They came in like two parcels dispatched by the same post, two clumsy,
squalid parcels, badly packed, and damaged in transit. Two human forms
rolled up in linens and woollens, strapped into strange instruments, one
of which enclosed the whole man, like a coffin of zinc and wire.
They seemed to be of no particular age; or rather, each might have
been a thousand and more, the age of swaddled mummies in the depths of
sarcophagi.
We washed, combed, and peeled them, and laid them very cautiously
between clean sheets; then we found that one had the look of an old man,
and that the other was still a boy.
Their beds face each other in the same grey room. All who enter it
notice them at once; their infinite misery gives them an air of kinship.
Compared with them, the other wounded seem well and happy. And in this
abode of suffering, they are kings; their couches are encircled by the
respect and silence due to majesty.