It is a common saying that all men are equal in the presence of suffering, but I know very well that this is not true.
Auger! Auger! humble basket-maker of La Charente, who are you, you who seem able to suffer without being unhappy? Why are you touched with grace, whereas Gregoire is not? Why are you the prince of a world in which Gregoire is merely a pariah?
Kind ladies who pass through the wards where the wounded lie, and give them cigarettes and sweet-meats, come with me.
We will go through the large ward on the first floor, where the windows are caressed by the boughs of chestnut-trees. I will not point out Auger, you will give him the lion's share of the cigarettes and sweets of your own accord; but if I don't point out Gregoire, you will leave without, noticing him, and he will get no sweets, and will have nothing to smoke.
It is not because of this that I call Gregoire a pariah. It is because of a much sadder and more intimate thing... Gregoire lacks endurance, he is not what we call a good patient.
In a general way those who tend the wounded call the men who do not give them much trouble "good patients." Judged by this standard, every one in the hospital will tell you that Gregoire is not a good patient.
All day long, he lies on his left side, because of his wound, and stares at the wall. I said to him a day or two after he came:
"I am going to move you and put you over in the other corner; there you will be able to see your comrades."
He answered, in his dull, surly voice:
"It's not worth while. I'm all right here."
"But you can see nothing but the wall."
"That's quite enough."
Scarcely have the stretcher-bearers touched his bed, when Gregoire begins to cry out in a doleful, irritable tone:
"Ah! don't shake me like that! Ah, you mustn't touch me."
The stretcher-bearers I give him are very gentle fellows, and he always has the same: Paffin, a fat shoe-maker with a stammer, and Monsieur Bouin, a professor of mathematics, with a grey beard and very precise movements.
They take hold of Gregoire most carefully to lay him on the stretcher. The wounded man criticises all their movements peevishly:
"Ah! don't turn me over like that. And you must hold my leg better than that!"
The sweat breaks out on Baffin's face. Monsieur Bouin's eye-glasses fall off. At last they bring the patient along.
As soon as he comes into the dressing ward, Gregoire is pale and perspiring. His harsh tawny beard quivers, hair by hair. I divine all this, and say a few words of encouragement to him from afar.
"I shan't be long with you this morning, Gregoire. You won't have time to say 'oof'!"
He preserves a sulky silence, full of reservations. He looks like a condemned criminal awaiting execution. He is so pre-occupied that he does not even answer when the sarcastic Sergeant says as he passes him:
"Ah! here's our grouser."
At last he is laid on the table which the wounded men call the "billiard-table."
Then, things become very trying. I feel at once that whatever I do, Gregoire will suffer. I uncover the wound in his thigh, and he screams. I wash the wound carefully, and he screams. I probe the wound, from which I remove small particles of bone, very gently, and he utters unimaginable yells. I see his tongue trembling in his open mouth. His hands tremble in the hands that hold them, I have an impression that every fibre of his body trembles, that the raw flesh of the wound trembles and retracts. In spite of my determination, this misery affects me, and I wonder whether I too shall begin to tremble sympathetically. I say:
"Try to be patient, my poor Gregoire."
He replies in a voice hoarse with pain and terror: "I can't help it."
I add, just to say something: "Courage, a little courage."
He does not even answer, and I feel that to exhort him to show courage, is to recommend an impossible thing, as if I were to advise him to have black eyes instead of his pale blue ones.
The dressing is completed in an atmosphere of general discomfort. Nothing could persuade me that Gregoire does not cordially detest me at this moment. While they are carrying him away, I ask myself bitterly why Gregoire is so deficient in grace, why he cannot suffer decently?
The Sergeant says, as he sponges the table: "He's working against one all the time." Well, the Sergeant is wrong. Gregoire is not deliberately hostile. Sometimes I divine, when he knits his brows, that he is making an effort to resist suffering, to meet it with a stouter and more cheerful heart. But he does not know how to set about it.
If you were asked to lift a railway-engine, you would perhaps make an effort; but you would do so without confidence and without success. So you must not say hard things of Gregoire.
Gregoire is unable to bear suffering, just as one is unable to talk an unknown language. And, then, it is easier to learn Chinese than to learn the art of suffering.
When I say that he is unable to bear suffering, I really mean that he has to suffer a great deal more than others.... I know the human body, and I cannot be deceived as to certain signs.
Gregoire begins very badly. He reminds one of those children who have such a terror of dogs that they are bound to be bitten. Gregoire trembles at once. The dogs of pain throw themselves upon this defenceless man and pull him down.
A great load of misery is heavy for a man to bear alone, but it is supportable when he is helped. Unfortunately Gregoire has no friends. He does nothing to obtain them, it almost seems as if he did not want any.
He is not coarse, noisy and foul-mouthed, like the rascal Groult who amuses the whole ward. He is only dull and reserved.
He does not often say "Thank you" when he is offered something, and many touchy people take offence at this.
When I sit down by his bed, he gives no sign of any pleasure at my visit. I ask him:
"What was your business in civil life?"
He does not answer immediately. At last he says: "Odd jobs; I carried and loaded here and there."
"Are you married?"
"Yes."
"Have you any children?"
"Yes."
"How many?"
"Three."
The conversation languishes. I get up and say: "Good-bye till to-morrow, Gregoire."
"Ah! you will hurt me again to-morrow."
I reassure him, or at least I try to reassure him. Then, that I may not go away leaving a bad impression, I ask:
"How did you get wounded?"
"Well, down there in the plain, with the others...."
That is all. I go away. Gregoire's eyes follow me for a moment, and I cannot even say whether he is pleased or annoyed by my visit.
Good-bye, poor Gregoire. I cross the ward and go to sit down by Auger.
Auger is busy writing up his "book."
It is a big ledger some one has given him, in which he notes the important events of his life.
Auger writes a round schoolboy hand. In fact, he can just write sufficiently well for his needs, I might almost say for his pleasure.
"Would you care to look at my book?" he says, and he hands it to me with the air of a man who has no secrets.
Auger receives many letters, and he copies them out carefully, especially when they are fine letters, full of generous sentiments. His lieutenant, for instance, wrote him a remarkable letter.
He also copies into his book the letters he writes to his wife and his little girl. Then he notes the incidents of the day: "Wound dressed at 10 o'clock. The pus is diminishing. After dinner Madame la Princesse Moreau paid us a visit, and distributed caps all round; I got a fine green one. The little chap who had such a bad wound in the belly died at 2 o'clock...."
Auger closes his book and puts it back under his bolster.
He has a face that it does one good to look at. His complexion is warm and fresh; his hair stiff and rather curly. He has a youthful moustache, a well-shaped chin, with a lively dimple in the middle, and eyes which seem to be looking out on a smiling landscape, gay with sunshine and running waters.
"I am getting on splendidly," he says with great satisfaction. "Would you like to see Mariette?"
He lifts up the sheet, and I see the apparatus in which we have placed the stump of his leg. It makes a kind of big white doll, which he takes in both hands with a laugh, and to which he has given the playful name of "Mariette."
Auger was a sapper in the Engineers. A shell broke his thigh and tore off his foot. But as the foot was still hanging by a strip of flesh, Auger took out his pocket-knife, and got rid of it. Then he said to his terror-stricken comrades: "Well, boys, that's all right. It might have been worse. Now carry me somewhere out of this."
"Did you suffer terribly?" I asked him.
"Well, Monsieur, not as much as you might think. Honestly, it did not hurt so very, very much. Afterwards, indeed, the pain was pretty bad."
I understand why every one is fond of Auger. It is because he is reassuring. Seeing him and listening to him one opines that suffering is not such a horrible thing after all. Those who live far from the battle-field, and visit hospitals to get a whiff of the war, look at Auger and go away well satisfied with everything: current events, him, and themselves. They are persuaded that the country is well defended, that our soldiers are brave, and that wounds and mutilations, though they may be serious things, are not unbearable.
Yet pain has come to Auger as to the rest. But there is a way of taking it.
He suffers in an enlightened, intelligent, almost methodical fashion. He does not confuse issues, and complain indiscriminately. Even when in the hands of others, he remains the man who had the courage to cut off his own foot, and finish the work of the shrapnel. He is too modest and respectful to give advice to the surgeon, but he offers him valuable information.
He says:
"Just there you are against the bone, it hurts me very much. Ah! there you can scrape, I don't feel it much. Take care! You're pressing rather too hard. All right: you can go on, I see what it's for...."
And this is how we work together.
"What are you doing? Ah, you're washing it. I like that. It does me good. Good blood! Rub a little more just there. You don't know how it itches. Oh! if you're going to put the tube in, you must tell me, that I may hold on tight to the table."
So the work gets on famously. Auger will make a rapid and excellent recovery. With him, one need never hesitate to do what is necessary. I wanted to give him an anaesthetic before scraping the bone of his leg. He said:
"I don't suppose it will be a very terrible business. If you don't mind, don't send me to sleep, but just do what is necessary. I will see to the rest."
True, he could not help making a few grimaces. Then the Sergeant said to him:
"Would you like to learn the song of the grunting pigs?"
"How does your song go?"
The Sergeant begins in a high, shrill voice:
Quand en passant dedans la plai-ai-neOn entend les cochons...Cela prouve d'une facon certai-ai-neQu'ils non pas l'trooo du... bouche.
Auger begins to laugh; everybody laughs. And meanwhile we are bending over the wounded leg and our work gets on apace.
"Now, repeat," says the Sergeant.
He goes over it again, verse by verse, and Auger accompanies him.
Quand en passant dedans la plai-ai-ne...
Auger stops now and then to make a slight grimace. Sometimes, too, his voice breaks. He apologises simply:
"I could never sing in tune."
Nevertheless, the song is learnt, more or less, and when the General comes to visit the hospital, Auger says to him:
"Mon General, I can sing you a fine song."
And he would, the rascal, if the head doctor did not look reprovingly at him.
It is very dismal, after this, to attend to Gregoire, and to hear him groaning:
"Ah! don't pull like that. You're dragging out my heart."
I point out that if he won't let us attend to him, he will become much worse. Then he begins to cry.
"What do I care, since I shall die anyhow?"
He has depressed the orderlies, the stretcher-bearers, everybody. He does not discourage me; but he gives me a great deal of trouble.
All you gentlemen who meet together to discuss the causes of the war, the end of the war, the using-up of effectives and the future bases of society, excuse me if I do not give you my opinion on these grave questions. I am really too much taken up with the wound of our unhappy Gregoire.
It is not satisfactory, this wound, and when I look at it, I cannot think of anything else; the screams of the wounded man would prevent me from considering the conditions of the decisive battle and the results of the rearrangement of the map of Europe with sufficient detachment.
Listen: Gregoire tells me he is going to die. I think and believe thathe is wrong. But he certainly will die if I do not take it upon myselfto make him suffer. He will die, because every one is forsaking him. Andhe has long ago forsaken himself."My dear chap," remarked Auger to a very prim orderly, "it is nodoubt unpleasant to have only one shoe to put on, but it gives one achance of saving. And now, moreover, I only run half as much risk ofscratching my wife with my toe-nails in bed as you do. ..."
"Quite so," added the Sergeant; "with Mariette he will caress his good lady, so to speak."
Auger and the Sergeant crack jokes like two old cronies. The embarrassed orderly, failing to find a retort, goes away laughing constrainedly.
I sat down by Auger, and we were left alone.
"I am a basket-maker," he said gravely. "I shall be able to take up my trade again more or less. But think of workers on the land, like Groult, who has lost a hand, and Lerondeau, with his useless leg!... That's really terrible!"
Auger rolls his r's in a way that gives piquancy and vigour to his conversation. He talks of others with a natural magnanimity which comes from the heart, like the expression of his eyes, and rings true, like the sound of his voice. And then again, he really need not envy any one. Have I not said it! He is a prince.
"I have had some very grand visitors," he says. "Look, another lady came a little while ago, and left me this big box of sweets. Do take one, Monsieur, it would be a pleasure to me. And please, will you hand them round to the others, from me?"
He adds in a lower tone:
"Look under my bed. I put everything I am given there. Really, there's too much. I'm ashamed. There are some chaps here who never get anything, and they were brave fellows who did their duty just as well as I did."
It is true, there are many brave soldiers in the ward, but only one Military Medal was given among them, and it came to Auger. Its arrival was the occasion of a regular little fete; his comrades all took part in it cordially, for strange to say, no one is jealous of Auger. A miracle indeed! Did you ever hear of any other prince of whom no one was jealous?
"Are you going?" said Auger. "Please just say a few words to Groult. Heis a bit of a grouser, but he likes a talk."Auger has given me a lesson. I will go and smoke a cigarette withGroult, and above all, I will go and see Gregoire.
Groult, indeed, is not altogether neglected. He is an original, a perverse fellow. He is pointed out as a curious animal. He gets his share of presents and attention.
But no one knows anything about Gregoire; he lies staring at the wall, and growing thinner every day, and Death seems the only person who is interested in him.
You shall not die, Gregoire! I vow to keep hold of you, to suffer with you, and to endure your ill-temper humbly. You, who seem to be bearing the misery of an entire world, shall not be miserable all alone.
Kind ladies who come to see our wounded and give them picture-books, tri-coloured caps and sweetmeats, do not forget Gregoire, who is wretched. Above all, give him your sweetest smiles.
You go away well pleased with yourselves because you have been generous to Auger. But there is no merit in being kind to Auger. With a single story, a single clasp of his hand, he gives you much more than he received from you. He gives you confidence; he restores your peace of mind.
Go and see Gregoire who has nothing but his suffering to give, and who very nearly gave his life.
If you go away without a smile for Gregoire, you may fear that you have not fulfilled your task. And don't expect him to return your smile, for where would your liberality be in that case?
It is easy to pity Auger, who needs no pity. It is difficult to pity Gregoire, and yet he is so pitiable.
Do not forget; Auger is touched with grace; but Gregoire will be damned if you do not hold out your hand to him.
God Himself, who has withheld grace from the damned, must feel pity for them.
It is a very artless desire for equality which makes us say that all men are equal in the presence of suffering. No! no! they are not. And as we know nothing of Death but that which precedes and determines it, men are not even equal in the presence of Death.
I
One more glance into the dark ward, in which something begins to reign which is not sleep, but merely a kind of nocturnal stupor.
The billiard-table has been pushed into a corner; it is loaded with an incoherent mass of linen, bottles, and articles of furniture. A smell of soup and excrements circulates between the stretchers, and seems to insult the slender onyx vases that surmount the cabinet.
And now, quickly! quickly! Let us escape on tiptoe into the open air.
The night is clear and cold, without a breath of wind: a vast block of transparent ice between the snow and the stars. Will it suffice to cleanse throat and lungs, nauseated by the close effluvium of suppurating wounds?
The snow clings and balls under our sabots. How good it would be to have a game.... But we are overwhelmed by a fatigue that has become a kind of exasperation. We will go to the end of the lawn.
Here is the great trench in which the refuse of the dressing-ward, all the residuum of infection, steams and rots. Further on we come to the musical pines, which Dalcour the miner visits every night, lantern in hand, to catch sparrows, Dalcour, the formidable Zouave, whom no one can persuade not to carry about his stiff leg and the gaping wound in his bandaged skull in the rain.
Let us go as far as the wall of the graveyard, which time has caused to swell like a protuberance on the side of the park, and which is so providentially close at hand.
The old Chateau looms, a stately mass, through the shadows. To-night, lamps are gleaming softly in every window. It looks like a silent, illuminated ship, the prow of which is cutting through an ice-bank. Nothing emerges from it but this quiet light. Nothing reveals the nature of its terrible freight.
We know that in every room, in every storey, on the level of every floor, young mutilated bodies are ranged side by side. A hundred hearts send the over-heated blood in swift pulsations towards the suffering limbs. Through all these bodies the projectile in its furious course made its way, crushing delicate mechanisms, rending the precious organs which make us take pleasure in walking, breathing, drinking....
Up there, this innocent joy of order no longer exists; and in order to recapture it, a hundred bodies are performing labours so slow and hard that they call forth tears and sighs from the strongest.
But how the murmurs of this centre of suffering are muffled by the walls! How silently and darkly it broods in space!
Like a dressing on a large inflamed wound, the Chateau covers its contents closely, and one sees nothing but these lamps, just such lamps as might illuminate a studious solitude, or a conversation between intimate friends at evening, or a love lost in self-contemplation.
We are now walking through thickets of spindle-wood, resplendent under the snow, and the indifference of these living things to the monstrous misery round them makes the impotent soul that is strangling me seem odious and even ridiculous to me. In spite of all protestations of sympathy, the mortal must always suffer alone in his flesh, and this indeed is why war is possible....
Philippe here thinks perhaps as I do; but he and I have these thoughts thrust on us in the same pressing fashion. Men who are sleeping twenty paces from this spot would be wakened by a cry; yet they are undisturbed by this formidable presence, inarticulate as a mollusc in the depths of the sea.
In despair, I stamp on the soft snow with my sabot. The winter grass it covers subsists obstinately, and has no solidarity with anything else on earth. Let the pain of man wear itself out; the grass will not wither. Sleep, good folks of the whole world. Those who suffer here will not disturb your rest.
And suddenly, beyond the woods a rocket rises and bursts against the sky, brilliant as a meteor. It means something most certainly, and it warns some one; but its coarse ingenuity does not deceive me. No barbarous signal such as this could give me back confidence in my soul to-night.
II
The little room adjoining the closet where I sleep has been set apart for those whose cries or effluvia make them intolerable to the rest. As it is small and encumbered, it will only admit a single stretcher, and men are brought in there to die in turn.
But lately, when the Chateau was reigning gracefully in the midst of verdure, the centre of the great star of alleys piercing its groves of limes and beeches, its owners occasionally entertained a brilliant society; and if they had under their roof some gay and lovely milk-white maiden, they gave her this little room at the summit of the right wing, whence the sun may be seen rising above the forests, to dream, and sleep, and adorn herself in.
To-day, the facade of the Chateau seems to be listening, strained and anxious, to the cannonade; and the little room has become a death-chamber.
Madelan was the first we put there. He was raving in such a brutal and disturbing manner, in spite of the immobility of his long, paralysed limbs, that his companions implored us to remove him. I think Madelan neither understood nor noticed this isolation, for he was already given over to a deeper solitude; but his incessant vociferation, after he was deprived of listeners, took on a strange and terrible character.
For four days and four nights, he never ceased talking vehemently; and listening to him, one began to think that all the life of the big body that was already dead, had fled in frenzy to his throat. For four nights I heard him shouting incoherent, elusive things, which seemed to be replies to some mysterious interlocutor.
At dawn, and from hour to hour throughout the day, I went to see him where he sprawled on a paillasse on the floor, like some red-haired stricken beast, with out-stretched limbs, convulsed by spasms which displaced the dirty blanket that covered him.
He lost flesh with such incredible rapidity that he seemed to be evaporating through the gaping wound in the nape of his neck.
Then I would speak to him, saying things that were kindly meant but futile, because conversation is impossible between a man who is being whirled along by the waters of a torrent, and one who is seated among the rushes on the bank. Madelan did not listen to me, and he continued his strange colloquy with the other. He did not want us or any one else; he had ceased to eat or to drink, and relieved himself as he lay, asking neither help nor tendance.
One day, the wind blew the door of the room to, and there was no key to open it. A long ladder was put up to the window, and a pane of glass was broken to effect an entrance. Directly this was done, Madelan was heard, continuing his dream aloud.
He died, and was at once replaced by the man with his skull battered in, of whom we knew nothing, because when he came to us he could neither see nor speak, and had nothing by way of history but a red and white ticket, as large as the palm of a child's hand.
This man spent only one night in the room, filling the silence with painful eructations, and thumping on the partition which separated him from my bed.
Listening alertly, with the cold air from the open window blowing on my face, I heard in turn the crowing of the cocks in the village, the irregular breathing of Philippe, sleeping the sleep of exhaustion not far from me, and the blows and the death-rattle of the man who took so long to die. He became silent, however, in the morning, when the wind began to drop, and the first detonation of the day boomed through the vault-like quiet of the darkness.
Then we had as our neighbour the hospital orderly, Sergeant Gidel, who was nearing his end, and whose cruel hiccough we had been unable to alleviate for a week past. This man knew his business, he knew the meaning of probe, of fever, of hardened abdomen. He knew too that he had a bullet in the spinal cord. He never asked us for anything, and as we dared not tell him lies, we were overcome by a kind of shame in his presence. He stayed barely two days in the room, looking with dim eyes at the engravings on the walls, and the Empire bureau on which vases were piled.
But what need is there to tell of all those whom this unhappy room swallowed up and ejected?
III
We have no lights this evening.... We must learn to do without them.... I grope my way along the passages, where the wind is muttering, to the great staircase. Here there is a fitful lamp which makes one prefer the darkness. I see the steps, which are white and smeared with mud, pictures and tapestries, a sumptuous scheme of decoration flooded at the bottom by filth and desolation. As I approach the room where the wounded are lying, I hear the calm sound of their conversation. I go in quietly. They cease talking; then they begin to chat again, for now they know me.
At first one can only distinguish long forms ranged upon the ground. The stretchers seem to be holding forth with human voices. One of these is narrating:
"We were all three sitting side by side... though I had told the adjutant that corner was not a good place.... They had just brought us a ration of soup with a little bit of meat that was all covered with white frost. Then bullets began to arrive by the dozen, and we avoided them as well as we could, and the earth flew about, and we were laughing, because we had an idea that among all those bullets there was not one that would find its billet. And then they stopped firing, and we came back to sit on the ledge. There were Chagniol and Duc and I, and I had them both to the right of me. We began to talk about Giromagny, and about Danjoutin, because that's the district we all came from, and this went on for about half an hour. And then, all of a sudden, a bullet came, just a single one, but this time it was a good one. It went through Chagniol's head, then through Duc's, and as I was a little taller than they, it only passed through my neck...."
"And then?"
"Then it went off to the devil! Chagniol fell forward on his face. Duc got up, and ran along on all fours as far as the bend in the trench, and there he began to scratch out the earth like a rabbit, and then he died. The blood was pouring down me right and left, and I thought it was time for me to go. I set off running, holding a finger to each side of my neck, because of the blood. I was thinking: just a single bullet! It's too much! It was really a mighty good one! And then I saw the adjutant. So I said to him: 'I warned you, mon adjutant, that that corner was not a good place!' But the blood rushed up into my mouth, and I began to run again."
There was a silence, and I heard a voice murmur with conviction:
"YOU were jolly lucky, weren't you?"
Mulet, too, tells his story:
"They had taken our fire... 'That's not your fire,' I said to him. 'Not our fire?' he said. Then the other came up and he said: 'Hold your jaw about the fire...' 'It's not yours,' I said. Then he said: 'You don't know who you're talking to.' And he turned his cap, which had been inside out... 'Ah! I beg your pardon,' I said, 'but I could not tell...' And so they kept our fire...."
Maville remarks calmly: "Yes, things like that will happen sometimes."
Silence again. The tempest shakes the windows with a furious hand. The room is faintly illuminated by a candle which has St. Vitus' dance. Rousselot, our little orderly, knits away industriously in the circle of light. I smoke a pipe at once acrid and consoling, like this minute itself in the midst of the infernal adventure.
Before going away, I think of Croquelet, the silent, whose long silhouette I see at the end of the room. "He sleeps all the time," says Mulet, "he sleeps all day." I approach the stretcher, I bend over it, and I see two large open eyes, which look at me gravely and steadily in the gloom. And this look is so sad, so poignant, that I am filled with impotent distress.
"You sleep too much, my poor Croquelet."
He answers me with his rugged accent, but in a feeble voice:
"Don't listen to him; it's not true. You know quite well that I can't sleep, and that you won't give me a draught to let me get a real nap. This afternoon, I read a little.... But it wasn't very interesting.... If I could have another book...."
"Show me your book, Croquelet."
He thrusts out his chin towards a little tract. I strike a match, and I read on the grey cover: "Of the Quality of Prayers addressed to God."
"All right, Croquelet, I'll try to get you a book with pictures in it. How do you feel this evening?"
"Ah! bad! very bad! They're thawing now...."
He has had frost-bite in his feet, and is beginning to suffer so much from them that he forgets the wound in his side, which is mortal, but less active.
IV
I have come to take refuge among my wounded to smoke in peace, and meditate in the shadow. Here, the moral atmosphere is pure. These men are so wretched, so utterly humiliated, so absorbed in their relentless sufferings that they seem to have relinquished the burden of the passions in order to concentrate their powers on the one endeavour: to live.
In spite of their solidarity they are for the time isolated by their individual sufferings. Later on, they will communicate; but this is the moment when each one contemplates his own anguish, and fights his own battle, with cries of pain....
They are all my friends. I will stay among them, associating myself with all my soul in their ordeal.
Perhaps here I shall find peace. Perhaps all ignoble discord will call a truce on the threshold of this empire.
But a short distance from us the battle-field has thundered unceasingly for days. Like a noisy, complicated mechanism which turns out the products of its internal activity, the stupid machine of war throws out, from minute to minute, bleeding men. We pick them up, and here they are, swathed in bandages. They have been crushed in the twinkling of an eye; and now we shall have to ask months and years to repair or palliate the damage.
How silent they are this evening! And how it makes one's heart ache to look at them! Here is Bourreau, with the brutal name and the gentle nature, who never utters a complaint, and whom a single bullet has deprived of sight for ever. Here is Bride, whom we fear to touch, so covered is he with bandages, but who looks at us with touching, liquid eyes, his mind already wandering. Here is Lerouet, who will not see next morning dawn over the pine-trees, and who has a gangrened wound near his heart. And the others, all of whom I know by their individual misfortunes.
How difficult it is to realise what they were, all these men who a year ago, were walking in streets, tilling the land, or writing in an office. Their present is too poignant. Here they lie on the ground, like some fair work of art defaced. Behold them! The creature par excellence has received a great outrage, an outrage it has wrought upon itself.
We are ignorant of their past. But have they a future? I consider these innocent victims in the tragic majesty of the hour, and I feel ashamed of living and breathing freely among them.
Poor, poor brothers! What could one do for you which would not be insufficient, unworthy, mediocre? We can at least give up everything and devote ourselves heart and soul to our holy and exacting work.
But no! round the beds on which your solitary drama is enacted, men are still taking part in a sinister comedy. Every kind of folly, the most ignoble and also the most imbecile passions, pursue their enterprises and their satisfactions over your heads.
Neither the four corpses we buried this morning, nor your daily agonies will disarm these appetites, suspend these calculations, and destroy these ambitions the development and fruition of which even your martyrdom, may be made to serve.
I will spend the whole evening among my wounded, and we will talk together, gently, of their misery; it will please them, and they will make me forget the horrible atmosphere of discussion that reigns here.
Alas! during the outburst of the great catastrophe, seeing the volume of blood and fire, listening to the uproar, smelling the stench of the vast gangrene, we thought that all passions would be laid aside, like cumbersome weapons, and that we should give ourselves up with clean hearts and empty hands to battle against the fiery nightmare. He who fights and defends himself needs a pure heart: so does he who wanders among charnel houses, gives drink to parched lips, washes fevered faces and bathes wounds. We thought there would be a great forgetfulness of self and of former hopes, and of the whole world. O Union of pure hearts to meet the ordeal!
But no! The first explosion was tremendous, yet hardly had its echoes died away when the rag-pickers were already at work among the ruins, in quest of cutlet-bones and waste paper.
And yet, think of the sacred anguish of those first hours!
Well, so be it! For my part, I will stay here, between these stretchers with their burdens of anguish.
At this hour one is inclined to distrust everything, man and the universe, and the future of Right. But we cannot have any doubts as to the suffering of man. It is the one certain thing at this moment.
So I will stay and drink in this sinister testimony. And each time that Beal, who has a gaping wound in the stomach, holds out his hands to me with a little smile, I will get up and hold his hands in mine, for he is feverish, and he knows that my hands are always icy.
V
Bride is dead. We had been working all day, and in the evening we had to find time to go and bury Bride.
It is not a very long ceremony. The burial-ground is near. About a dozen of us follow the lantern, slipping in the mud, and stumbling over the graves. Here we are at the wall, and here is the long ditch, always open, which every day is prolonged a little to the right, and filled in a little to the left. Here is the line of white crosses, and the flickering shadows on the wall caused by the lantern.
The men arrange the planks, slip the ropes, and lower the body, disputing in undertones, for it is not so easy as one might think to be a grave-digger. One must have the knack of it. And the night is very dark and the mud very sticky.
At last the body is at the bottom of the trench, and the muddy ropes are withdrawn. The little consumptive priest who stands at the graveside murmurs the prayer for the dead. The rain beats in our faces. The familiar demon of Artois, the wind, leaps among the ancient trees. The little priest murmurs the terrible words: Dies irae, dies illa....
And this present day is surely the day of wrath... I too utter my prayer: "In the name of the unhappy world, Bride, I remit all thy sins, I absolve thee from all thy faults! Let this day, at least, be a day of rest."
The little priest stands bare-headed in the blast. An orderly who is an ecclesiastic holds the end of an apron over his head. A man raises the lantern to the level of his eye. And the rain-drops gleam and sparkle furtively.
Bride is dead....
Now we meet again in the little room where friendship reigns.
Pierre and Jacques, gallant fellows, I shall not forget your beautiful, painful smile at the moment which brings discouragement to the experienced man. I shall not forget.
The beef and rice, which one needs to be very hungry to swallow, is distributed. And a gentle cheerfulness blossoms in the circle of lamplight, a cheerfulness which tries to catch something of the gaiety of the past. Man has such a deep-seated need of joy that he improvises it everywhere, even in the heart of misery.
And suddenly, through the steam of the soup, I see Bride's look distinctly.
It was no ordinary look. The extremity of suffering, the approach of death, perhaps, and also the hidden riches of his soul, gave it extraordinary light, sweetness, and gentleness. When one came to his bedside, and bent over him, the look was there, a well-spring of refreshment.
But Bride is dead: we saw his eyes transformed into dull, meaningless membranes.
Where is that well-spring? Can it be quenched?
Bride is dead. Involuntarily, I repeat aloud: "Bride is dead."
Have I roused a responsive echo in these sympathetic souls? A religious silence falls upon them. The oldest of all problems comes and takes its place at the table like a familiar guest. It breathes mysteriously into every ear: "Where is Bride? Where is Bride's look?"
VI
A lantern advances, swinging among the pines. Who is coming to meet us?
Philippe recognises the figure of Monsieur Julien. Here is the man, indeed, with his porter's livery, and his base air as of an insolent slave. He waves a stable-lantern which throws grotesque shadows upwards on his face; and he is obviously furious at having been forced to render a service.
He brandishes the lantern angrily, and thrusts out his chin to show us the advancing figures: two men are carrying a stretcher on which lies a big body wrapped in a coarse winding sheet. The two men are weary, and set the stretcher down carefully in the mud.
"Is it Fumat?"
"Yes. He has just died, very peacefully."
"Where are you going?"
"There is no place anywhere for a corpse. So we are taking him to the chapel in the burial-ground. But he is heavy."
"We will give you a hand."
Philippe and I take hold of the stretcher. The men follow us in silence. The body is heavy, very heavy. We drag our sabots out of the clay laboriously. And we walk slowly, breathing hard.
How heavy he is!... He was called Fumat... He was a giant. He came from the mountains of the Centre, leaving a red-tiled village on a hill-side, among juniper-bushes and volcanic boulders. He left his native place with its violet peaks and strong aromatic scents and came to the war in Artois. He was past the age when men can march to the attack, but he guarded the trenches and cooked. He received his death-wound while he was cooking. The giant of Auvergne was peppered with small missiles. He had no wound at all proportionate to his huge body. Nothing but splinters of metal. Once again, David has slain Goliath.
He was two days dying. He was asked: "Is there anything you would like?" And he answered with white lips: "Nothing, thank you." When we were anxious and asked him "How do you feel?" he was always quite satisfied. "I am getting on very well." He died with a discretion, a modesty, a self-forgetfulness which redeemed the egotism of the universe.
How heavy he is! He was wounded as he was blowing up the fire for the soup. He did not die fighting. He uttered no historic word. He fell at his post as a cook.... He was not a hero.
You are not a hero, Fumat. You are only a martyr. And we are going to lay you in the earth of France, which has engulfed a noble and innumerable army of martyrs.
The shadow of the trees sweeps like a huge sickle across space. An acrid smell of cold decay rises on the night. The wind wails its threnody for Fumat.
"Open the door, Monsieur Julien."
The lout pushes the door, grumbling to himself. We lay the body on the pavement of the chapel.
Renaud covers the corpse carefully with a faded flag. And suddenly, as if to celebrate the moment, the brutal roar of guns comes to us from the depths of the woods, breaks violently into the chapel, seizes and rattles the trembling window-panes. A hundred times over, a whole nation of cannon yells in honour of Fumat. And each time other Fumats fall in the mud yonder, in their appointed places.
VII
They ought not to have cut off all the light in this manner, and it would not have been done, perhaps, if...
There is a kind of mania for organisation which is the sworn enemy of order; in its efforts to discover the best place for everything, it ends by diverting everything from its right function and locality, and making everything as inopportune as itself. It was a mistake to cut off all the lights this evening, on some pretext or the other. The rooms of the old mansion are not packed with bales of cotton, but with men who have anxious minds and tortured bodies.
A mournful darkness suddenly reigned; and outside, the incessant storm that rages in this country swept along like a river in spate.
Little Rochet was dreaming in the liquid light of the lamp, with hands crossed on his breast, and the delicate profile of an exhausted saint.
He was dreaming of vague and exquisite things, for cruel fever has moments of generosity between two nightmares. He was dreaming so sweetly that he forgot the abominable stench of his body, and that a smile touched the two deep wrinkles at the corners of his mouth, set there by a week of agony.
But all the lamps have been put out, and the noise of the hurricane has become more insistent, and the wounded have ceased talking, for darkness discourages conversation.
There are some places where the men with whom the shells have dealt mercifully and whose wounds are only scratches congregate. These have only the honour of wounds, and what may be called their delights.... But here, we have only the worst cases; and here they have to await the supreme decision of death.
Little Rochet awoke to a reality full of darkness and despair. He heard nothing but laboured breathing round him, and rising above it all, the violent breath of the storm. He was suddenly conscious of his lacerated stomach, of his lost leg, and he realised that the fetid smell in the air was the smell of his flesh. And he thought of the loving letter he had received in the morning from his four big sisters with glossy hair, he thought of all his lost, ravished happiness....
Renaud hurries up, groping his way among the dark ambushes of the corridor.
"Come, come quickly. Little Rochet has thrown himself out of bed."
Holding up a candle, I take in the melancholy scene. We have to get Rochet into bed again, readjust his bandages, wipe up the fetid liquid spilt on the floor.
Rochet's lips are compressed. I stoop to his ear and ask softly:
"Why did you do this?"
His face remains calm, and he answers gently, looking me full in the eyes: "I want to die."
I leave the room, disarmed, my head bowed, and go in search of Monet, who is a priest and an excellent orderly. He is smoking a pipe in a corner. He has just had news that his young brother has been killed in action, and he had snatched a few minutes of solitude.
"Monet," I say, "I think Rochet is a believer. Well, go to him. He may want you."
Monet puts away his pipe, and goes off noiselessly.
As to me, I go and wander about outside. On the poplar-lined road, in company with the furious rain and the darkness, I shall perhaps be able to master the flood of bitterness that sweeps over me.
At the end of an hour, my anxiety brings me back to Rochet's bedside. The candle is burning away with a steady flame. Monet is reading in a little book with a clasp. The profile of the wounded man has still the pitiful austerity of a tortured saint.
"Is he quieter now?"
Monet lifts his fine dark eyes to my face, and drops his book.
"Yes. He is dead."
VIII
Why has Hell been painted as a place of hopeless torture and eternal lamentation?
I believe that even in the lowest depths of Hell, the damned sing, jest, and play cards. I am led to imagine this after seeing these men rowing in their galleys, chained to them by fever and wounds.
Blaireau, who has only lost a hand, preludes in an undertone: