I
One more glance into the dark ward, in which something begins to reign
which is not sleep, but merely a kind of nocturnal stupor.
The billiard-table has been pushed into a corner; it is loaded with an
incoherent mass of linen, bottles, and articles of furniture. A smell
of soup and excrements circulates between the stretchers, and seems to
insult the slender onyx vases that surmount the cabinet.
And now, quickly! quickly! Let us escape on tiptoe into the open air.
The night is clear and cold, without a breath of wind: a vast block
of transparent ice between the snow and the stars. Will it suffice
to cleanse throat and lungs, nauseated by the close effluvium of
suppurating wounds?
The snow clings and balls under our sabots. How good it would be to have
a game.... But we are overwhelmed by a fatigue that has become a kind of
exasperation. We will go to the end of the lawn.
Here is the great trench in which the refuse of the dressing-ward, all
the residuum of infection, steams and rots. Further on we come to the
musical pines, which Dalcour the miner visits every night, lantern in
hand, to catch sparrows, Dalcour, the formidable Zouave, whom no one can
persuade not to carry about his stiff leg and the gaping wound in his
bandaged skull in the rain.
Let us go as far as the wall of the graveyard, which time has caused
to swell like a protuberance on the side of the park, and which is so
providentially close at hand.
The old Chateau looms, a stately mass, through the shadows. To-night,
lamps are gleaming softly in every window. It looks like a silent,
illuminated ship, the prow of which is cutting through an ice-bank.
Nothing emerges from it but this quiet light. Nothing reveals the nature
of its terrible freight.
We know that in every room, in every storey, on the level of every
floor, young mutilated bodies are ranged side by side. A hundred hearts
send the over-heated blood in swift pulsations towards the suffering
limbs. Through all these bodies the projectile in its furious course
made its way, crushing delicate mechanisms, rending the precious organs
which make us take pleasure in walking, breathing, drinking....
Up there, this innocent joy of order no longer exists; and in order to
recapture it, a hundred bodies are performing labours so slow and hard
that they call forth tears and sighs from the strongest.
But how the murmurs of this centre of suffering are muffled by the
walls! How silently and darkly it broods in space!
Like a dressing on a large inflamed wound, the Chateau covers its
contents closely, and one sees nothing but these lamps, just such lamps
as might illuminate a studious solitude, or a conversation between
intimate friends at evening, or a love lost in self-contemplation.
We are now walking through thickets of spindle-wood, resplendent under
the snow, and the indifference of these living things to the monstrous
misery round them makes the impotent soul that is strangling me seem
odious and even ridiculous to me. In spite of all protestations of
sympathy, the mortal must always suffer alone in his flesh, and this
indeed is why war is possible....
Philippe here thinks perhaps as I do; but he and I have these thoughts
thrust on us in the same pressing fashion. Men who are sleeping twenty
paces from this spot would be wakened by a cry; yet they are undisturbed
by this formidable presence, inarticulate as a mollusc in the depths of
the sea.
In despair, I stamp on the soft snow with my sabot. The winter grass it
covers subsists obstinately, and has no solidarity with anything else on
earth. Let the pain of man wear itself out; the grass will not wither.
Sleep, good folks of the whole world. Those who suffer here will not
disturb your rest.
And suddenly, beyond the woods a rocket rises and bursts against the
sky, brilliant as a meteor. It means something most certainly, and
it warns some one; but its coarse ingenuity does not deceive me. No
barbarous signal such as this could give me back confidence in my soul
to-night.