“My friend,” he said, “look for the registers, and be so good as to
come along with me.”
Then he repeated, putting on his hat:
“There is no point in catching cold.”
A warm ray of sunlight entered by the open window! I thought M.
Briavoine had no reason to fear colds, and I took the registers.
The group of officers were now going down the wide stairs, in a tumult
of voices and footsteps.
A feeling of uneasiness, it seemed to me, gave a slight chill to the
conversation. As we arrived under the arches, I heard M. Briavoine
saying to M. Coupé:
“It’s the first time, since the war, that I meet the Chief of the
Medical Staff, General Dufrêne.”
He added, not without a certain gravity of tone:
“Vernier, go back and see if they have swept the subalterns’ room.
Some cotton was lying about there just now.”
“Hang it!” mumbled Proby; “he must not come and interfere with us. And
he’s going to be received like this! We’ll tell him--what!--we’ll tell
him a thing or two.”
“We will tell him, right enough,” said M. Briavoine with decision.
“We’ll tell him that the hospital is badly lighted; the gas-pipes and
water-pipes are innumerable; that the food is not as it should be----”
“I shall not stick at anything,” interrupted Father Coupé: “I shall
insist on the important improvements I want for my work.”
As we got to the steps of the entrance, Professor Proby became suddenly
irascible, and, taking on one side one of the attendants who was
wearing a white coat, said to him:
“You, there! Get yourself into uniform. It looks better.”
The motor-car of the Chief of the Medical Staff was coming to a stop
in front of the door. It opened like a dry fruit, and shot out its
contents on the pavement.
What an impressive personage! He was tall and, it seemed to me, of
enormous proportions. A typically military face--no one could mistake
it--deep features over which the fingers and the nails of the sculptor
must have passed again and again; on the nose, too, the sculptor’s
thumb must have been at work, pressing and moulding delicately the
lumps of flesh; a bristling white moustache and imperial, of the
kind specially reserved for soldiers advanced in age. He wore an old
general’s uniform, which many give up with the greatest difficulty,
like old ideas. Gold, jewellery, velvet, and silk facings adorned his
body with such refulgence that the imagination could hardly conceive
that, beneath this barbarous splendour, there were lungs, muscles,
bones and a shrivelled skin covered with grey hair.
A look escaped from beneath his bushy eyebrows, which was at once
violent, questioning, and suggestive of unutterable pride.
He came forward in grave silence.
I expected a scene; but from that moment what took place has remained
mysteriously veiled in my memory.
In one single movement everybody there took up a certain position, and
they made a correct military salute according to the rules taught so
patiently in barracks to recruits from the country.
Faces imperceptibly became rigid. The light in one’s eyes became dull
and fixed. Ten centuries of a habit imposed and accepted petrified
tongues, muscles and minds.
Some thistleseed flew away with the breeze. As I saw it fluttering,
white, woolly, without weight, I thought--I don’t know why--of that
subtle, fine, delicate, critical spirit. It vanished in a gust of wind.
A big insect loaded with pollen could be heard buzzing around.
I felt stupid! A long pause; then the white-moustached gentleman
decided to let these words fall from his lips:
“Good-day, gentlemen!”
The visit began in the rooms which had been packed with the wounded
from the Marne front. There young men were lying who had been face to
face with War, and who had calmly recognised it as the old Devil of
the Species. From that time they spoke of it just as they always will,
now that three years of blood, suffering and torture have decimated,
maimed and broken them.
But nobody bothered about their thoughts. Sheets were drawn back,
bandages were undone, wounds were left open to the air. It was now a
question of “cases” and of lesions.
A scientific discussion was commencing, to which I listened with an
eager curiosity. As I have said, doctors were present who were princes
in their profession. They came on the scene with minds, I thought,
which were profoundly independent--even aggressive. And I looked
forward to an interesting controversy.
M. Dufrêne was closely examining some one’s thigh, in which a dark,
quivering hole had been made by a shell.
“What do you put in it, Proby?” he said.
Professor Proby began a detailed explanation of the way in which such
wounds ought to be treated.
“It has been my habit,” he said, “for thirty years to put in some
cotton wool--I lectured to the Academy of Medicine--what! And nothing
gives me such good results, because----”
At that point the Medical Inspector-General struck the sick man’s
little table drily with his pencil.
“Hurry up, Proby,” he said, in a calm, cutting voice.
Proby started a little, and mumbled again:
“For thirty years I have always used cotton wool----”
“Believe me, Proby, that’s enough. You will not put any of it in the
wounds. You understand.”