“At your service, sir!”
Then he begins to shout in a hoarse voice:
“Speak when you are spoken to. Be quiet, will you! You see I’m up to my
neck with this offensive, the wounded, and all these things here.”
What could I reply? I stand at attention and again say:
“Yes, sir; at your service, sir!”
He lights a cigarette and begins to wheeze, as you may have noticed,
from the effects of alcohol on his chest.
At this juncture an officer comes in. M. Poisson exclaims:
“It’s you, Perrin? Oh, my dear fellow, let me alone, will you, to get
on with this job! You see I am tired out with the work. Just look at my
list: nineteen! I’ll never get to the end! Nineteen!”
The officer takes me by the arm and says:
“Oh! but this is the extra man that has been sent to us.”
Then M. Poisson comes nearer, looks at me closely, and bellows, his
breath reeking with alcohol:
“Send him to the mortuary! Some one is wanted there. He can help
Tanquerelle. To the mortuary! And no more nonsense!”
Ten minutes later I am stationed at the mortuary.
* * * * *
I became, sir, very wretched. I am fairly cheerful as a rule, but
moving corpses about all day long cannot be called life. And such dead!
The flower of the country, degraded to a depth which imagination cannot
fathom.
Tanquerelle is an old butcher’s assistant. He too drinks. He is always
given the most unpleasant work because he drinks, and his unpleasant
work is an excuse for giving him more drinks. But I am not going to
expatiate on that. The drink question is not my business, unfortunately.
Tanquerelle is no company: he is a calamity, a scourge, a breed apart,
so to speak. When he is hungry, he never speaks; but he never is
hungry. Usually he indulges in small talk--the comments of a drunkard,
painful to hear in the presence of these corpses.
We are told, sir, that dead bodies mean very little to one after a
time, and that when you habitually live with them they become nothing
more than stones to you. Well, that’s not my experience. Every one of
these corpses, with which I pass my days, ends in being a companion to
me.
I get to like some of them, and I am almost sorry to see them taken
away. Sometimes, when I carelessly hit up against them with my elbow,
it is with an effort that I do not say, “I beg your pardon, my friend.”
I look at them, with their blistered hands, and their feet covered with
corns after long trudging over the roads, and my heart understands and
is touched.
I note a flighty ring on a finger, a birthmark on the skin, an old
scar, sometimes even tattoes, and finally one of the things which man
does not leave behind him: his poor grey hair, the lines of his face,
the relic of a smile around his eyes, more often traces of terror.
And all that sets my mind thinking. From their bodies I can read their
history: I imagined how much they had worked with those arms, the many
things they had seen with their eyes, how they had kissed with those
lips, how proud they must have been of their moustache and their beard,
on which now the lice were crawling, away from the cold, dead flesh. I
think of these things as I sew up the corpses in the sacking; and the
emotion I feel rather startles me, because mingled with my misery is a
feeling of pleasure.
But I am wandering off into philosophy. Not being a philosopher, I
haven’t the right to bore you.
I think I was speaking to you about Cuirassier Cuvelier. Well, let me
return to the story.
It takes us back to the May offensives. I assure you, I wasn’t idle
in those days. What numbers of dead passed through my hands! The poor
unfortunate widows and mothers need have no anxiety: in my way, I did
my duty. All of them were taken away with their mouths tightly closed
with a chin-cloth, arms crossed on their bodies--that is, of course,
if they still possessed mouths and arms--and I carefully wrapped them
in the sacking. I do not mention their eyes: it was beyond my power to
close them. It is too late, you know, by the time they arrive at the
mortuary. Oh, I took good care of my dead!
One day they brought me one with no identification mark at all. His
face was crushed in; bandages everywhere on his limbs, but no ticket,
no disc on his wrist, nothing at all.