have been no surprise, if I suffered from all three of them. Dysentery took off my appetite for food, and I could not digest it. Want of food added to my weakness and shattered my nerves; the fever was continuously on me; only the last enemy was yet to come, though he was very near. In the prison-hospital I had nothing to entertain me except reading. And that was the only solace of my life. But my nervous debility made reading and light conversation a heavy tax on my constitution. The slightest indulgence in these brought on fever which rose to 102 degrees. So I gave up reading altogether did not keep any books near me to avoid the temptation, and lay on my cot with eyes shut. Time, already a tedious factor in the jail, became too long and too heavy to bear and I had to spend the tedium to the accompaniment of griping pain in the stomach, and of burning fever on the body. Even then I was doing all those things that I have described in the last chapter.
Sometimes I thought that, due to my illness in the prison, I had come to regard prison-life as a hell on earth and that to be outside would have been better for me. But how? Do not people suffer from all these maladies outside, and is it wise to lay all the blame for them on the jail? People sulffer from dysentery, malaria und consumption even in palaces. Epidemics like bubonic plague and influenza sweep over big cities adorned with theatres, and pleasure-haunts, and blazing with electric light. And groanings and cries of pain are heard in a thousand homes through them. The City of Bombay suffered from such epidemic, and every home -in it had four beds of patients stricken with influenza. Why should I then bewail my lot in this prison because I am in its hospital down with mularia und. dysentery? Pain and disease are rampant everywhere. There are a thousand villages and a thousand huts of poor families which, stricken down with similar ailments, do not find any medical aid near at hand to relieve them. You have in this hospital a medical officer, medicine and nursing of which these poor folk have not the slightest notion or expectation. Your lot in this dependent state is much better than theirs though they are free; their lot, in these circumstances, is. any day. harder to bear thanyours. So be patient and put up with it calmly. Do not grumble because you have to pass through it as a prisoner. Do not add to your pain by this idle pining. It is right for you to think that freedom is better than imprisonment, but for other reasons. But now that you are in prison and are ill, you had better not think of it. For disease and death haunt the prison too often, no doubt; but not that they don’t stalk the outside world as well. Life in this prison, intrinsically, is not more ‘flat, weary, stale and unprofitable’ than the usages of the world outside, for have we not all to pass our days in ’the vast prison that is this world’, and is not this prison a part of it?
That is as a part of philosophy. But is the reality so different after all? The struggles for national freedom and the individual struggle for existence are both hard and serious things. Is not life in prison equally hard and serious? It is worth while striving to live up to your noble ideal for which yourself with thousand others like you, and some of them your friends, have had to come in this prison. It is for that, that you had to pass through these trials, practise these austerities, and go through this kind of self-abnegation. And these will shine in the world by their reflected splendour, things great and small, like great and dazzling achievements of other men on the theatre of the world. People read with as much eagerness and interest the accounts of the prisoners transported to Siberia for the political crime of shooting Czar Alexander, as they may gloat over pages of a book describing the life of Czar Nicholas, or of the hypocritical priest, full of romance, mystery, lust and dupery, Rasputin. And they certainly cherish greater sympathy and reverence for the former than they pity or hate the latter. A people’s eyes are fastened less upon the domes of luxurious palaces than they are rivetted upon the cottages of the exiled and on the jails of people imprisoned for political crime. And even, were it not so, we, the worshippers of freedom, must count the hour and mark the day in this dark night for the arrival of the dawn for which we had dedicated our all. It is a solemn duty for it is a solemn vow. Then why should I consider this life as meaner and more futile than the life without?
Free life? What is it, and who is free? Is it without the walls where these people toil? Outside these walls are the huge walls of Universe and Nature. Mind alone is free. It is imprisoned only by the skies over-head and by the horizons stretching before its eyes. If you feel pinned down and limited by this prison, ask those who are free, and they will tell you that they are as much pinned down by the giant circumstance. In short, what is here is also without, more or less, but in no way different.
And nothing to entertain here, you think? No, friend, you have plenty of it. Look at this book; within its two pages the ants have built their capital city.
This much about my ailment. What about the tedium? Nothing more and nothing less. We find life in prison dull, monotonous and useless. But what is life in the world intrinsically? You are a prisoner and your jailor and Superintendent are not. But what is the difference between their life and yours? They rise from their bed every day; they sit in their office and write; they eat and they sleep; again, they wake up, and again they go to bed. How have they made their lives, and what have they made of it? Marriage, children, retirement and pension - that is the sum-total of it. Is that life’s fulfillment? Do not children enact the same part in their sport? How is this sort of life better than that of the children at play? Can you really say that it is better from your observation and analysis of that life? Your life and theirs run in the same groove and are cast in the same mould, though they are free and you are a prisoner. We grow on our parents’ knees; we burn or bury them in due time; then we dangle and rear up our own children; and we go’ to our graves finally. And what is all this for? Is not the wheel of life a weary round, after all? The great Shankaracharya asked the question, “What next?” And it is a question very pertinent to ask of life in this world as also of my life hereafter. And even to a mighty cataclysm like the great war Just ended. France and Germany have indulged in this game many times before. The Franks attacked the Gauls, and from that day onwards, how many times, across the ages, have they not played the same role? And victory has mademiracle. learn it and be wise. This is real diversion to your distracted mind. Great scientists spend a life to understand the infinitely small in the Universe. They study insects and worms, or the animal world, beasts of the eaith and the fowls of the air, their life, their ways and habits, and record them. They watch an ant-hill or a beehive for years on end to know and write on the evolution of life. And their life, no one can say, is spent uselessly. If it is not a trifle, why do you look upon your life in this prison as futile or as wasted?
Behold another thing. The cats after midnight mew and cry. They are out caterwauling. A rival comes on the scene, and the love-song changes into a war-song. Terrible is the fight and screaming. So shrill and piercing the sound, that it jars on your nerves. You feel it contemptible, and ridiculous. But if you think of it, what else is our Ramayana? Like these two cats, the two men fight for the possession of a woman. Smitten with love, Ravana kidnaps Sita. In pursuit of love, Rama fights and carries her back. These cats fight with their claws and make terrible noise. Those men fought with their bows and arrows, sword and trident, and sounded their kettle-drums. The passion and the impulse, the instinct and the behaviour, are the same. The cats must have taken this fight between two tom-cats to be as epic as we regard the battle between Rama and Ravana. To talk in the language of evolution this battle of the tom-cats was the origin of the heroic duel between Rama and Ravana. Speaking of evolution, there are two basic facts of life which it enunciates. One is known as the struggle for existence and the other as the preservation of the race. Hunger and sex are its elements. According to this then, the Ramayana or the battle between Rama and Ravana may well be traced in its genesis to the fight ofthe two cats. And according to another basic fact, the love of Mary for Christ or of Yashoda for Krishna is the evolution ofthe primitive instinct of the mother-cat for her kitten. Look at the court-yard ofthe doctor’s bungalow, and see there the hen with her brood of chicken. How she plays with them, crows to them and saves them from the swoop of the eagle or the kite. Yashoda trembled and wept not so much when Putana swooped upon Krishna, as this Madame Partelett must have crowed when the kite swooped down upon her little ones. What a wonderful thing is this world! Elders purchase tickets to witness the sports of children and competitions among schools. Here is the gathering of these chickens, jumping, cackling, picking up corn with their little beaks, their dodging one another, their running and their pursuing one another. Is it not as interesting as the school sports and the school competitions? The same feeling throbs in their hearts, the same joy thrills their being that we find in children and school boys playing. The whole life is a symphony of love, and joy, of instinct and appetite. Nothing is mean and nothing is great. The animal is as much human as the human is animal. Only we must look at both with a sympathetic eye and we must live to see it.
After a year in the hospital, I was sent back in chawl number five, and on its third floor. I was kept by myself and all alone, and I whiled away the hours in musings like these. I overcame the weakness of body and mind by these meditations. Some time I felt every day that the body could not hold out any longer because one ailment after another was attacking it. This garment of the flesh seemed to be completely tattered and torn so that the soul could no longer wear it.
At another time I felt a distinct improvement in my health. But how long am I to linger thus? So a year and a half had rolled on. Dysentery, blood in stools, fever and something else followed in succession and I bore it all. So I resolved to put an end to my life. For, I was in no doubt that this prison and myself were never to part company and so long as this continued my health would never improve. We all struggle for happiness and none could weep for all time and continue suffering to the end ofthe chapter. I wanted to know how many days I suffered and how many days I was without suffering. So I made a month’s chart and marked on it days when wearing a body was a joy and when it was intense pain. I marked this on the wall, the day of suffering from one ailment or another, and the day free from any ailment. This went on for two months and then I made a reckoning. I found out that of sixty days, fifteen days were relatively better, and the rest were all worse. So I concluded that things were not after all so I dark, and I must put off the thought of suicide.
But who would thus continue to live on the tar-oil interest of tears? The castles in the air arc, after all, shadowy, unsubstantial things. And the mind recoils on reality after building them long enough. So I was pulled back on ’the earth, earthy’ and was kept hanging on the borderland of suicide. In the hospital my weight had fallen down to 95 pounds, I could take no solid food, I felt distant symptoms of Thisis; fever did not abate, and there was none whom I could call mine near me. During the three following months I became worse, what with the atmosphere of hostility common to all political prisoners around me; what with disrespect and stark despair, with none to talk to me words of kindness and of love, and with no freedom of movement from one place to another. So much so that I knew not when Death would pounce upon me and snap the chord of my life. I realised that the time had come when, with all my will to livef I must pan away.
Am I, then, to die in the hospital? This thought began to haunt me all along. I reviewed in my mind the philosophy of the world and in conclusion on the subject, from Buddha’s doctrine of Nirvana and nescience to the Yoga doctrinc of Knowledge; from the materialism of Science to the Monism of I lacckcl and Spencer, and to the evolution theory of ‘Substance’ propounded hy them, I marched them all for light on death and immortality. From the Mimansa doctrine of the Vedanta to Mill’s Utilitarianism, I ransacked in my mind their conclusions about religion, and about the triple faith of God, Immortality and Duty. And as the fruit of them all came forth my poem “On my bed facing death”, I wrote it while on bed in the hospital, and I had no hope that I should survive to read it.
When I was first arrested, and, when, in England I had expected the sentence of death, I had composed the two poems entitled “My Will”, and “f irnt offering” And this I wrote on the threshold of death In the la ft I have woven an imaginary conversation between Death and myself. All the three poems find a place in the book, “Echo from the AndamanS”, published subsequently.
First meeting with my family
I his year my brother and myself got the permission to see our own people in the Andamans. Others were allowed to meet their own people once in five years, and they stayed together with the members of their families for a couple of days, and, in some cases, for weeks together. I got the permission at the end of eight years. I could obtain it after much worry and effort and with great difficulty. At last my younger brother and my wife started from Bombay for Calcutta when they received a wire that the permission was withdrawn. It was a cruel joke indeed. When one wrote to the Government of Bombay, it directed him to enquire at Port Blair. If the Commissioner of Port Blair was approached on the subject, he referred us to the Government of India. If one wrote to the Government of India, it wrote back to say that the final decision rested with the Government of Bombay.+++(4)+++ Things went on like this till 1918-19, when at last we met each other I met them in the prison, and in the, presence ofthe prison-superintendent, and also within the hearing of the Marathi knowing warder concealed behind, so that they may discover from our conversation if we were hatching up a new plot, conspirators as we were by the nature of our imprisonment, I met them after eight years - my wife, my brother and his wife. I was glad to see him hale and hearty. We talked to each other for an hour and a half full of joy and with the abandonment of a marriage festival. We suppressed for the time being all the dark memories of the past, thoughts of the rueful present, and fears for the unknown future. We dwelt on the immediate before us, and, as if care-free, gave ourselves up to the delight of the moment. But why did not my elder brother’s wife come along with them? She had borne the heaviest burden of work in our political activities and in the never flailing dangers of those activities. With what superb courage and an amount of patience had she faced them all! She was my childhood’s companion, she was a loving mother to me in my adolescence, she was my trusted coworker in all political planning and execution, and for seven long years I was pining to see her. Why did she not come? Her eyes had closed on the scene, as I was to learn soon; they had closed after a long vigil with the lighted lamp of her love constantly kept burning. The lamp had flickered, the light had failed, the vigil was over, and she had gone to her Maker, hopes deferred had not only made the heart sick but had broken it. Burning in the sacrificial fire of the country’s liberation, and of her own separation from one dearest to her heart, she was at last reduced to ashes, and had expired. The wire, that she was permitted to visit her husband in the Andamans, from the kind Government at Delhi, had come a day too late!
The story was told me by my younger brother, and I swallowed it, without a word, like bitter poison. The world is always changing; what is today, tomorrow is not. Those who are united are bound to be separated at some time, sooner or later. God was kind to keep us together so long, and myself am entering on the decline of life. From the drama of life, one character after another must depart. They are bound to make their exit from the stage of this world. Are they mounting up to appear on the stage of the next world? Who knows? Each one to his faith. My elder brother believes in life after death and in rebirth. According to his faith, the, soul of his dear and departed wife was hovering over this family reunion in the prison ofthe Andamans, and it must have heard us all. A man like me may not have that faith and for me the chapter has ended here. A woman fighting bravely for the freedom of her Motherland, dies on the battlefield and is said to go straight to heaven. What does it mean? It means that she is freed from all cares, all struggles, all pining, that she finds peace. She is extinguished like the flame of fire, disappears, vanishes completely. She goes beyond the pale of sorrow and joy. She attains salvation. On any ground we ought not to weep for her. The sorrow is our own for we can see her no more. I consoled myself thus and dropped the topic. I turned on other subjects of national, religious and domestic importance. I indulged in humour and laughter within the time at our disposal. I do not know whence I gathered so much strength, in my exhausted condition, to say what I said. We three brothers had met together after twelve years! We were standing together on the pier near the boat that was to take me to England. That was in 1906 and we had met now in Port Blair and in prison in the year 1919, and that only for an hour and a half!
Permission was given me to meet my wife alone for half an hour. After the meeting was over, my younger brother and the other members of my family were instantly put on the boat at Port Blair. As if their stay here for a week more to see the Andamans would have been dangerous, and involved some plot to spirit me away from this place by a boat or in an aeroplane! My brother’s arrival had made many people anxious to meet him, but no one else was allowed to see him. But my fellow-prisoners saw him in spite of the ban, and did not shrink from presenting him with fruit and flowers.
Well, my people had left. It was like a happy dream in deep sleep on a night wllen the body is burning with fever; and like waking up from that short-lived experience and relief, to toss restlessly on my bed again. I found myself all alone once more, locked up on the third floor of chawl number five of my prison- house in the Andamans. At this time, I was removed from the hospital and put in this place. It was a solitary place but I saw from it the broad ocean and the open sky, and the island of Ras on the bosom of the ocean. I had never before been put in a room so airy and so open to view. And I was permitted, besides, to move freely in the verandas and the square of that circle of chawl. I used to sit and watch the island stretching out in front of me, and I often passed into a reverie. It put a strain on my mind to be lost in thought thus. Sometimes emotions bubbled over and overthrew thought, and I had to surrender myself to them till the storm had passed over me and I was again cooled down. A conflict and anarchy was the result of these surging waves, and then I had to take the helm, ride the storm and let thought resume its seat as before. That my heart should not be so entirely swayed by them, I directed my attention deliberately to the most ordinary things about me like the cows grazing in the compounder’s ground like crows picking up and making away with coconut pieces, in concert and phalanx; or like little boats sailing towards the island of Ras. In the prison the mind becomes so introspective, that it is hard for one to push it out and direct a objects without. We lose the habit of observing the world around us, and contract the vicious habit of brooding, again and again, over the same old thoughts.
Reading was impossible for the brain was too fagged for it. Serious thinking and concentration on Yogic practices was out of question. While contemplating the sea and watching the rise and tag of the rolling waves, suddenly the mind itself like the waves was lost in the depths of reverie, and a mood of concentration would follow. Sometime deep silence came over me as I kept on looking at the island of Ras, shining like an emerald in that sea, and adorned by the Church and its spire pointing heavenward. It reminded me of the Father in Heaven for whose prayer and adoration it was reared on that solitary island. But that deep concentration, that solemn all-embracing silence, and that exhilaration of solitude became too much for my enfeebled body and my shattered nerves. My desolate heart could not bear them. After I had come to myself, my head would begin to ache, I felt their strain upon my brain and my nerves, and I felt weaker than before. Hence even this exhilaration I could not have. I was reminded in these moments of Lord Buddha. Recovering from the memorable fast, he had fainted, and he had to regain the lost. strength of his body, and his power of concentrated thought and meditation. He had to eat whatever nourished his body like butter sugarcandy, rice, milk and sugar boiled together, and whatever he got on the way. What then of a person like me! In the depressed state of mind and body, reading, thinking, concentration, meditation - all were out of court. Serious work was denied me by my failing health; while the prison- hardships denied to me the calmness of mind as well. Without a friend, without play and without the opportunity of a stroll, the prison had become a nightmare. I could look at the hens of the doctor in the opposite compound. I could watch the birds flying and I could hear the mosquitoes humming. That was my relief; that was my recreation in this prison.
Yes, speaking of birds, I am reminded of bulbuls, the Indian nightingales, in the Andamans. Their melody was a real joy to my heart. They are very beautiful birds indeed. Tiny, well-proportioned, and alert. How playful and how sweet is their music, how quick their movements. Swarms of them hovered over the heaps of coconut fruit and swooped down upon them. They picked and ate the pieces to their fill. They continuously chirped round and about our chawls. The bulbuls entertained me when there was nothing else to entertain. I could even know their language and that of the jay or maina. The ten to fifteen notes of the maina I could clearly follow. So soon as the note fell upon my ears. I at once recognised it. The notes were different for different moods. A simple note; a note of hide and seek; a note of deep yearning; a note of alarm and fear, a note of deep happiness and peace; a note of passionate love; of motherly love and affection; of invitation to the mate; of ultimatums; and last of fierce fight and finale - I had learnt and mastered them all.+++(5)+++ They were regular like words of human speech. I could not teach them my language but they taught me theirs. Prisoners were not allowed to cage a bird as their companion. It was an offence. Or else I could have kept them in my room. I would have taught them songs of patriotism. And then! Why other prisoners would have directed enquirers to my room as the great Shankaracharya was directed to the house of the learned Mandan Mishra, by pointing it as a house that had in its window a parrot and a maina discussing Vedanta!+++(5)+++ If a bulbul came in search of my cell, the prisoners would have guided it by saying. “Behold the room at the bar of which the maina and bulbul sing their songs of patriotism and freedom, and know that it is the cell of the revolutionary Savarkar.”
The crows were my familiar friends. A Mussulman prisoner kept a crow secretly with my connivance. But within a few days I found that it was the food of the Burmese. For the Burmese and the Mussulmans in that prison, being non-vegetarians, often killed crows to make a meal of them. They cooked his flesh on the fire in the factories and ate it. They sold it to one another at the rate of one anna per roasted piece or four tobacco leaves in exchange for it. The crow was tamed and kept by the Mussulman prisoner with the same end in view. And my suspicion came true when I found him the next day giving it to the Burmese prisoners for making a dish of it!
I was alone in the prison, confined in a solitary cell, when I came here first. But then I could pass my time in writing poetry. Eight years after, while my fellow prisoners could move freely and be warders on tens of their fellows, I alone was put back to rot in a lonely room, and could not beguile the hours in writing poetry. I had stop writing it when I found that I had better work to occupy my time here. But now nervous prostration had made it impossible to resume my old passtime. And I had to give it up almost. The three or four thousand lines I had composed, I now found it hard to commit to my memory. How then could I compose any new poems? Even then every week I recited the old ones and fixed them well in my mind. The whole of my poetry took me one full day and one full night to recite. I used to repeat it line by line continuously, barring the time for meals. But I realised, as I recited it now from my memory, how much of it I had forgotten during the two years of my continuous illness.
This is the story of my serious illness and the enforced rest that followed it. And yet I had not discontinued activity altogether. All old activities like Shuddhi, Sanghatan, education and political awakening were spreading far wide and were kept on so spreading by me.
In this lonely chawl and on itsthird floor, prisoners came to see me and incurred the displeasure of the officers and were put in handcuffs for eight days for breaking the prison-regulation. They rendered me all the service they could, with all the difficulties that faced them in it. I cannot close this story without putting on record my gratitude to them in these pages.
The main object of the doctor and the other officers in this prison in bringing me on the third floor of chawl NO. 5 was, I must admit, to give me the advantage of fresh sea-breeze and the open prospect in front of it. This change, along with better food and better treatment that I got during my two years’ illness enabled me to tide over it, and to improve my health after it. Gradually I began to digest my food, I gained in weight, shook off fever, and got over the signs which had marked me out as a sure victim of tuberculosis. And in the end I rolled up my bed and was confident that I had beaten off death.
My brother suffers from T. B.
But the bed that I had rolled up I had to spread out once more. And this time it was for my elder brother. His health had been failing for a long time, but it collapsed completely by the time I had recovered my own. And it gives me pain to put down here that he was not looked after so well as I had been till almost the last dayof his life in prison. I shall recall the scene:my brother going to the hospital in black coat of coarse blanket and bent down with the disease that had attacked him; with pain in the stomach indicating bad liver and spleen; standing before an insolent Madrasi “the sly-boots”of a doctor; the doctor pretending to examine him and to put him odd questions; and at least dismissing him with the remark that nothing was wrong with him! My brother taking it as an insult resolved that, even for the life of him, he would never step into the hospital. He was taken back to his room coughing and groaning, clad in the coarse garment, and was left to be there unattended, unnursed and uncured. The Madrasi was afterwards sternly warned for his rudness and indifference. Later on the superitendent got his sputum examined, and at last, a specialist, who had been sent from India to inspect the hospital and offer his suggestions for improving it, declared that my brother had a patch on his back and was clearly a patient for tuberculosis. Even then, while in prison, he did not get the treatment that he needed for its cure. Sometime he had such a fit of coughing, that the sound was heard in the two blocks of buliding near his own. And that obstinate cough would exhaust his completely so that he could hardly breath; and he felt that it was choking the life out of him. And fever rose every day from hundred to hundred and two degrees. And his damaged liver made it impossible for him to walk erect. Add to all this a very bad type of chronic dysentery - and you will be surprised how he could pull on in that prison for the last year and a half of his term of imprisonment.
During that year and a half about a hundred and fifty political prisoners on life-sentence, and about five hundred of worst convicts like robbers and dacoits - some of whom had not been there even for one year - were released on the occasion of the Victory Celebration of the last war and for amnesty granted in connection with an event to which we shall presently refer. But my brother who had put ten years of hard labour and declining health in it, and whom bad health and overwork had made prematurely old, got no advantage either of the Victory Celebration or of the amnesty following it. And what was the Government’s objection to his release? That he had written a pamphlet of ten pages for which offence he had been sentenced to transportation far life. And the other and the main objection was that he was my brother. So that though he was suffering from tuberculosis, there could be no amnesty for him.
And yet that Karma Yogi, that sufferer, never lost his confidence, never gave way to fear and nervousness, never surrendered his principles, and did not budge an inch when he saw death approaching to claim him as its own.
But this is only about the Andamans. When he was transferred from this jail to a jail in India, he had to undergo hardships still more terrible. Fate had in store for him untold suffering in comparison with which what he had got in the Andamans was almost nothing. He was reserved by Providence to face them.