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.
Many things we had perforce to leave to chance, and I thought, during
this alarm, of men just operated on, and plunged in the stupor of the
chloroform, whom we should have to allow to wake, and then mask them
immediately, or...
Ah, well!... in the midst of all this unimaginable tragedy,
laughter was not quite quenched. This phenomenon is perhaps one of
the characteristics, one of the greatnesses of our race--and in a more
general way, no doubt, it is an imperative need of humanity at large.
Certain of the wounded took a pride in cracking jokes, and they did so
in words to which circumstances lent a poignant picturesqueness. These
jests drew a laugh from us which was often closely akin to tears.
One morning, in the sorting room, I noticed a big, curly-haired fellow
who had lost a foot, and had all sorts of wounds and fractures in both
legs. All these had been hastily bound up, clothing and all, in the
hollow of the stretcher, which was stiff with blood. When I called the
stretcher-bearers and contemplated this picture, the big man raised
himself on his elbow and said:
"Please give me a cigarette."
Then he began to smoke, smiling cheerfully and telling absurd stories.
We took off one of his legs up to the thigh, and as soon as he recovered
consciousness, he asked for another cigarette, and set all the orderlies
laughing.
When, on leaving him, I asked this extraordinary man what his calling
was, he replied modestly:
"I am one of the employees of the Vichy Company."
The orderlies in particular, nearly all simple folks, had a desire to
laugh, even when they were worn out with fatigue, which made a pretext
of the slightest thing, and notably of danger. One of them, called
Tailleur, a buffoon with the airs of an executioner's assistant, would
call out at the first explosions of a hurricane of shells:
"Number your arms and legs! Look out for your nuts! The winkles are
tumbling about!"
All my little band would begin to laugh. And I had not the heart to
check them, for their faces were drawn with fatigue, and this moment of
doleful merriment at least prevented them from falling asleep as they
stood.
When the explosions came very close, this same Tailleur could not help
exclaiming:
"I am not going to be killed by a brick! I am going outside."
I would look at him with a smile, and he would repeat: "As for me, I'm
off," carefully rolling a bandage the while, which he did with great
dexterity.
His mixture of terror and swagger was a perpetual entertainment to us.
One night, a hand-grenade fell out of the pocket of one of the wounded.
In defiance of orders, Tailleur, who knew nothing at all about the
handling of such things, turned it over and examined it for some time,
with comic curiosity and distrust.
One day a pig intended for our consumption was killed in the pig-sty by
fragments of shell. We ate it, and the finding by one of the orderlies
of some bits of metal in his portion of meat gave occasion for a great
many jests.
For a fortnight we were unable to go beyond the hospital enclosure.
Our longest expedition was to the piece of waste ground which had been
allotted to us for a burial ground, a domain the shells were always
threatening to plough up. This graveyard increased considerably. As it
takes a man eight hours to dig a grave for his brother man, one had to
set a numerous gang to work all day, to ensure a place for each corpse.
Sometimes we went into the wooden shed which served as our mortuary.
Pere Duval, the oldest of our orderlies, sewed there all day, making
shrouds of coarse linen for "his dead."
They were laid in the earth carefully, side by side, their feet
together, their hands crossed on their breasts, when indeed they still
possessed hands and feet.... Duval also looked after the human debris,
and gave it decent sepulture.
Thus our function was not only to tend the living, but also to honour
the dead. The care of what was magniloquently termed their "estate" fell
to our manager, S----. It was he who put into a little canvas bag all
the papers and small possessions found on the victims. He devoted days
and nights to a kind of funereal bureaucracy, inevitable even under the
fire of the enemy. His occupation, moreover, was not exempt from moral
difficulties. Thus he found in the pocket of one dead man a woman's card
which it was impossible to send on to his family, and in another case, a
collection of songs of such a nature that after due deliberation it was
decided to burn them.
Let us purify the memories of our martyrs!
We had several German wounded to attend. One of these, whose leg I had
to take off, overwhelmed me with thanks in his native tongue; he had
lain for six days on ground over which artillery played unceasingly, and
contemplated his return to life and the care bestowed on him with a kind
of stupefaction.
Another, who had a shattered arm, gave us a good deal of trouble by his
amazing uncleanliness. Before giving him the anaesthetic, the orderly
took from his mouth a set of false teeth, which he confessed he had not
removed for several months, and which exhaled an unimaginable stench.
I remember, too, a little fair-haired chap of rather chilly demeanour,
who suddenly said "Good-bye" to me with lips that quivered like those of
a child about to cry.
The interpreter from Headquarters, my friend C----, came to see them all
as soon as they had got over their stupor, and interrogated them with
placid patience, comparing all their statements in order to glean some
trustworthy indication.
Thus days and nights passed by in ceaseless toil, under a perpetual
menace, in the midst of an ever-growing fatigue which gave things the
substance and aspects they take on in a nightmare.
The very monotony of this existence was made up of a thousand dramatic
details, each of which would have been an event in normal life. I still
see, as through the mists of a dream, the orderly of a dying captain
sobbing at his bedside and covering his hands with kisses. I still
hear the little lad whose life blood had ebbed away, saying to me in
imploring tones: "Save me, Doctor! Save me for my mother!"... and I
think a man must have heard such words in such a place to understand
them aright, I think that every day this man must gain a stricter, a
more precise, a more pathetic idea of suffering and of death.
One Sunday evening, the bombardment was renewed with extraordinary
violence. We had just sent off General S----, who was smoking on his
stretcher, and chatting calmly and cheerfully; I was operating on an
infantryman who had deep wounds in his arms and thighs. Suddenly there
was a great commotion. A hurricane of shells fell upon the hospital.
I heard a crash which shook the ground and the walls violently, then
hurried footsteps and cries in the passage.
I looked at the man sleeping and breathing heavily, and I almost envied
his forgetfulness of all things, the dissolution of his being in a
darkness so akin to liberating death. My task completed, I went out to
view the damage.
A shell had fallen on an angle of the building, blowing in the windows
of three wards, scattering stones in all directions, and riddling walls
and ceilings with large fragments of metal. The wounded were moaning,
shrouded in acrid smoke. They were lying so close to the ground that
they had been struck only by plaster and splinters of glass; but
the shock had been so great that nearly all of them died within the
following hour.
The next day it was decided that we should change our domicile, and we
made ready to carry off our wounded and remove our hospital to a point
rather more distant. It was a very clear day. In front of us, the main
road was covered with men, whom motor vehicles were depositing in groups
every minute. We were finishing our final operations and looking out
occasionally at these men gathered in the sun, on the slopes and in the
ditches. At about one o'clock in the afternoon the air was rent by
the shriek of high explosives and some shells fell in the midst of the
groups. We saw them disperse through the yellowish smoke, and go to
lie down a little farther off in the fields. Some did not even stir.
Stretcher-bearers came up at once, running across the meadow, and
brought us two dead men, and nine wounded, who were laid on the
operating-table.
As we tended them during the following hour we looked anxiously at the
knots of men who remained in the open, and gradually increased, and we
asked whether they would not soon go. But there they stayed, and again
we heard the dull growl of the discharge, then the whistling overhead,
and the explosions of some dozen shells falling upon the men. Crowding
to the window, we watched the massacre, and waited to receive the
victims. My colleague M----drew my attention to a soldier who was
running up the grassy slope on the other side of the road, and whom the
shells seemed to be pursuing.
These were the last wounded we received in the suburb of G----. Three
hours afterwards, we took up the same life and the same labours again,
some way off, for many weeks more....
Thus things went on, until the day when we, in our turn, were carried
off by the automobiles of the Grand' Route, and landed on the banks of a
fair river in a village where there were trees in blossom, and where the
next morning we were awakened by the sound of bells and the voices of
women.