It was night-time, and I could hear the hours striking, hours which
would have been long if I had not beside me moaning and groaning,
suffering to be consoled. We had had to wait for them for a fortnight,
but there they were now, filling the great dormitories of a school
which had been turned into a military hospital, where we had joined
our post in the war. They suffer in silence, or when in the throes
of a hideous nightmare, they scream and groan with the torture their
mutilated bodies wrings from them.
I went up to a bed over which the lamp shed a subdued light. There
lay a young fellow of about twenty, awakened by the intensity of his
suffering. I had seen him but a short time before on his stretcher, a
poor broken thing, his eyes staring, with the horrors of his dreadful
journey still pictured in them.
What appalling scenes had I read in them. All the horrors of war had
become present to me.
Stretched out motionless on his stretcher, he looked like a corpse,
whose eyes had not been properly closed, indifferent to all around him.
Then, when we had lifted him, and with such care, he began to scream
and cry out. A doctor should have dressed his wounds at the front, but
they had not been done for four days. On being lifted up, his shattered
leg, cramped and asleep, gave him excruciating pain, and his whole body
writhed as though it had been on the rack.
I had noticed this young Marseillais, with his child's face among all
the other wounded men, and I had been attracted by his youth and his
sufferings.
I went up to his bed. I leant over him, and said with the instinctive
gentleness which compassion inspires one with: "You are suffering, my
child?"
Without answering, he withdrew his burning hand from mine, and put his
arm round my neck.
"Father," he said, in a weak voice, "Father, am I going to die?"
What answer could I make? I didn't know; besides, even when one is
sure, one can't say it out brutally like that.
Then the poor boy guessed I had misunderstood him, and his proud, brave
soul wished to keep the glory of the soldier, who has braved danger
without flinching. Now he defied death and found strength to smile.
"Oh! I'm not a bit afraid, but I wanted to ask you...."
He stopped and began to cry. He drew me still closer to him. He was no
coward, this young trooper. One felt it instinctively. I knew that this
lad who had lived through the bloody epopee, was not to be approached
by maddening fear. His heart was stamped with virility. A month's
campaign had made of him an old soldier who had gone through tragic
adventures.
"No, I'm not afraid. I've seen so many die all around me that I don't
care a scrap whether I live or die. But ... It's my mother, I'm
thinking of. If I die, she won't understand, and it will kill her too."
Little by little the sighs and moans had ceased in the darkened ward.
Only his solemn words broke the silence. Everything else faded away
at the meeting of the two beings, at that supreme moment, more than
mere men, the soldier and the priest, to whom France had confided the
guarding of her frontiers and the treasure of her ideal.
Then, knowing how nature rebounds, and trusting to the hardy stock from
which he sprang, I dared to assure him that he was not mortally wounded.
"No, my child, you won't die, you are too young to die." A sceptical
smile stopped me.
"And what about those others 'là-bas?'"
All the same, I don't believe that we shall not be able to save the
poor, mangled body. The head doctor, whose diagnosis is never wrong,
said only a little while ago that he would save him.
"I tell you, you will recover."