One never got tired in Revaud’s room. The roar of the war, the rumbling
of transport waggons, the spasmodic shocks of the gunfire, all the
whistling and gasping sounds of the killing machine beat against
the windows with a spent fury, as in the shelter of a creek resound
the echoes of a storm raging in the open sea. But this noise was as
familiar to the ear as the heart-beats of the miserable world, and one
never got tired in Revaud’s room.
It was a long, narrow apartment where there were four beds and four
men. It was, notwithstanding, called Revaud’s room, because the
personality of Revaud filled it from wall to wall. It was just the
size for Revaud, exactly fitting like a tailor-made coat. In the
beginning of November there had been all kinds of nasty intrigues
hatched by Corporal Têtard to get Revaud removed elsewhere; and, the
intrigues succeeding, the poor man was taken up to another storey and
placed in a large dormitory of twenty beds--a bewildering desert, no
longer homely, but ravaged by a raw, cruel light. In three days, by an
involuntary decision of his body and soul, Revaud had got worse to such
an alarming extent that he had to be carried down with great haste and
placed behind the door in his own room, where the winter light came
filtering in, full of kindliness.
And thus things remained; whenever a seriously wounded man, an
extraordinary case, was brought to the division, Mme. Baugan was asked
to go and see Revaud at once and “sound him on the question.”
Revaud pretended to make things rather difficult at first, and ended by
saying:
“Very well; I am quite willing. Put the man in my room....”
And Revaud’s room was always full. To be there, you had to have more
than a mere bagatelle of a wound: a broken foot, or some trivial little
amputation in the arm. It was necessary to have “some unusual and queer
things”--a burst intestine, for example, or a displaced spinal cord, or
yet cases in which “the skull has been bent in or the urine doesn’t
come out where it used to before the war.”
“Here,” Revaud used to say with pride, “there are only very rare cases.”
There was Sandrap, “who had to have his needs satisfied through a hole
in his side”--Sandrap, a little man from the north, with a round nose
like a fresh apple, with beautiful eyes of a delicate grey colour of
silk. He had been wounded three times, and used to say every morning:
“They’d be surprised, the Boches, if they could see me now.”
There was Remusot, who had a large wound in the chest. It made a
continual Faoo aoo ... Raoo aoo ... Faoo ... Raoo ...; and Revaud had
been asking from the first day:
“What a funny noise you’re making! D’you do it with your mouth?”
In a hoarse voice he wheezed:
“It is my breath escaping between my ribs.”
And lastly there was Mery, whose spine had been broken by an aerial
torpedo, and who “no longer felt the lower part of his body, as if it
didn’t belong to him.”
All this little world was living on its back, each in his place, in a
promiscuous atmosphere of smells, of sounds, and sometimes of thought.
The men recognised each other by their voices rather than by their
faces; and there was one great week when Sandrap was seen by Revaud as
he was being carried to the dressing-room in a stretcher on a level
with the bed, and the latter exclaimed suddenly:
“Hallo! is that you, Sandrap? What a funny head you have got! And your
hair is even funnier.”
Mme. Baugan came at eight o’clock, and at once she began scolding:
“There’s a nasty smell about. Oh! Oh! my poor Revaud, I’m sure you have
again----”
Revaud avoided the question:
“Very fine, thanks. I’ve slept very well. Nothing more to report. I’ve
slept quite well.”
Then Mme. Baugan drew back the sheets, and, overcome by the sad and
ignoble smell, she muttered:
“Oh! Revaud! you are unreasonable. Will you never be able to control
yourself!”
Revaud could no longer dissemble. He confessed phlegmatically: “Ah,
it’s true enough! But whatever you say, nurse, I can’t help myself.”
Mme. Baugan came and went, looking for fresh linen and water. She began
to wash him and dress him as if he were a child.
But suddenly overcome with shame and a kind of despair, he moaned:
“Madame Baugan, don’t be cross with me. I wasn’t like that in civil
life.”
Mme. Baugan began to laugh, and Revaud without more ado laughed
too, for all the lines of his face and his whole soul were made for
laughing, and he loved to laugh even in the midst of the most acute
pain.
This reply having pleased him, he trotted it out often, and, when
confessing to his little infirmity, he used to tell everyone “I wasn’t
like that, you know, before I joined up.”
One morning, in making Mery’s bed, Mme. Baugan startled the room with
an exclamation. The paralytic lad had not been able to restrain himself.
“What! Mery! You, too, my poor friend!”
Mery, once a handsome country lad with a splendid body, looked at his
dead limbs and sighed:
“It is quite possible, Madame. I can’t feel what’s going on.”
But Revaud was delighted. All the morning he cried, “It isn’t only me!
It isn’t only me!” And no one grudged him his joy, for when you are in
the depths of despair you are glad to have companions in your misery.
The most happy phrases have only a short-lived success. Revaud, who
had a sense of humour, soon felt the moment coming when he would no
longer find comfort in the remark that “he wasn’t like that before he
joined up.” It was then he received a letter from his father. It came
unexpectedly one morning. Revaud’s face had just been washed, and his
great Gallic moustache had been cut--from caprice--according to the
American pattern. All the hospital filed past at the corner of the door
in order to see Revaud who looked like a very sick “English gentleman.”
He turned the letter over with his fingers that were deformed by misery
and toil; then he said uneasily, “What does the letter mean? Do they
still want to kick up a row?”
Revaud was a married man; but during the six months in which he had
remained without news from his wife he had got used to his loneliness.
He was in his room, behind the door, and sought no quarrels with
anyone. Then why had a letter been sent to him?
“It must be they want to make a row,” he repeated; and he handed the
letter to Mme. Baugan, for her to read.
The letter came from Revaud’s father. In ten lines written in a
painstaking hand, with thick downstrokes and fine upstrokes, with
flourishes and a dashing signature, the old man announced that he was
going to visit him one day in the near future.
Laughter came back again to Revaud, and with laughter a final
justification for living. All day he toyed with the letter, and used
gladly to show it and say:
“We are going to have a visit. My father is coming to see us.”
Then he began to be rather confiding.
“My father, you know, is a fine fellow, but he has had some hard
knocks. You will see my father--he’s a fellow that’s up to a few
tricks, and, what’s worse, he wears a shirt collar.”
Finally he ended by restricting his comments on his father’s character
to this statement:
“My father!--you’ll see--he wears a shirt collar.”
The days passed, and Revaud spoke so often of his father that in the
end he no longer knew whether the visitor had come or was yet to come.
Thus, by a special providence, Revaud never knew that his father did
not come to see him; and afterwards, when wanting to make allusion to
this remarkable period, he had recourse to a very ample phrase, and
used to say:
“It was the time of my father’s visit.”
Revaud was spoiled: he never lacked cigarettes or company, and he used
to confess so contentedly: “I’m the pet of this hospital.”
Besides, Revaud was not difficult. Tarrissant had only to appear
between his crutches for the dying man to exclaim, “Here’s another
who’s come to see me. I told you I was the pet here.”
Tarrissant had undergone the same operation as Revaud. It was a
complicated business, taking place in the knee. Only, in the case of
Tarrissant the operation had been more or less a complete success, and
in the case of Revaud, more or less a failure, because “it depends on
one’s blood.”
From the operation itself Revaud thought he had learned a new word:
“His knee had been ‘dezected.’” He used to look at Tarrissant, and,
comparing himself with the convalescing young man, he came to the
simple conclusion:
“We are both ‘dezected’ men, except that my old woman has left me; and,
too, I have been overworked.”
It was the only allusion that Revaud ever made to his conjugal
misfortune and to his toiling past.
But really, why think of all these things? Hasn’t man enough to do with
a troublesome leg, or this perpetual need which he cannot control?
Every evening each one prepared to face the long night with little
preparations, as if they were about to set out on a journey. Remusot
was pricked in the thigh, and at once he was in a dreamland bathed in
sweat, in which the fever brought before his eyes things he never would
describe to anyone. Mery had a large mug of some decoction or other
prepared for him, and he had only to stretch out his arm to get it.
Sandrap smoked his last cigarette, and Revaud asked for his cushion. It
was a little cotton pillow, which was placed against his side. Only
when this was done was Revaud willing to say, “That’s it, boys! That’ll
do.”
And from that moment they went off into a sleep that was horrible and
teeming like a forest waylaid with snares, and each of them wandered in
the pursuit of his dreams.
While the mind was beating its wings, the four bodies remained still. A
little night-light relieved the darkness. Then, in slippered footfalls,
a night attendant came and put his head through the door and heard the
four tortured respiratory movements, and occasionally surprised the
open but absent look of Remusot; in contemplating these patched-up
human remains, he suddenly thought of a raft of shipwrecked men--of a
raft tossed by the waves of the sea, with four bodies in distress.
The window-panes continued to vibrate plaintively with the echoes of
the war. Sometimes, in the course of the long night, the war seemed to
stop, as a woodcutter pauses to take breath between two blows of his
axe.
It was then that, in the deep and sudden silence, they awoke with queer
painful sensations; and they thought of all the things that happen in
battle--they thought of these things when not a sound could be heard.
Dawn broke reluctantly, those days of winter. The orderlies scrubbed
the floor. They blew out the spluttering night-light which stank of
burnt fat. Then there were the morning ablutions, and all the pains and
screams of wound-dressing.
Sometimes, in the middle of the trivial duties of the day, the door was
solemnly opened and a general entered, followed by the officers of the
staff. He paused at first on the threshold, overcome by the unwholesome
air, then he made a few steps into the room and asked who were these
men. The doctor used to whisper in his ear, and the general replied
quite simply:
“Ah, good! Excellent!”
When he had gone, Revaud always used to assure us:
“The general wouldn’t think of coming here without seeing me. He’s an
old pal.”
After that, there was something to talk about the whole day.
Many officers used to come as well--of the highest rank. They read the
papers pinned on the wall. “Frankly,” they said, “it’s a very fine
result.”
One of them began one day to examine Mery. He was a doctor, with a
white-bearded chin, very large and corpulent, his breast decorated with
crosses and his neck pink with good living. He seemed a decent fellow
and disposed to show sympathy. He said, in fact:
“Poor devil! Ah, but you see the same sort of thing might happen to me.”
More often than not, nobody came, absolutely no one, and the day was
endured only by being taken in small mouthfuls, like their meat at
dinner.
Once a great event happened. Mery was taken out and placed under the
X-rays. He came back, well content, remarking:
“At least, it isn’t painful.”
Another time Revaud’s leg was amputated. He had murmured when giving
his consent: “I’d done my best to keep it, this old leg of mine! Well!
well! So much the worse, so get on with it. Poor old thing!”
He burst out laughing once again; and no one has laughed, and no one
will laugh again, as Revaud did that day.
His leg then was to be amputated. The noblest blood in France flowed
once more. But it took place between four walls, in a little room
white-washed like a dairy, and no one heard of it.
Revaud was put back to bed behind the door. He awoke, and like a child
said:
“They’ve set me back quite warm and ‘comfy’ with this leg.”
Revaud had rather a good night, and when, on the next day, Mme. Baugan
came into the room, he said to her, as he now was in the habit of
saying:
“Fine, Madame Baugan. I’ve had a good night.”
With this, his head dropped on one side, his mouth opened little by
little, and, without further remark or movement, he was dead.
“Poor Revaud!” exclaimed Mme. Baugan. “Oh! he is dead.”
She kissed his brow, and at once began to lay him out, for a long day
faced her and she could not afford to waste time.
As Mme. Baugan dressed Revaud, she grumbled and scolded good-naturedly
because the corpse was difficult to manage.
Sandrap, Mery and Remusot said nothing. The rain streamed down the
panes, which never stopped rattling because of the gunfire.