The cup had been deposited near me. Not daring to approach it, I
boosted my aching corpse on one of its futile elbows and gazed blankly
around. My eyes, wading laboriously through a dark atmosphere, a
darkness gruesomely tactile, perceived only here and there lively
patches of vibrating humanity. My ears recognised English, something
which I took to be low-German and which was Belgian, Dutch, Polish, and
what I guessed to be Russian.
Trembling with this chaos, my hand sought the cup. The cup was not
warm; the contents, which I hastily gulped, were not even tepid. The
taste was dull, almost bitter, clinging, thick, nauseating. I felt a
renewed interest in living as soon as the deathful swallow descended to
my abdomen, very much as a suicide who changes his mind after the fatal
dose. I decided that it would be useless to vomit. I sat up. I looked
around.
The darkness was rapidly going out of the sluggish stinking air. I was
sitting on my mattress at one end of a sort of room, filled with
pillars; ecclesiastical in feeling. I already perceived it to be of
enormous length. My mattress resembled an island: all around it on the
floor at distances varying from a quarter of an inch to ten feet (which
constituted the limit of distinct vision) reposed startling identities.
There was blood in some of them. Others consisted of a rind of blueish
matter sustaining a core of yellowish froth. From behind me a chunk of
hurtling spittle joined its fellows. I decided to stand up.
At this moment, at the far end of the room, I seemed to see an
extraordinary vulture-like silhouette leap up from nowhere. It rushed a
little way in my direction crying hoarsely “_Corvée d’eau!_”—stopped,
bent down at what I perceived to be a _paillasse_ like mine, jerked
what was presumably the occupant by the feet, shook him, turned to the
next, and so on up to six. As there seemed to be innumerable
_paillasses_, laid side by side at intervals of perhaps a foot with
their heads to the wall on three sides of me, I was wondering why the
vulture had stopped at six. On each mattress a crude imitation of
humanity, wrapped ear-high in its blanket, lay and drank from a cup
like mine and spat long and high into the room. The ponderous reek of
sleepy bodies undulated toward me from three directions. I had lost
sight of the vulture in a kind of insane confusion which arose from the
further end of the room. It was as if he had touched off six high
explosives. Occasional pauses in the minutely crazy din were accurately
punctuated by exploding bowels; to the great amusement of innumerable
somebodies, whose precise whereabouts the gloom carefully guarded.
I felt that I was the focus of a group of indistinct recumbents who
were talking about me to one another in many incomprehensible tongues.
I noticed beside every pillar (including the one beside which I had
innocently thrown down my mattress the night before) a good sized pail,
overflowing with urine, and surrounded by a large irregular puddle. My
mattress was within an inch of the nearest puddle. What I took to be a
man, an amazing distance off, got out of bed and succeeded in locating
the pail nearest to him after several attempts. Ten invisible
recumbents yelled at him in six languages.
All at once a handsome figure rose from the gloom at my elbow. I smiled
stupidly into his clear hardish eyes. And he remarked pleasantly:
“Your friend’s here, Johnny, and wants to see you.”
A bulge of pleasure swooped along my body, chasing aches and numbness,
my muscles danced, nerves tingled in perpetual holiday.
B. was lying on his camp-cot, wrapped like an Eskimo in a blanket which
hid all but his nose and eyes.
“Hello, Cummings,” he said smiling. “There’s a man here who is a friend
of Vanderbilt and knew Cézanne.”
I gazed somewhat critically at B. There was nothing particularly insane
about him, unless it was his enthusiastic excitement, which might
almost be attributed to my jack-in-the-box manner of arriving. He said:
“There are people here who speak English, Russian, Arabian. There are
the finest people here! Did you go to Gré? I fought rats all night
there. Huge ones. They tried to eat me. And from Gré to Paris? I had
three gendarmes all the way to keep me from escaping, and they all fell
asleep.”
I began to be afraid that I was asleep myself. “Please be frank,” I
begged. “Strictly _entre nous_: am I dreaming, or is this a bug-house?”
B. laughed, and said: “I thought so when I arrived two days ago. When I
came in sight of the place a lot of girls waved from the window and
yelled at me. I no sooner got inside than a queer looking duck whom I
took to be a nut came rushing up to me and cried: ‘Too late for
soup!’—This is Campe de Triage de la Ferté Macé, Orne, France, and all
these fine people were arrested as spies. Only two or three of them can
speak a word of French, and that’s _soupe!_”
I said, “My God, I thought Marseilles was somewhere on the
Mediterranean Ocean, and that this was a _gendarmerie_.”
“But this is M-a-c-é. It’s a little mean town, where everybody snickers
and sneers at you if they see you’re a prisoner. They did at me.”
“Do you mean to say we’re _espions_ too?”
“Of course!” B. said enthusiastically. “Thank God! And in to stay.
Every time I think of the _section sanitaire_, and A. and his thugs,
and the whole rotten red-taped Croix Rouge, I have to laugh. Cummings,
I tell you this is the finest place on earth!”
A vision of the Chef de la section Sanitaire Ving-et-Un passed through
my mind. The doughy face. Imitation-English-officer swagger. Large
calves, squeaking puttees. The daily lecture: “I doughno what’s
th’matter with you fellers. You look like nice boys. Well-edjucated.
But you’re so dirty in your habits. You boys are always kickin’ because
I don’t put you on a car together. I’m ashamed to do it, that’s why. I
doughtwanta give this section a black eye. We gotta show these lousy
Frenchmen what Americans are. We gotta show we’re superior to ’em.
Those bastards doughno what a bath means. And you fellers are always
hangin’ ’round, talkin’ with them dirty frog-eaters that does the
cookin’ and the dirty work ’round here. How d’you boys expect me to
give you a chance? I’d like to put you fellers on a car, I wanta see
you boys happy. But I don’t dare to, that’s why. If you want me to send
you out, you gotta shave and look neat, and _keep away from them dirty
Frenchmen_. We Americans are over here to learn them lousy bastards
something.”