Chapter 14 — The war, the deathbed, the priest refused

War with Prussia in the spring of 1864. The novel does not pretend to write a war chapter in the heroic mode. The Second Schleswig War was, for Denmark, a brief catastrophe: a small kingdom against the Prussian and Austrian armies, an outdated army on its own ground, the loss of a third of the country's territory in a few months, and the long humiliation that would mark the national mood for a generation. Niels enlists. He is past the prime age for it; the army takes him anyway. The reasons for enlisting are mixed in him as they were in many of his class — patriotism for a country he has watched older men weep over, a respect for his father's generation, and, beneath both, the long unspoken ache of a man who has lived for forty years inside his own head and has at last been offered something that is not inside it.

He is shot in a minor engagement. The wound is in the body and it does not heal. He is brought back to a field hospital — one of the temporary ones the army set up in farmhouses behind the lines — and put on a cot among other men with similar wounds. The novel writes the field hospital with the restraint it has used for every other death scene: the smell of the room, the quiet of the night, the doctor coming and going, the women of the parish bringing what they could. Niels lies for some days. He grows weaker. He understands, in the way the dying understand, that this is the bed.

A priest is offered to him. The novel has been preparing for this offer since chapter 4 — since Edele's bedside, since Hjerrild's Christmas Eve, since the bedside of his own son — and the offer arrives now in the form Edele had refused. Niels refuses it. He refuses it without theatre. He refuses it as a man who has held a position for forty years and who is not, at the very end, going to stop holding it because the position has at last become inconvenient. Jacobsen does not present the refusal as triumph. He presents it as what Niels does. The novel ends. The country has lost the war. The man has lost his life. The position has held. The book closes on a deathbed in a farmhouse behind a defeated line, with a priest at the door and a refusal on the lips of a man who, long ago, was a boy at his aunt's bedside watching her do exactly the same thing.