Thus said a Zouave, who had been lying helpless for three days on his bed.
"If you knew how strong I am! Look at my arms! No one could unhook a bag like me, and heave it over my shoulder—tock! A hundred kilos—with one jerk!"
The doctor looked at the muscular torso, and his face expressed pity, regret, embarrassment, and, perhaps, a certain wish to go away.
"But this wretched bullet prevents me from moving my legs. You must take it out, doctor, you must take it out!"
The doctor glances at the paralysed legs, and the swollen belly, already lifeless. He knows that the bullet broke the spine, and cut through the marrow which sent law and order into all this now inanimate flesh.
"Operate, doctor. Look you, a healthy chap like me would soon get well."
The doctor stammers vague sentences: the operation would be too serious for the present... better wait....
"No, no. Never fear. My health is first-rate. Don't be afraid, the operation is bound to be a success."
His rugged face is contracted by his fixed idea. His voice softens; blind confidence and supplication give it an unusual tone. His heavy eyebrows meet and mingle under the stress of his indomitable will; his soul makes such an effort that the immobility of his legs seems suddenly intolerable. Heavens! Can a man WILL so intensely, and yet be powerless to control his own body?
"Oh, operate, operate! You will see how pleased I shall be!"
The doctor twists the sheet round his forefinger; then, hearing a wounded man groaning in the next ward, he gets up, says he will come back presently, and escapes.
XIV
The colloquy between the rival gods took place at the foot of the great staircase.
The Arab soldier had just died. It was the Arab one used to see under a shed, seated gravely on the ground in the midst of other magnificent Arabs. In those days they had boots of crimson leather, and majestic red mantles. They used to sit in a circle, contemplating from under their turbans the vast expanse of mud watered by the skies of Artois. To-day, they wear the ochre helmet, and show the profiles of Saracen warriors.
The Algerian has just been killed, kicked in the belly by his beautiful white horse.
In the ambulance there was a Mussulman orderly, a well-to-do tradesman, who had volunteered for the work. He, on the other hand, was extremely European, nay, Parisian; but a plump, malicious smile showed itself in the midst of his crisp grey beard, and he had the look in the eyes peculiar to those who come from the other side of the Mediterranean.
Rashid "behaved very well." He had found native words when tending the dying man, and had lavished on him the consolations necessary to those of his country.
When the Algerian was dead, he arranged the winding-sheet himself, in his own fashion; then he lighted a cigarette, and set out in search of Monet and Renaud.
For lack of space, we had no mortuary at the time in the ambulance. Corpses were placed in the chapel of the cemetery while awaiting burial. The military burial-ground had been established within the precincts of the church, close by the civilian cemetery, and in a few weeks it had invaded it like a cancer and threatened to devour it.
Rashid had thought of everything, and this was why he went in search of Monet and Renaud, Catholic priests and ambulance orderlies of the second class.
The meeting took place at the foot of the great staircase. Leaning over the balustrade, I listened, and watched the colloquy of the rival gods.
Monet was thirty years old; he had fine, sombre eyes, and a stiff beard, from which a pipe emerged. Renaud carried the thin face of a seminarist a little on one side.
Monet and Renaud listened gravely, as became people who were deciding in the Name of the Father. Rashid was pleading for his dead Arab with supple eloquence, wrapped in a cloud of tobacco-smoke:
"We cannot leave the Arab's corpse under a wagon, in the storm. ... This man died for France, at his post.... He had a right to all honours, and it was hard enough as it was that he could not have the obsequies he would surely have had in his own country."
Monet nodded approvingly, and Renaud, his mouth half open, was seeking some formula.
It came, and this was it:
"Very well, Monsieur Rashid, take him into the church; that is God's house for every one."
Rashid bowed with perfect deference, and went back to his dead.
Oh, he arranged everything very well! He had made this funeral a personal matter. He was the family, the master of the ceremonies, almost the priest.
The Algerian's body accordingly lay in the chapel, covered with the old faded flag and a handful of chrysanthemums.
It was here the bearers came to take it, and carry it to CONSECRATED GROUND, to lie among the other comrades.
Monet and Renaud were with us when it was lowered into the grave. Rashid represented the dead man's kindred with much dignity. He held something in his hand which he planted in the ground before going away. It was that crescent of plain deal at the end of a stick which is still to be seen in the midst of the worm-eaten crosses, in the shadow of the belfry of L——.
There the same decay works towards the intermingling and the reconciliation of ancient symbols and ancient dogmas.
XV
Nogue is courageous, but Norman; this gives to courage a special form, which excludes neither reserve, nor prudence, nor moderation of language.
On the day when he was wounded, he bore a preliminary operation with perfect calm. Lifting up his shattered arm, I said:
"Are you suffering very much?" And he barely opened his lips to reply:
"Well... perhaps a bit."
Fever came the following days, and with it a certain discomfort. Nogue could not eat, and when asked if he did not feel rather hungry, he shook his head:
"I don't think so."
Well, the arm was broken very high up, the wound looked unhealthy, the fever ran high, and we made up our minds that it was necessary to come to a decision.
"My poor Nogue," I said, "we really can't do anything with that arm of yours. Be sensible. Let us take it off."
If we had waited for his answer, Nogue would have been dead by now. His face expressed great dissatisfaction, but he said neither yes nor no.
"Don't be afraid, Nogue. I will guarantee the success of the operation."
Then he asked to make his will. When the will had been made, Nogue was laid upon the table and operated upon, without having formulated either consent or refusal.
When the first dressing was made, Nogue looked at his bleeding shoulder, and said:
"I suppose you couldn't have managed to leave just a little bit of arm?"
After a few days the patient was able to sit up in an arm-chair. His whole being bore witness to a positive resurrection, but his tongue remained cautious.
"Well, now, you see, you're getting on capitally."
"Hum... might be better."
Never could he make up his mind to give his whole-hearted approval, even after the event, to the decision which had saved his life. When we said to him:
"YOU'RE all right. We've done the business for YOU!" he would not commit himself.
"We shall see, we shall see."
He got quite well, and we sent him into the interior. Since then, he has written to us, "business letters," prudent letters which he signs "a poor mutilated fellow."
XVI
Lapointe and Ropiteau always meet in the dressing ward. Ropiteau is brought in on a stretcher, and Lapointe arrives on foot, jauntily, holding up his elbow, which is going on "as well as possible."
Lying on the table, the dressings removed from his thigh, Ropiteau waits to be tended, looking at a winter fly walking slowly along the ceiling, like an old man bowed down with sorrow. As soon as Ropiteau's wounds are laid bare, Lapointe, who is versed in these matters, opens the conversation.
"What do they put on it?"
"Well, only yellow spirit."
"That's the strongest of all. It stings, but it is first-rate for strengthening the flesh. I always get ether."
"Ether stinks so!"
"Yes, it stinks, but one gets used to it. It warms the blood. Don't you have tubes any longer?"
"They took out the last on Tuesday."
"Mine have been taken away, too. Wait a minute, old chap, let me look at it. Does it itch?"
"Yes, it feels like rats gnawing at me."
"If it feels like rats, it's all right. Mine feels like rats, too. Don't you want to scratch?"
"Yes, but they say I mustn't."
"No, of course, you mustn't.... But you can always tap on the dressing a little with your finger. That is a relief."
Lapointe leans over and examines Ropiteau's large wound.
"Old chap, it's getting on jolly well. Same here; I'll show you presently. It's red, the skin is beginning to grow again. But it is thin, very thin."
Lapointe sits down to have his dressing cut away, then he makes a half turn towards Ropiteau.
"You see—getting on famously."
Ropiteau admires unreservedly.
"Yes, you're right. It looks first-rate."
"And you know... such a beastly mess came out of it."
At this moment, the busy forceps cover up the wounds with the dressing, and the operation comes to an end.
"So long!" says Lapointe to his elbow, casting a farewell glance at it. And he adds, as he gets to the door:
"Now there are only the damned fingers that won't get on. But I don't care. I've made up my mind to be a postman."
XVII
Bouchenton was not very communicative. We knew nothing of his past history. As to his future plans, he revealed them by one day presenting to the head doctor for his signature a paper asking leave to open a Moorish cafe at Medea after his recovery, a request the head doctor felt himself unable to endorse.
Bouchenton had undergone a long martyrdom in order to preserve an arm from which the bone had been partially removed, but from which a certain amount of work might still be expected. He screamed like the others, and his cry was "Mohabdi! Mohabdi!" When the forceps came near, he cried: "Don't put them in!" And after this he maintained a silence made up of dignity and indolence. During the day he was to be seen wandering about the wards, holding up his ghostly muffled arm with his sound hand. In the evening, he learned to play draughts, because it is a serious, silent game, and requires consideration.
Now one day when Bouchenton, seated on a chair, was waiting for his wound to be dressed, the poor adjutant Figuet began to complain in a voice that was no more than the shadow of a voice, just as his body was no more than the shadow of a body.
Figuet was crawling at the time up the slopes of a Calvary where he was soon to fall once more, never to rise again.
The most stupendous courage and endurance foundered then in a despair for which there seemed henceforth to be no possible alleviation.
Figuet, I say, began to complain, and every one in the ward feigned to be engrossed in his occupation, and to hear nothing, because when such a man began to groan, the rest felt that the end of all things had come.
Bouchenton turned his head, looked at the adjutant, seized his flabby arm carefully with his right hand, and set out. Walking with little short steps he came to the table where the suffering man lay.
Stretching out his neck, his great bowed body straining in an effort of attention, he looked at the wounds, the pus, the soiled bandages, the worn, thin face, and his own wooden visage laboured under the stress of all kinds of feelings.
Then Bouchenton did a very simple thing; he relaxed his hold on his own boneless arm, held out his right hand to Figuet, seized his transparent fingers and held them tightly clasped.
The adjutant ceased groaning. As long as the silent pressure lasted, he ceased to complain, ceased perhaps to suffer. Bouchenton kept his right hand there as long as it was necessary.
I saw this, Bouchenton, my brother. I will not forget it. And I saw, too, your aching, useless left arm, which you had been obliged to abandon in order to have a hand to give, hanging by your side like a limp rag.
XVIII
To be over forty years old, to be a tradesman of repute, well known throughout one's quarter, to be at the head of a prosperous provision-dealer's business, and to get two fragments of shell—in the back and the left buttock respectively—is really a great misfortune; yet this is what happened to M. Levy, infantryman and Territorial.
I never spoke familiarly to M. Levy, because of his age and his air of respectability; and perhaps, too, because, in his case, I felt a great and special need to preserve my authority.
Monsieur Levy was not always "a good patient." When I first approached him, he implored me not to touch him "at any price."
I disregarded these injunctions, and did what was necessary. Throughout the process, Monsieur Levy was snoring, be it said. But he woke up at last, uttered one or two piercing cries, and stigmatised me as a "brute." All right.
Then I showed him the big pieces of cast-iron I had removed from his back and his buttock respectively. Monsieur Levy's eyes at once filled with tears; he murmured a few feeling words about his family, and then pressed my hands warmly: "Thank you, thank you, dear Doctor."
Since then, Monsieur Levy has suffered a good deal, I must admit. There are the plugs! And those abominable india-rubber tubes we push into the wounds! Monsieur Levy, kneeling and prostrating himself, his head in his bolster, suffered every day and for several days without stoicism or resignation. I was called an "assassin" and also on several occasions, a "brute." All right.
However, as I was determined that Monsieur Levy should get well, I renewed the plugs, and looked sharply after the famous india-rubber tubes.
The time came when my hands were warmly pressed and my patient said: "Thank you, thank you, dear Doctor," every day.
At last Monsieur Levy ceased to suffer, and confined himself to the peevish murmurs of a spoilt beauty or a child that has been scolded. But now no one takes him seriously. He has become the delight of the ward; he laughs so heartily when the dressing is over, he is naturally so gay and playful, that I am rather at a loss as to the proper expression to assume when, alluding to the past, he says, with a look in which good nature, pride, simplicity, and a large proportion of playful malice are mingled:
"I suffered so much! so much!"
XIX
He was no grave, handsome Arab, looking as if he had stepped from the pages of the "Arabian Nights," but a kind of little brown monster with an overhanging forehead and ugly, scanty hair.
He lay upon the table, screaming, because his abdomen was very painful and his hip was all tumefied. What could we say to him? He could understand nothing; he was strange, terrified, pitiable....
At my wits' ends, I took out a cigarette and placed it between his lips. His whole face changed. He took hold of the cigarette delicately between two bony fingers; he had a way of holding it which was a marvel of aristocratic elegance.
While we finished the dressing, the poor fellow smoked slowly and gravely, with all the distinction of an Oriental prince; then, with a negligent gesture, he threw away the cigarette, of which he had only smoked half.
Presently, suddenly becoming an animal, he spit upon my apron, and kissed my hand like a dog, repeating something which sounded like "Bouia! Bouia!"
XX
Gautreau looked like a beast of burden. He was heavy, square, solid of base and majestic of neck and throat. What he could carry on his back would have crushed an ordinary man; he had big bones, so hard that the fragment of shell which struck him on the skull only cracked it, and got no further into it. Gautreau arrived at the hospital alone, on foot; he sat down on a chair in the corner, saying:
"No need to hurry; it's only a scratch."
We gave him a cup of tea with rum in it, and he began to hum:
En courant par les epeignesJe m'etios fait un ecourchon,Et en courant par les epeignesEt en courant apres not' couchon.
"Ah!" said Monsieur Boissin, "you are a man! Come here, let me see."
Gautreau went into the operating ward saying:
"It feels queer to be walking on dry ground when you've just come off the slime. You see: it's only a scratch. But one never knows: there may be some bits left in it."
Dr. Boussin probed the wound, and felt the cracked bone. He was an old surgeon who had his own ideas about courage and pain. He made up his mind.
"I am in a hurry; you are a man. There is just a little something to be done to you. Kneel down there and don't stir."
A few minutes later, Gautreau was on his knees, holding on to the leg of the table. His head was covered with blood-stained bandages, and Dr. Boussin, chisel in hand, was tapping on his skull with the help of a little mallet, like a sculptor. Gautreau exclaimed:
"Monsieur Bassin, Monsieur Bassin, you're hurting me."
"Not Bassin, but Boussin," replied the old man calmly.
"Well, Boussin, if you like."
There was a silence, and then Gautreau suddenly added:
"Monsieur Bassin, you are killing me with these antics."
"No fear!"
"Monsieur Bassin, I tell you you're killing me."
"Just a second more."
"Monsieur Bassin, you're driving nails into my head, it's a shame."
"I've almost finished."
"Monsieur Bassin, I can't stand any more."
"It's all over now," said the surgeon, laying down his instruments.
Gautreau's head was swathed with cotton wool and he left the ward.
"The old chap means well," he said, laughing, "but fancy knocking like that... with a hammer! It's not that it hurts so much; the pain was no great matter. But it kills one, that sort of thing, and I'm not going to stand that."
XXI
There is only one man in the world who can hold Hourticq's leg, and that is Monet.
Hourticq, who is a Southerner, cries despairingly: "Oh, cette jammbe, cette jammbe!" And his anxious eyes look eagerly round for some one: not his doctor, but his orderly, Monet. Whatever happens, the doctor will always do those things which doctors do. Monet is the only person who can take the heel and then the foot in both hands, raise the leg gently, and hold it in the air as long as it is necessary.
There are people, it seems, who think this notion ridiculous. They are all jealous persons who envy Monet's position and would like to show that they too know how to hold Hourticq's leg properly. But it is not my business to show favour to the ambitious. As soon as Hourticq is brought in, I call Monet. If Monet is engaged, well, I wait. He comes, lays hold of the leg, and Hourticq ceases to lament. It is sometimes a long business, very long; big drops of sweat come out on Monet's forehead. But I know that he would not give up his place for anything in the world.
When Mazy arrived at the hospital, Hourticq, who is no egoist, said to him at once in a low tone:
"Yours is a leg too, isn't it? You must try to get Monet to hold it for you."
XXII
If Bouchard were not so bored, he would not be very wretched, for he is very courageous, and he has a good temper. But he is terribly bored, in his gentle, uncomplaining fashion. He is too ill to talk or play games. He cannot sleep; he can only contemplate the wall, and his own thoughts which creep slowly along it, like caterpillars.
In the morning, I bring a catheter with me, and when Bouchard's wounds are dressed, I apply it, for unfortunately, he can no longer perform certain functions independently.
Bouchard has crossed his hands behind the nape of his neck, and watches the process with a certain interest. I ask:
"Did I hurt you? Is it very unpleasant?"
Bouchard gives a melancholy smile and shakes his head:
"Oh, no, not at all! In fact it rather amuses me. It makes a few minutes pass. The day is so long...."
XXIII THOUGHTS OF PROSPER RUFFIN
... God! How awful it is in this carriage! Who is it who is groaning like that? It's maddening! And then, all this would never have happened if they had only brought the coffee at the right time. Well now, a wretched 77... oh, no! Who is it who is groaning like that? God, another jolt! No, no, man, we are not salad. Take care there. My kidneys are all smashed.
Ah! now something is dripping on my nose. Hi! You up there, what's happening? He doesn't answer. I suppose it's blood, all this mess.
Now again, some one is beginning to squeal like a pig. By the way, can it be me? What! it was I who was groaning! Upon my word, it's a little too strong, that! It was I myself who was making all the row, and I did not know it. It's odd to hear oneself screaming.
Ah! now it's stopping, their beastly motor.
Look, there's the sun! What's that tree over there? I know, it's a Japanese pine. Well, you see, I'm a gardener, old chap. Oh, oh, oh! My back! What will Felicie say to me?
Look, there's Felicie coming down to the washing trough. She pretends not to see me.... I will steal behind the elder hedge. Felicie! Felicie! I have a piece of a 77 in my kidneys. I like her best in her blue bodice.
What are you putting over my nose, you people? It stinks horribly. I am choking, I tell you. Felicie, Felicie. Put on your blue bodice with the white spots, my little Feli... Oh, but... oh, but...!
Oh, the Whitsuntide bells already! God—the bells already... the Whitsun bells... the bells....
XXIV
I remember him very well, although he was not long with us. Indeed I think that I shall never forget him, and yet he stayed such a short time....
When he arrived, we told him that an operation was necessary, and he made a movement with his head, as if to say that it was our business, not his.
We operated, and as soon as he recovered consciousness, he went off again into a dream which was like a glorious delirium, silent and haughty.
His breathing was so impeded by blood that it sounded like groaning; but his eyes were full of a strange serenity. That look was never with us.
I had to uncover and dress his wounds several times; and THOSE WOUNDS MUST HAVE SUFFERED. But to the last, he himself seemed aloof from everything, even his own sufferings.
XXV
"Come in here. You can see him once more."
I open the door, and push the big fair artilleryman into the room where his brother has just died.
I turn back the sheet and uncover the face of the corpse. The flesh is still warm.
The big fellow looks like a peasant. He holds his helmet in both hands, and stares at his brother's face with eyes full of horror and amazement. Then suddenly, he begins to cry out:
"Poor Andre! Poor Andre!"
This cry of the rough man is unexpected, and grandiose as the voice of ancient tragedians chanting the threnody of a hero.
Then he drops his helmet, throws himself on his knees beside the death-bed, takes the dead face between his hands and kisses it gently and slowly with a little sound of the lips, as one kisses a baby's hand.
I take him by the arm and lead him away. His sturdy body is shaken by sobs which are like the neighing of a horse; he is blinded by his tears, and knocks against all the furniture. He can do nothing but lament in a broken voice:
"Poor Andre! Poor Andre!"
XXVI
La Gloriette is amongst the pine-trees. I lift up a corner of the canvas and he is there. In spite of the livid patches on the skin, in spite of the rigidity of the features, and the absence for all time of the glance, it is undoubtedly the familiar face.
What a long time he suffered to win the right to be at last this thing which suffers no more!
I draw back the winding-sheet. The body is as yet but little touched by corruption. The dressings are in place, as before. And as before, I think, as I draw back the sheet, of the look he will turn on me at the moment of suffering.
But there is no longer any look, no longer any suffering, no longer even any movements. Only, only unimaginable eternity.
For whom is the damp autumn breeze which flutters the canvas hung before the door? For whom the billowy murmur of the pine-trees and the rays of light crossed by a flight of insects? For whom this growling of cannon mingling now with the landscape like one of the sounds of nature? For me only, for me, alone here with the dead.
The corpse is still so near to the living man that I cannot make up my mind that I am alone, that I cannot make up my mind to think as when I am alone.
For indeed we spent too many days hoping together, enduring together, and if you will allow me to say so, my comrade, suffering together. We spent too many days wishing for the end of the fever, examining the wound, searching after the deeply rooted cause of the disaster—both tremulous, you from the effort to bear your pain, I sometimes from having inflicted it.
We spent so many days, do you remember, oh, body without a soul ... so many days fondly expecting the medal you had deserved. But it seems that one must have given an eye or a limb to be put on the list, and you, all of a sudden, you gave your life. The medal had not come, for it does not travel so quickly as death.
So many days! And now we are together again, for the last time.
Well! I came for a certain purpose. I came to learn certain things at last that your body can tell me now.
I open the case. As before, I cut the dressings with the shining scissors. And I was just about to say to you, as before: "If I hurt you, call out."
XXVII
At the edge of the beetroot field, a few paces from the road, in the white sand of Champagne, there is a burial-ground.
Branches of young beech encircle it, making a rustic barrier that shuts out nothing, but allows the eyes and the winds to wander at will. There is a porch like those of Norman gardens. Near the entrance four pine-trees were planted, and these have died standing at their posts, like soldiers.
It is a burial-ground of men.
In the villages, round the churches, or on the fair hill-sides, among vines and flowers, there are ancient graveyards which the centuries filled slowly, and where woman sleeps beside man, and the child beside the grandfather.
But this burial-ground owes nothing to old age or sickness. It is the burial-ground of young, strong men.
We may read their names on the hundreds of little crosses which repeat daily in speechless unison: "There must be something more precious than life, more necessary than life... since we are here."
Mercier is dead, and I saw his corpse weep.... I did not think such a thing possible. The orderly had just washed his face and combed his grey hair.
I said: "You are not forty yet, my poor Mercier, and your hair is almost white already."
"It is because my life has been a very hard one, and I have had so many sorrows. I have worked so hard... so hard! And I have had so little luck."
There are pitiful little wrinkles all over his face; a thousand disappointments have left indelible traces there. And yet his eyes are always smiling; from out his faded features they shine, bright with an artless candour and radiant with hope.
"You will cure me, and perhaps I shall be luckier in the future."
I say "yes," and I think, "Alas! No, no."
But suddenly he calls me. Great dark hollows appear under the smiling eyes. A livid sweat bathes his forehead.
"Come, come!" he says. "Something terrible is taking hold of me. Surely I am going to die."
We busy ourselves with the poor paralysed body. The face alone labours to translate its sufferings. The hands make the very slightest movement on the sheet. The bullets of the machine-gun have cut off all the rest from the sources of life.
We do what we can, but I feel his heart beating more feebly; his lips make immense efforts to beg for one drop, one drop only from the vast cup of air.
Gradually he escapes from this hell. I divine that his hand makes a movement as if to detain mine.
"Stay by me," he says; "I am afraid."
I stay by him. The sweat no longer stands on his brow. The horrible distress passes off. The air flows again into the miserable breast. The gentle eyes have not ceased to smile.
"You will save me after all," he says; "I have had too miserable a life to die yet, Monsieur."
I press his hand to give him confidence, and I feel that his hard hand is happy in mine. My fingers have groped in his flesh, his blood has flowed over them, and this creates strong ties between two men.
Calm seems completely restored. I talk to him of his beautiful native place. He was a baker in a village of Le Cantal. I passed through it once as a traveller in peace time. We recall the scent of the juniper-bushes on the green slopes in summer, and the mineral fountains with wonderful flavours that gush forth among the mountains.
"Oh!" he exclaims, "I shall always see you!"
"You will see me, Mercier?"
He is a very simple fellow; he tries to explain, and merely adds:
"In my eyes.... I shall always see you in my eyes."
What else does he see? What other thing is suddenly reflected in his eyes?
"I think... oh, it is beginning again!"
It is true; the spasm is beginning again. It is terrible. In spite of our efforts, it overcomes the victim, and this time we are helpless.
"I feel that I am going to die," he says.
The smiling eyes are still fixed imploringly upon me.
"But you will save me, you will save me!"
Death has already laid a disfiguring hand on Mercier.
"Stay by me."
Yes, I will stay by you, and hold your hand. Is there nothing more I can do for you?
His nostrils quiver. It is hard to have been wretched for forty years, and to have to give up the humble hope of smelling the pungent scent of the juniper-bushes once more....
His lips contract, and then relax gradually, so sadly. It is hard to have suffered for forty years, and to be unable to quench one's last thirst with the wonderful waters of our mountain springs....
Now the dark sweat gathers again on the hollow brow. Oh, it is hard to die after forty years of toil, without ever having had leisure to wipe the sweat from a brow that has always been bent over one's work.
The sacrifice is immense, and we cannot choose our hour; we must make it as soon as we hear the voice that demands it.
The man must lay down his tools and say: "Here I am."
Oh, how hard it is to leave this life of unceasing toil and sorrow!
The eyes still smile feebly. They smile to the last moment.
He speaks no more. He breathes no more. The heart throbs wildly, then stops dead like a foundered horse.
Mercier is dead. The pupils of his eyes are solemnly distended upon a glassy abyss. All is over. I have not saved him....
Then from those dead eyes great tears ooze slowly and flow upon his cheeks. I see his features contract as if to weep throughout eternity.
I keep the dead hand still clasped in mine for several long minutes.
FEBRUARY-APRIL 1916
We were going northward by forced marches, through a France that was like a mournful garden planted with crosses. We were no longer in doubt as to our appointed destination; every day since we had disembarked at B——our orders had enjoined us to hasten our advance to the fighting units of the Army Corps. This Army Corps was contracting, and drawing itself together hurriedly, its head already in the thick of the fray, its tail still winding along the roads, across the battle-field of the Marne.
February was closing in, damp and icy, with squalls of sleet, under a sullen, hideous sky, lowering furiously down to the level of the ground. Everywhere there were graves, uniformly decent, or rather according to pattern, showing a shield of tri-colour or black and white, and figures. Suddenly, we came upon immense flats, whence the crosses stretched out their arms between the poplars like men struggling to save themselves from being engulfed. Many ancient villages, humble, irremediable ruins. And yet here and there, perched upon these, frail cabins of planks and tiles, sending forth thin threads of smoke, and emitting a timid light, in an attempt to begin life again as before, on the same spot as before. Now and again we chanced upon a hamlet which the hurricane had passed by almost completely, full to overflowing with the afflux of neighbouring populations.
Beyond P——, our advance, though it continued to be rapid, became very difficult, owing to the confluence of convoys and troops. The main roads, reserved for the military masses which were under the necessity of moving rapidly, arriving early, and striking suddenly, were barred to us. From every point of the horizon disciplined multitudes converged, with their arsenal of formidable implements, rolling along in an atmosphere of benzine and hot oil. Through this ordered mass, our convoys threaded their way tenaciously and advanced. We could see on the hill sides, crawling like a clan of migrating ants, stretcher-bearers and their dogs drawing handcarts for the wounded, then the columns of orderlies, muddy and exhausted, then the ambulances, which every week of war loads a little more heavily, dragged along by horses in a steam of sweat.
From time to time, the whole train halted at some cross-road, and the ambulances allowed more urgent things to pass in front of them—things designed to kill, sturdy grey mortars borne along post haste in a metallic rumble.
A halt, a draught of wine mingled with rain, a few minutes to choke over a mouthful of stale bread, and we were off again, longing for the next halt, for a dry shelter, for an hour of real sleep.
Soon after leaving C——we began to meet fugitives. This complicated matters very much, and the spectacle began to show an odious likeness to the scenes of the beginning of the war, the scenes of the great retreat.
Keeping along the roadsides, the by-roads, the field-paths, they were fleeing from the Verdun district, whence they had been evacuated by order. They were urging on miserable old horses, drawing frail carts, their wheels sunk in the ruts up to the nave, loaded with mattresses and eiderdowns, with appliances for eating and sleeping, and sometimes too, with cages in which birds were twittering. On they went, from village to village, seeking an undiscoverable lodging, but not complaining, saying merely:
"You are going to Verdun? We have just come from X——. We were ordered to leave. It is very difficult to find a place to settle down in."
Women passed. Two of them were dragging a little baby-carriage in which an infant lay asleep. One of them was quite young, the other old. They held up their skirts out of the mud. They were wearing little town shoes, and every minute they sank into the slime like ourselves, sometimes above their ankles.
All day long we encountered similar processions. I do not remember seeing one of these women weep; but they seemed terrified, and mortally tired.
Meanwhile, the sound of the guns became fuller and more regular. All the roads we caught sight of in the country seemed to be bearing their load of men and of machines. Here and there a horse which had succumbed at its task lay rotting at the foot of a hillock. A subdued roar rose to the ear, made up of trampling hoofs, of grinding wheels, of the buzz of motors, and of a multitude talking and eating on the march.
Suddenly we debouched at the edge of a wood upon a height whence we could see the whole battle-field. It was a vast expanse of plains and slopes, studded with the grey woods of winter. Long trails of smoke from burning buildings settled upon the landscape. And other trails, minute and multi-coloured, rose from the ground wherever projectiles were raining. Nothing more: wisps of smoke, brief flashes visible even in broad daylight, and a string of captive balloons, motionless and observant witnesses of all.
But we were already descending the incline and the various planes of the landscape melted one after the other. As we were passing over a bridge, I saw in a group of soldiers a friend I had not met since the beginning of the war. We could not stop, so he walked along with me for a while, and we spent these few minutes recalling the things of the past. Then as he left me we embraced, though we had never done so in times of peace.
Night was falling. Knowing that we were now at our last long lap, we encouraged the worn-out men. At R——I lost touch with my formation. I halted on the roadside, calling aloud into the darkness. An artillery train passed, covering me with mud to my eyes. Finally, I picked up my friends, and we marched on through villages illumined by the camp fires which were flickering under a driving rain, through a murky country which the flash of cannon suddenly showed to be covered with a multitude of men, of horses, and of martial objects.
It was February 27. Between ten and eleven at night we arrived at a hospital installed in some wooden sheds, and feverishly busy. We were at B——, a miserable village on which next day the Germans launched some thirty monster-shells, yet failed to kill so much as a mouse.
The night was spent on straw, to the stentorian snores of fifty men overcome by fatigue. Then reveille, and again, liquid mud over the ankles. As the main road was forbidden to our ambulances there was an excited discussion as a result of which we separated: the vehicles to go in search of a by-way, and we, the pedestrians, to skirt the roads on which long lines of motor-lorries, coming and going, passed each other in haste like the carriages of an immense train.
We had known since midnight where we were to take up our quarters; the suburb of G——was only an hour's march further on. In the fields, right and left, were bivouacs of colonial troops with muddy helmets; they had come back from the firing line, and seemed strangely quiet. In front of us lay the town, half hidden, full of crackling sounds and echoes. Beyond, the hills of the Meuse, on which we could distinguish the houses of the villages, and the continuous rain of machine-gun bullets. We skirted a meadow strewn with forsaken furniture, beds, chests, a whole fortune which looked like the litter of a hospital. At last we arrived at the first houses, and we were shown the place where we were expected.
There were two brick buildings of several storeys, connected by a glazed corridor; the rest of the enclosure was occupied by wooden sheds. Behind lay orchards and gardens, the first houses of the suburb. In front, the wall of a park, a meadow, a railway track, and La Route, the wonderful and terrible road that enters the town at this very point.
Groups of lightly wounded men were hobbling towards the hospital; the incessant rush of motors kept up the feverish circulation of a demolished ant-hill.
As we approached the buildings, a doctor came out to meet us.
"Come, come. There's work enough for a month."
It was true. The effluvium and the moans of several hundreds of wounded men greeted us. Ambulance No——, which we had come to relieve, had been hard at it since the night before, without having made much visible progress. Doctors and orderlies, their faces haggard from a night of frantic toil, came and went, choosing among the heaps of wounded, and tended two while twenty more poured in.
While waiting for our material, we went over the buildings. But a few days before, contagious diseases had been treated here. A hasty disinfection had left the wards reeking with formaline which rasped the throat without disguising the sickly stench of the crowded sufferers. They were huddled round the stoves in the rooms, lying upon the beds of the dormitories, or crouching on the flags of the passages.
In each ward of the lower storey there were thirty or forty men of every branch of the service, moaning and going out from time to time to crawl to the latrines, or, mug in hand, to fetch something to drink.
As we explored further, the scene became more terrible; in the back rooms and in the upper building a number of severely wounded men had been placed, who began to howl as soon as we entered. Many of them had been there for several days. The brutality of circumstances, the relief of units, the enormous sum of work, all combined to create one of those situations which dislocate and overwhelm the most willing service.
We opened a door, and the men who were lying within began to scream at the top of their voices. Some, lying on their stretchers on the floor, seized us by the legs as we passed, imploring us to attend to them. A few bewildered orderlies hurried hither and thither, powerless to meet the needs of this mass of suffering. Every moment I felt my coat seized, and heard a voice saying:
"I have been here four days. Dress my wounds, for God's sake."
And when I answered that I would come back again immediately, the poor fellow began to cry.
"They all say they will come back, but they never do."
Occasionally a man in delirium talked to us incoherently as we moved along. Sometimes we went round a quiet bed to see the face of the sufferer, and found only a corpse.
Each ward we inspected revealed the same distress, exhaled the same odour of antiseptics and excrements, for the orderlies could not always get to the patient in time, and many of the men relieved themselves apparently unconcerned.
I remember a little deserted room in disorder, on the table a bowl of coffee with bread floating in it; a woman's slippers on the floor, and in a corner, toilet articles and some strands of fair hair.... I remember a corner where a wounded man suffering from meningitis, called out unceasingly: 27, 28, 29... 27, 28, 29... a prey to a strange obsession of numbers. I see a kitchen where a soldier was plucking a white fowl... I see an Algerian non-commissioned officer pacing the corridor....
Towards noon, the head doctor arrived followed by my comrades, and our vehicles. With him I made the round of the buildings again while they were unpacking our stores. I had got hold of a syringe, while waiting for a knife, and I set to work distributing morphia. The task before us seemed immense, and every minute it increased. We began to divide it hastily, to assign to each his part. The cries of the sufferers muffled the sound of a formidable cannonade. An assistant at my side, whom I knew to be energetic and resolute, muttered between his teeth: "No! no! Anything rather than war!"
But we had first to introduce some order into our Inferno.
In a few hours this order appeared and reigned. We were exhausted by days of marching and nights of broken sleep, but men put off their packs and set to work with a silent courage that seemed to exalt even the least generous natures. Our first spell lasted for thirty-six hours, during which each one gave to the full measure of his powers, without a thought of self.
Four operation-wards had been arranged. The wounded were brought in unceasingly, and a grave and prudent mind pronounced upon the state of each, upon his fate, his future.... Confronted by the overwhelming flood of work to be done, the surgeon, before seizing the knife, had to meditate deeply, and make a decision as to the sacrifice which would ensure life, or give some hope of life. In a moment of effective thought, he had to perceive and weigh a man's whole existence, then act, with method and audacity.
As soon as one wounded man left the ward, another was brought in; while the preparations for the operation were being made, we went to choose among and classify the patients beforehand, for many needed nothing more; they had passed beyond human aid, and awaited, numb and unconscious, the crowning mercy of death.
The word "untransportable" once pronounced, directed all our work. The wounded capable of waiting a few hours longer for attention, and of going elsewhere for it were removed. But when the buzz of the motors was heard, every one wanted to go, and men begging to be taken away entered upon their death agony as they assured us they felt quite strong enough to travel....
Some told us their histories; the majority were silent. They wanted to go elsewhere... and above all, to sleep, to drink. Natural wants dominated, and made them forget the anguish of their wounds....
I remember one poor fellow who was asked if he wanted anything. ... He had a terrible wound in the chest, and was waiting to be examined. He replied timidly that he wanted the urinal, and when the orderly hurried to him bringing it, he was dead.
The pressure of urgent duty had made us quite unmindful of the battle close by, and of the deafening cannonade. However, towards evening, the buildings trembled under the fury of the detonations. A little armoured train had taken up its position near us. The muzzle of a naval gun protruded from it, and from moment to moment thrust out a broad tongue of flame with a catastrophic roar.
The work was accelerated at the very height of the uproar. Rivers of water had run along the corridors, washing down the mud, the blood and the refuse of the operation-wards. The men who had been operated on were carried to beds on which clean sheets had been spread. The open windows let in the pure, keen air, and night fell on the hillsides of the Meuse, where the tumult raged and lightnings flashed.
Sometimes a wounded man brought us the latest news of the battle. Between his groans, he described the incredible bombardment, the obstinate resistance, the counter-attacks at the height of the hurly-burly.
All these simple fellows ended their story with the same words, surprising words at such a moment of suffering:
"They can't get through now...."
Then they began to moan again.
During the terrible weeks of the battle, it was from the lips of these tortured men that we heard the most amazing words of hope and confidence, uttered between two cries of anguish.
The first night passed under this stress and pressure. The morning found us face to face with labours still vast, but classified, divided, and half determined.
A superior officer came to visit us. He seemed anxious.
"They have spotted you," he said. "I hope you mayn't have to work upon each other. You will certainly be bombarded at noon."
We had forgotten this prophecy by the time it was fulfilled.
About noon, the air was rent by a screeching whistle, and some dozen shells fell within the hospital enclosure, piercing one of the buildings, but sparing the men. This was the beginning of an irregular but almost continuous bombardment, which was not specially directed against us, no doubt, but which threatened us incessantly.
No cellars. Nothing but thin walls. The work went on.
On the third day a lull enabled us to complete our organisation. The enemy was bombarding the town and the lines persistently. Our artillery replied, shell for shell, in furious salvos; a sort of thunderous wall rose around us which seemed to us like a rampart. ... The afflux of wounded had diminished. We had just received men who had been fighting in the open country, as in the first days of the war, but under a hail of projectiles hitherto reserved for the destruction of fortresses. Our comrade D——arrived from the battlefield on foot, livid, supporting his shattered elbow. He stammered out a tragic story: his regiment had held its ground under a surging tide of fire; thousands of huge shells had fallen in a narrow ravine, and he had seen limbs hanging in the thicket, a savage dispersal of human bodies. The men had held their ground, and then had fought....
A quarter of an hour after his arrival D——, refreshed and strengthened, was contemplating the big wound in his arm on the operating table, and talking calmly of his ruined future....
Towards the evening of this day, we were able to go out of the building, and breathe the unpolluted air for a few minutes.
The noise reigned supreme, as silence reigns elsewhere. We were impregnated, almost intoxicated with it....
A dozen of those captive balloons which the soldiers call "sausages" formed an aerial semi-circle and kept watch.
On the other side of the hills the German balloons also watched in the purple mist to the East.
Night came, and the balloons remained faithfully at their posts. We were in the centre of a circus of fire, woven by all the lightnings of the cannonade. To the south-west, however, a black breach opened, and one divined a free passage there towards the interior of the country and towards silence. A few hundred feet from us, a cross-road continually shelled by the enemy echoed to the shock of projectiles battering the ground like hammers on an anvil. We often found at our feet fragments of steel still hot, which in the gloom seemed slightly phosphorescent.
From this day forth, a skilful combination of our hours and our means enabled us to take short spells of rest in turn. However, for a hundred reasons sleep was impossible to me, and for several weeks I forgot what it was to slumber.
I used to retire, then, from time to time to the room set apart for my friend V——and myself, and lie down on a bed, overcome by a fatigue that verged on stupefaction; but the perpetual clatter of sabots and shoes in the passage kept the mind alert and the eyes open. The chorus of the wounded rose in gusts; there were always in the adjoining wards some dozen men wounded in the head, and suffering from meningitis, which provoked a kind of monotonous howling; there were men wounded in the abdomen, and crying out for the drink that was denied them; there were the men wounded in the chest, and racked by a low cough choked with blood... and all the rest who lay moaning, hoping for an impossible repose....
Then I would get up and go back to work, haunted by the terrible fear that excess of fatigue might have made my eye less keen, my hand less steady than imperious duty required.
At night more especially, the bombardment was renewed, in hurricane gusts.
The air, rent by projectiles, mewed like a furious cat; the detonations came closer, then retired methodically, like the footsteps of a giant on guard around us, above us, upon us.
Every morning the orderlies took advantage of a moment of respite to run and inspect the new craters, and unearth the fuses of shells.... I thought of the delightful phrase of assistant-surgeon M——whom we had attended for a wound on the head, and who said to me as I was taking him back to bed, and we heard the explosions close by:
"Oh, the marmites (big shells) always fall short of one."
But to a great many of the wounded, the perpetual uproar was intolerable. They implored us with tears to send them somewhere else; those we kept were, as a fact, unable to bear removal; we had to soothe them and keep them, in spite of everything. Some, overcome by fatigue, slept all day; others showed extraordinary indifference, perhaps due to a touch of delirium, like the man with a wound in the abdomen which I was dressing one morning, and who when he saw me turn my head at the sound of an explosion which ploughed up a neighbouring field, assured me quietly that "those things weren't dangerous."
One night a policeman ran in with his face covered with blood.
He was waving a lantern which he used to regulate the wheeled traffic, and he maintained that the enemy had spotted his lamp and had peppered him with bullets. As a fact, he had only some slight scratches. He went off, washed and bandaged, but only to come back to us the next day dead. A large fragment of iron had penetrated his eye.
There was an entrance ward, where we sorted the cases. Ten times a day we thought we had emptied this reservoir of misery; but we always found it full again, paved with muddy stretchers on which men lay, panting and waiting.
Opposite to this ante-room was a clearing ward; it seemed less dismal than the other, though it was just as bare, and not any lighter; but the wounded there were clean; they had been operated on, they wore white bandages, they had been comforted with hot drinks and with all sorts of hopes, for they had already escaped the first summons of Death.
Between these two rooms, a clerk lived in the draught, the victim of an accumulation of indispensable and stupefying documents.
In the beginning, the same man sat for three days and three nights chained to this ungrateful task until at last we saw him, his face convulsed, almost mad after unremittingly labelling all this suffering with names and figures.
The first days of March were chilly, with alternations of snow and sunshine. When the air was pure, we heard it vibrate with the life of aeroplanes and echo to their contests. The dry throb of machine-guns, the incessant scream of shrapnel formed a kind of crackling dome over our heads. The German aeroplanes overwhelmed the environs with bombs which gave a prolonged whistle before tearing up the soil or gutting a house. One fell a few paces from the ward where I was operating on a man who had been wounded in the head. I remember the brief glance I cast outwards and the screams and headlong flight of the men standing under the windows.
One morning I saw an airship which was cruising over the hills of the Meuse suddenly begin to trail after it, comet-wise, a thick tail of black smoke, and then rush to the earth, irradiated by a burst of flame, brilliant even in the daylight. And I thought of the two men who were experiencing this fall.
The military situation improved daily, but the battle was no less strenuous. The guns used by the enemy for the destruction of men produced horrible wounds, certainly more severe on the whole than those we had tended during the first twenty months of a war that has been pitiless from its inception. All doctors must have noted the hideous success achieved in a very short time, in perfecting means of laceration. And we marvelled bitterly that man could adventure his frail organism through the deflagrations of a chemistry hardly disciplined as yet, which attains and surpasses the brutality of the blind forces of Nature. We marvelled more especially that flesh so delicate, the product and the producer of harmony, could endure such shocks and such dilapidations without instant disintegration.
Many men came to us with one or several limbs torn off completely, yet they came still living.... Some had thirty or forty wounds, and even more. We examined each body systematically, passing from one sad discovery to another. They reminded us of those derelict vessels which let in the water everywhere. And just because these wrecks seemed irredeemably condemned to disaster, we clung to them in the obstinate hope of bringing them into port and perhaps floating them again.
When the pressure was greatest, it was impossible to undress the men and get them washed properly before bringing them into the operating-ward. The problem was in these cases to isolate the work of the knife as far as possible from the surrounding mud, dirt and vermin: I have seen soldiers so covered with lice that the different parts of the dressings were invaded by them, and even the wounds. The poor creatures apologised, as if they were in some way to blame....
At such moments patients succeeded each other so rapidly that we knew nothing of them beyond their wounds: the man was carried away, still plunged in sleep; we had made all the necessary decisions for him without having heard his voice or considered his face.
We avoided overcrowding by at once evacuating all those on whom we had operated as soon as they were no longer in danger of complications. We loaded them up on the ambulances which followed one upon the other before the door. Some of the patients came back a few minutes later, riddled with fragments of shell; the driver had not succeeded in dodging the shells, and he was often wounded himself. In like manner the stretcher-bearers as they passed along the road were often hit themselves, and were brought in on their own hand-carts.
One evening there was a "gas warning." Some gusts of wind arrived, bearing along an acrid odour. All the wounded were given masks and spectacles as a precaution. We hung them even on the heads of the beds where dying men lay... and then we waited. Happily, the wave spent itself before it reached us.
A wounded man was brought in that evening with several injuries caused by a gas-shell. His eyes had quite disappeared under his swollen lids. His clothing was so impregnated with the poison that we all began to cough and weep, and a penetrating odour of garlic and citric acid hung about the ward for some time.