“How was he finally saved? He does not know yet. Wounded within the
enemy’s lines, left for dead, he lay there four full days without care
and for forty-eight hours he was unconscious. When he came to himself
it was difficult to collect his thoughts. He did not know where he was.
Around him was total darkness, and it did not pass away. He heard the
groans, the death-rattle of the dying, the voices of the wounded who
called to him. He dragged himself in their direction and asked them
questions. Why did the night last so long? They answered that it was
broad daylight—and he understood.
“‘... I had thought of everything,’ he said to me. ‘Of death, of the
most horrible wounds, but not of that!
“‘... But as long as that too was necessary!’
“Yet his martyrdom was not finished, and the worst of all perhaps
remains. How shall I tell of that fearful suffering in wretched
lazarettos, in the dung-heaps where the Germans laid our wounded in the
villages behind the front! Most of them stayed there forever. He, with
greater vitality, was carried to Cambrai, and from there stage by stage
was transported to a hospital in Bavaria.
“Melancholy journey! If he saw nothing, at least in the
railway-stations he heard the yells of the mobs which crowded on
the passage of the French wounded to gloat over their sufferings.
Eventually his condition improved a little; his eyes, one pushed out
of its socket, the other driven back in his head by the breaking of
his frontal bone, had been put back in place; he began to see, he
could even draw a few lines and make out large characters. But the
idea of escape mastered him; two unsuccessful efforts had sent him
to the guardhouse; on the third he was ordered to a reprisal camp;
his departure was fixed for the next day. Calm and serene as ever, he
wished before going to finish the series of addresses on the history
of painting which he had undertaken for his fellow prisoners. In the
course of the conference Lemordant wished to run over his notes; he
could no longer make them out! A halo danced in front of him, obscuring
everything! He had such a sense of anguish that he had to stop. But
by a concentration of the will he mastered himself and improvised the
rest of his address in a voice in which there was only the slightest
trembling. At the end of the address the battalion chief leaped to the
platform and took Lemordant in his arms.”