Nothing was ready; neither canteen, nor straw, nor coats, nor arms,
nothing, absolutely nothing. Only tents full of manure and of insects,
just left by the troops off for the frontier. For three days we live
at the mercy of Mourmelon.[8] Eating a sausage one day and drinking a
bowl of café-au-lait the next, exploited to the utmost by the natives,
sleeping, no matter how, without straw and without covering. Truly such
a life was not calculated to give us a taste for the calling they had
inflicted on us.
Once in camp, the companies separated; the laborers took themselves to
the tents of their fellows; the bourgeois did the same. The tent in
which I found myself was not badly managed, for we succeeded in driving
out by argument of wine the two fellows, the native odor of whose feet
was aggravated by a long and happy neglect.
One or two days passed. They made us mount guard with the pickets, we
drank a great deal of eau-de-vie, and the drink-shops of Mourmelon were
full without let, when suddenly Canrobert[9] passed us in review along
the front line of battle. I see him now on his big horse, bent over
the saddle, his hair flying, his waxed mustaches in a ghastly face. A
mutiny was breaking out. Deprived of everything, and hardly convinced
by that marshal that we lacked nothing, we growled in chorus when he
talked of repressing our complaints by force: "Ran, plan, plan, a
hundred thousand men afoot, to Paris, to Paris!"
Canrobert grew livid, and shouted, planting his horse in the midst
of us. "Hats off to a marshal of France!" Again a howl goes up from
the ranks; then turning bridle, followed in confusion by his staff
officers, he threatened us with his finger, whistling between his
separated teeth. "You shall pay dear for this, gentlemen from Paris!"
Two days after this episode, the icy water of the camp made me so sick
that there was urgent need of my entering the hospital. After the
doctor's visit, I buckle on my knapsack, and under guard of a corporal,
here I am going limping along, dragging my legs and sweating under my
harness. The hospital is gorged with men; they send me back. I then
go to one of the nearest military hospitals; a bed stands empty; I am
admitted. I put down my knapsack at last, and with the expectation that
the major would forbid me to move, I went out for a walk in the little
garden which connected the set of buildings. Suddenly there issued from
a door a man with bristling beard and bulging eyes. He plants his hands
in the pockets of a long dirt-brown cloak, and shouts out from the
distance as soon as he sees me:
"Hey you, man! What are you doing over here?" I approach, I explain to
him the motive that brings me. He thrashes his arms about and bawls:
"Go in again! You have no right to walk about in this garden until they
give you your costume."
I go back into the room, a nurse arrives and brings me a great
military coat, pantaloons, old shoes without heels, and a cap like a
nightcap. I look at myself, thus grotesquely dressed, in my little
mirror. Good Heavens, what a face and what an outfit! With my haggard
eyes and my sallow complexion, with my hair cut short, and my nose
with the bumps shining; with my long mouse-gray coat, my pants
stained russet, my great heelless shoes, my colossal cotton cap, I
am prodigiously ugly. I could not keep from laughing. I turn my head
toward the side of my bed neighbor, a tall boy of Jewish type, who
is sketching my portrait in a notebook. We become friends at once; I
tell him to call me Eugène Lejantel; he responds by telling me to call
him Francis Emonot; we recall to each other this and that painter; we
enter into a discussion of esthetics and forget our misfortunes. Night
arrives; they portion out to us a dish of boiled meat dotted black with
a few lentils, they pour us out brimming cups of coco-clairet, and I
undress, enchanted at stretching myself out in a bed without keeping my
clothes and my shoes on.
The next morning I am awakened at about six o'clock by a great fracas
at the door and a clatter of voices. I sit up in bed, I rub my eyes,
and I see the gentleman of the night before, still dressed in his
wrapper, brown the color of cachou, who advances majestically, followed
by a train of nurses. It was the major. Scarcely inside, he rolls his
dull green eyes from right to left and from left to right, plunges his
hands in his pockets and bawls:
"Number One, show your leg--your dirty leg. Eh, it's in a bad shape,
that leg, that sore runs like a fountain; lotion of bran and water,
lint, half-rations, a strong licorice tea. Number Two, show your
throat--your dirty throat. It's getting worse and worse, that throat;
the tonsils will be cut out to-morrow."
"But, doctor--"
"Eh, I am not asking anything from you, am I? Say one word and I'll put
you on a diet."
"But, at least--"
"Put that man on a diet. Write: diet, gargles, strong licorice tea."
In that vein he passed all the sick in review, prescribing for all, the
syphilitics and the wounded, the fevered and the dysentery patients
his strong licorice tea. He stopped in front of me, stared into my
face, tore off my covering, punched my stomach with his fist, ordered
albuminated water for me, the inevitable tea; and went out snorting and
dragging his feet.
Life was difficult with the men who were about us. There were
twenty-one in our sleeping quarters. At my left slept my friend, the
painter; on my right, a great devil of a trumpeter, with face pocked
like a sewing thimble and yellow as a glass of bile. He combined two
professions, that of cobbler by day and a procurer of girls by night.
He was, in other respects, a comical fellow who frisked about on his
hands, or on his head, telling you in the most naïve way in the world
the manner in which he expedited at the toe of his boot the work of his
menials, or intoned in a touching voice sentimental songs:
"I have cherished in my sorrow--ow
But the friendship of a swallow--ow."
I conquered his good graces by giving him twenty sous to buy a liter
of wine with, and we did well in not being on bad terms with him, for
the rest of our quarters--composed in part of attorneys of the Rue
Maubuée--were well disposed to pick a quarrel with us.
One night, among others, the 15th of August, Francis Emonot threatened
to box the ears of two men who had taken his towel. There was a
formidable hubbub in the dormitory. Insults rained, we were treated
to "roule-en-coule et de duchesses." Being two against nineteen, we
were in a fair way of getting a regular drubbing, when the bugler
interfered, took aside the most desperate and coaxed them into giving
up the stolen object. To celebrate the reconciliation which followed
this scene, Francis and I contributed three francs each, and it was
arranged that the bugler with the aid of his comrades should try to
slip out of the hospital and bring back some meat and wine.
The light had disappeared from the major's window, the druggist at last
extinguished his, we climb over the thicket, examine our surroundings,
caution the men who are gliding along the walls, not to encounter the
sentinels on the way, mount on one another's shoulders and jump off
into the field. An hour later they came back laden with victuals; they
pass them over and reenter the dormitory with us; we suppress the two
night lamps, light candle-ends stuck on the floor, and around my bed
in our shirts we form a circle. We had absorbed three or four liters
of wine and cut up the best part of a leg of mutton, when a great
clattering of shoes is heard; I blow out the candle stubs, by the grace
of my shoe, and every one escapes under the beds. The door opens; the
major appears, heaves a formidable "Good Heavens!" stumbles in the
darkness, goes out and comes back with a lantern and the inevitable
train of nurses. I profit by the moment to disperse the remains of
the feast; the major crosses the dormitory at a quick step, swearing,
threatening to take us all into custody and to put us in stocks.
We are convulsed with laughter under our coverings; a trumpet-flourish
blazes from the other side of the dormitory. The major puts us all
under diet; then he goes out, warning us that we shall know in a few
minutes what metal he is made of.
Once gone, we vie with each other in doing our worst; flashes of
laughter rumble and crackle. The trumpeter does a handspring in the
dormitory, one of his friends joins him, a third jumps on his bed as on
a springboard and bounces up and down, his arms balancing, his shirt
flying; his neighbor breaks into a triumphant cancan; the major enters
abruptly, orders four men of the line he has brought with him to seize
the dancers, and announces to us that he is going to draw up a report
and send it to whom it may concern.
Calm is restored at last; the next day we get the nurses to buy us some
eatables. The days run on without further incident. We are beginning
to perish of ennui in this hospital, when, one day, at five o'clock,
the doctor bursts into the room and orders us to put on our campaign
clothes and to buckle on our knapsacks.
We learn ten minutes later that the Prussians are marching on Chalons.
A gloomy amazement reigns in the quarters. Until now we have had
no doubts as to the outcome of passing events. We knew about the
too celebrated victory of Sarrebrück, we do not expect the reverses
which overwhelm us. The major examines every man; not one is cured,
all had been too long gorged with licorice water and deprived of
care. Nevertheless, he returns to their corps the least sick, he
orders others to lie down completely dressed, knapsack in readiness.
Francis and I are among these last. The day passes, the night passes.
Nothing. But I have the colic continually and suffer. At last, at
about nine o'clock in the morning, appears a long train of mules with
"cacolets,"[10] and led by "tringlots."[11] We climb two by two into
the baskets. Francis and I were lifted onto the same mule, only, as
the painter was very fat and I very lean, the arrangement see-sawed; I
go up in the air while he descends under the belly of the mule, who,
dragged by the head, and pushed from behind, dances and flings about
furiously. We trot along in a whirlwind of dust, blinded, bewildered,
jolted, we cling to the bar of the cacolet, shut our eyes, laugh and
groan. We arrive at Chalons more dead than alive; we fall to the gravel
like jaded cattle, then they pack us into the cars and we leave Chalons
to go--where? No one knows.
It is night; we fly over the rails. The sick are taken from the cars
and walked up and down the platforms. The engine whistles, slows down
and stops in a railway station--that of Reims, I suppose, but I can not
be sure. We are dying of hunger, the commissary forgot but one thing:
to give us bread for the journey. I get out. I see an open buffet. I
run for it, but others are there before me. They are fighting as I come
up. Some were seizing bottles, others meat, some bread, some cigars.
Half-dazed but furious, the restaurant-keeper defends his shop at the
point of a spit. Crowded by their comrades, who come up in gangs, the
front row of militia throw themselves onto the counter, which gives
way, carrying in its wake the owner of the buffet and his waiters.
Then followed a regular pillage; everything went, from matches to
toothpicks. Meanwhile the bell rings and the train starts. Not one of
us disturbs himself, and while sitting on the walk, I explain to the
painter how the tubes work, the mechanism of the bell. The train backs
down over the rails to take us aboard. We ascend into our compartments
again and we pass in review the booty we had seized. To tell the truth,
there was little variety of food. Pork-butcher's meat and nothing but
pork-butcher's meat! We had six strings of Bologna sausages flavored
with garlic, a scarlet tongue, two sausages, a superb slice of Italian
sausage, a slice in silver stripe, the meat all of an angry red,
mottled white; four liters of wine, a half-bottle of cognac, and a few
candle ends. We stick the candle ends into the neck of our flasks,
which swing, hung by strings to the sides of the wagon. There was,
thus, when the train jolted over a switch, a rain of hot grease which
congealed almost instantly into great platters, but our coats had seen
many another.
We began our repast at once, interrupted by the going and coming of
those of the militia who kept running along the footboards the whole
length of the train, and knocked at our window-panes and demanded
something to drink. We sang at the top of our voices, we drank, we
clinked glasses. Never did sick men make so much noise or romp so on
a train in motion! One would have said that it was a rolling Court of
Miracles; the cripples jumped with jointed legs, those whose intestines
were burning soaked them in bumpers of cognac, the one-eyed opened
their eyes, the fevered capered about, the sick throats bellowed and
tippled; it was unheard of!
This disturbance ends in calming itself. I profit by the lull to put
my nose out of the window. There was not a star there, not even a
tip of the moon, heaven and earth seem to make but one, and in that
intensity of inky blackness, the lanterns winked like eyes of different
colors attached to the metal of the disks. The engineer discharged
his whistle, the engine puffed and vomited its sparks without rest. I
reclose the window and look at my companions. Some were snoring, others
disturbed by the jolting of the box, gurgled and swore in their sleep,
turning over incessantly, searching for room to stretch their legs, to
brace their heads that nodded at every jolt.
By dint of looking at them, I was beginning to get sleepy when the
train stopped short and woke me up. We were at a station; and the
station-master's office flamed like a forge fire in the darkness of
the night. I had one leg numbed, I was shivering with cold, I descend
to warm up a bit. I walk up and down the platform, I go to look at
the engine, which they uncouple, and which they replace by another,
and walking by the office I hear the bills and the tic-tac of the
telegraph. The employee, with back turned to me, was stooping a little
to the right in such a way that from where I was placed, I could see
but the back of his head and the tip of his nose, which shone red and
beaded with sweat, while the rest of his figure disappeared in the
shadow thrown by the screen of a gas-jet.
They invite me to get back into the carriage, and I find my comrades
again, just as I had left them. That time I went to sleep for good. For
how long did my sleep last? I don't know--when a great cry woke me up:
"Paris! Paris!" I made a dash for the doorway. At a distance, against
a band of pale gold, stood out in black the smokestacks of factories
and workshops. We were at Saint-Denis; the news ran from car to car.
Every one was on his feet. The engine quickened its pace. The Gare du
Nord looms up in the distance. We arrive there, we get down, we throw
ourselves at the gates. One part of us succeeds in escaping, the others
are stopped by the employees of the railroad and by the troops; by
force they make us remount into a train that is getting up steam, and
here we are again, off for God knows where!
We roll onward again all day long. I am weary of looking at the rows of
houses and trees that spin by before my eyes; then, too, I have the
colic continually and I suffer. About four o'clock of the afternoon,
the engine slackens its speed, and stops at a landing-stage where
awaits us there an old general, around whom sports a flock of young
men, with headgear of red képis, breached in red and shod with boots
with yellow spurs. The general passes us in review and divides us into
two squads; the one for the seminary, the other is directed toward
the hospital. We are, it seems, at Arras. Francis and we form part of
the first squad. They tumble us into carts stuffed with straw, and we
arrive in front of a great building that settles and seems about to
collapse into the street. We mount to the second story to a room that
contains some thirty beds; each one of us unbuckles his knapsack, combs
himself, and sits down. A doctor arrives.
"What is the trouble with you?" he asks of the first.
"A carbuncle."
"Ah! and you?"
"Dysentery."
"Ah! and you?"
"A bubo."
"But in that case you have not been wounded during the war?"
"Not the least in the world."
"Very well! You can take up your knapsacks again. The archbishop gives
up the beds of his seminarists only to the wounded."
I pack into my knapsack again all the knickknacks that I had taken out,
and we are off again, willy-nilly, for the city hospital. There was no
more room there. In vain the sisters contrive to squeeze the iron beds
together, the wards are full. Worn out by all these delays, I seize one
mattress, Francis takes another, and we go and stretch ourselves in the
garden on a great grass-plot.
The next day I have a talk with the director, an affable and charming
man. I ask permission for the painter and for me to go out into the
town. He consents; the door opens; we are free! We are going to dine
at last! To eat real meat, to drink real wine! Ah, we do not hesitate;
we make straight for the best hotel in town. They serve us there with
a wholesome meal. There are flowers there on the table, magnificent
bouquets of roses and fuchsias that spread themselves out of the glass
vases. The waiter brings in a roast that drains into a lake of butter;
the sun himself comes to the feast, makes the covers sparkle and the
blades of the knives, sifts his golden dust through the carafes, and
playing with the pomard that gently rocks in the glasses, spots with a
ruby star the damask cloth.
Oh, sacred joy of the guzzlers! My mouth is full and Francis is drunk!
The fumes of the roast mingle with the perfume of the flowers; the
purple of the wine vies in gorgeousness with the red of the roses.
The waiter who serves us has the air of folly and we have the air of
gluttons, it is all the same to us! We stuff down roast after roast,
we pour down bordeaux upon burgundy, chartreuse upon cognac. To the
devil with your weak wines and your thirty-sixes,[12] which we have
been drinking since our departure from Paris! To the devil with those
whimsicalities without name, those mysterious pot-house poisons with
which we have been so crammed to leanness for nearly a month! We are
unrecognizable; our once peaked faces redden like a drunkard's, we get
noisy, with noise in the air we cut loose. We run all over the town
that way.
Evening arrives; we must go back, however. The sister who is in charge
of the old men's ward says to us in a small flute-like voice:
"Soldiers, gentlemen, you were very cold last night, but you are going
to have a good bed."
And she leads us into a great room where three night lamps, dimly
lighted, hang from the ceiling. I have a white bed, I sink with delight
between the sheets that still smell fresh with the odor of washing.
We hear nothing but the breathing or the snoring of the sleepers. I
am quite warm, my eyes close, I know no longer where I am, when a
prolonged chuckling awakes me. I open one eye and I perceive at the
foot of my bed an individual who is looking down at me. I sit up in
bed. I see before me an old man, tall, lean, his eyes haggard, lips
slobbering into a rough beard. I ask what he wants of me. No answer! I
cry out: "Go away! Let me sleep!"
He shows me his fist. I suspect him to be a lunatic. I roll up my
towel, at the end of which I quietly twist a knot; he advances one
step; I leap to the floor; I parry the fisticuff he aims at me, and
with the towel I deal him a return blow full in the left eye. He sees
thirty candles, he throws himself at me; I draw back and let fly a
vigorous kick in the stomach. He tumbles, carrying with him a chair
that rebounds; the dormitory is awakened; Francis runs up in his shirt
to lend me assistance; the sister arrives; the nurses dart upon the
madman, whom they flog and succeed with great difficulty in putting
in bed again. The aspect of the dormitory was eminently ludicrous; to
the gloom of faded rose, which the dying night lamps had spread around
them, succeeded the flaming of three lanterns. The black ceiling, with
its rings of light that danced above the burning wicks, glittered now
with its tints of freshly spread plaster. The sick men, a collection of
Punch and Judies without age, had clutched the piece of wood that hung
at the end of a cord above their beds, hung on to it with one hand, and
with the other made gestures of terror. At that sight my anger cools, I
split with laughter, the painter suffocates, it is only the sister who
preserves her gravity and succeeds by force of threats and entreaties
in restoring order in the room.
Night came to an end, for good or ill; in the morning at six o'clock
the rattle of a drum assembled us, the director called off the roll.
We start for Rouen. Arrived in that city, an officer tells the
unfortunate man in charge of us that the hospital is full and can not
take us in. Meanwhile we have an hour to wait. I throw my knapsack
down into a corner of the station, and though my stomach is on fire,
we are off, Francis and I, wandering at random, in ecstasies before
the church of Saint-Ouen, in wonder before the old houses. We admire
so much and so long that the hour had long since passed before we even
thought of looking for the station again. "It's a long time since your
comrades departed," one of the employees of the railroad said to us;
"they are in Evreux." "The devil! The next train doesn't go until nine
o'clock.--Come, let's get some dinner!"
When we arrived at Evreux, midnight had come. We could not present
ourselves at a hospital at such an hour; we would have the appearance
of malefactors. The night is superb, we cross the city and we find
ourselves in the open fields. It was the time of haying, the piles were
in stacks. We spy out a little stack in a field, we hollow out there
two comfortable nests, and I do not know whether it is the reminiscent
odor of our couch or the penetrating perfume of the woods that stirs
us, but we feel the need of airing our defunct love affairs. The
subject was inexhaustible. Little by little, however, words become
fewer, enthusiasm dies out, we fall asleep. "Sacre bleu!" cries my
neighbor, as he stretches himself. "What time can it be?" I awake in
turn. The sun will not be late in rising, for the great blue curtain
is laced at the horizon with a fringe of rose. What misery! It will
be necessary now to go knock at the door of the hospital, to sleep in
wards impregnated with that heavy smell through which returns, like an
obstinate refrain, the acrid flower of powder of iodoform! All sadly we
take our way to the hospital again. They open to us but alas! one only
of us is admitted, Francis--and I, they send me on to the lyceum. This
life is no longer possible, I meditate an escape, the house surgeon on
duty comes down into the courtyard. I show him my law-school diploma;
he knows Paris, the Latin Quarter. I explain to him my situation. "It
has come to an absolute necessity." I tell him "that either Francis
comes to the lyceum or that I go to rejoin him at the hospital." He
thinks it over, and in the evening, coming close to my bed, he slips
these words into my ear: "Tell them to-morrow morning that your
sufferings increase." The next day, in fact, at about seven o'clock,
the doctor makes his appearance; a good, an excellent man, who had but
two faults; that of odorous teeth and that of desiring to get rid of
his patients at any cost. Every morning the following scene took place:
"Ah, ha! the fine fellow," he cries, "what an air he has! good color,
no fever. Get up and go take a good cup of coffee; but no fooling,
you know! don't go running after the girls; I will sign for you your
_Exeat_; you will return to-morrow to your regiment."
Sick or not sick, he sent back three a day. That morning he stops in
front of me and says:
"Ah! saperlotte, my boy, you look better!"
I exclaim that never have I suffered so much.
He sounds my stomach. "But you are better," he murmurs; "the stomach is
not so hard." I protest--he seems astonished, the interne then says to
him in an undertone:
"We ought perhaps to give him an injection; and we have here neither
syringe nor stomach-pump; if we send him to the hospital--?"