CIVILISATION

I must know first what you mean by civilisation. That is a question I

can well put to a man of understanding and intelligence like yourself;

and then, too, you are always boasting of this famous civilisation.

Before the war I was an assistant in a commercial laboratory; but now

I swear that, if ever I have the doubtful privilege of surviving this

horror, I will never take up the work again. The country--the pure,

fresh country for me! Anywhere away from these filthy factories--far

from the roar of your aeroplanes and all the machinery in which

formerly I took an interest when I did not understand things; but which

horrify me now because I see in them the very spirit of the war--the

principle and the cause of the war.

I hate the twentieth century as I hate this degenerate Europe--as

I hate the world which Europe has polluted. I know it may seem

ridiculous--this high talk. But what do I care! I’m not speaking to

the crowd, and besides I might as well be laughed at for this as for

anything else. I repeat, I shall fly to the hills, and I shall see

to it that I am as much alone as I possibly can be. I had thought of

escaping among the savages, but there are no real savages now. _They_

are all riding bicycles and clamouring for medals and honours.... I am

not going to live with the savages--we have done our best to corrupt

them: I have seen it done too well at Soissons.

In the spring of this year I was at Soissons with the G.B.C. I see

that G.B.C.[2] rather mystifies you, but you must blame civilisation

for that: the Tower of Babel is being rebuilt by it, and soon we shall

have so debased our mother tongue that it will be nothing more than a

telegraphic code, ugly and colourless.

The retreat of the Germans had taken the line back towards Vauxaillon

and Laffaux, and there fighting went on pretty vigorously. In one

sector there was a spot--the Laffaux mill--which was a veritable thorn

in a wound, keeping it always inflamed. About the beginning of May

a great attack was launched on the mill, and nearly the whole of my

division had to turn out on field duty.

“You, sergeant,” said one officer to me--“you will remain at the

hospital and take charge of the A.C.A.[3] section. I’ll send a number

of men to help you.”

I was by this time thoroughly conversant with the subtleties of

military speech. When I was told that a number of men were to be

put under my charge, I understood perfectly that there would be no

one; and in point of fact I was given four miserable outcasts--weak,

half-imbecile creatures of no use to any one.

From Saturday onwards the wounded arrived in batches of a hundred. I

got them arranged as methodically as I could in the wards of the A.C.A.

But the work was not going on at all well. My absurd

stretcher-bearers, unable to fall in with each other’s movements,

stumbled like broken-kneed, miserable nags, causing the wounded to

scream with pain. In a nibbling, haphazard sort of way, they tried

to deal with the waiting masses of the injured, and the whole A.C.A.

seemed to stamp with impatience. The effect was rather like a human

meat factory which has its machinery going at full strength without

being fed with oil and materials.

I must really describe the A.C.A. to you. In war slang it means

an automatic hospital (“autochir”)--the latest thing in surgical

invention. It’s the last word in science, just like our 400 m.m.

calibre guns which run on metal rails: it follows the armies with

motors, steam-driven machinery, microscopes, laboratories, the

complete equipment of a modern hospital. It is the first great repair

depôt which the wounded man enters on coming out of the destructive,

grinding mill on the extreme front. Here are brought the parts of the

military machine that are most spoiled. Skilled workmen take them in

hand at once, loosen them quickly, and with a practised eye examine

them, as one would a hydro-pneumatic break, an ignition chamber or

a collimator. If the part is seriously damaged, it goes through the

usual routine of being scrapped; but if the “human material” is not

irretrievably ruined, it is patched up ready to be used again at the

first opportunity, and that is called “preserving the effectives.”

My stretcher-bearers, with the jolting clumsiness of drunken dockers,

were bringing to the A.C.A. a few of the injured, who were at once

swallowed up and eliminated. And the factory continued to growl, like

some Moloch whose appetite has been whetted by the fumes of the first

sacrifice.

I had picked up a stretcher. Helped by a gunner who had been wounded in

the neck, and whose only desire was to be of some use while awaiting

his operation, I led my crew in amongst the heap of men that lay on

the ground. It was then that I saw some one passing along wearing a

high-grade officer’s hat--a sensible sort of man who smiled in spite

of his solicitous bearing.

“There is something wrong with your ambulance work,” he said. “I’ll

send you eight negroes. They are excellent stretcher men, these fellows

from Madagascar.”

Ten minutes afterwards the negroes had come.

To be exact, they were not all natives of Madagascar: they were types

selected from the 1st Colonial Corps which was at that very moment

strenuously fighting before Laffaux. There were a few natives of the

Soudan, whose age was difficult to tell, sombre and wrinkled, and

concealing under their regimental tunics charms that were coated with

dirt, and smelling with leather, sweat and exotic oils. The negroes of

Madagascar were of medium height, looking like embryos, very dark and

silent.

They slipped on the straps, and at my command began carrying the

wounded with quiet unconcern, as if they were unloading bales of cotton

at the docks.

I was content, or rather reassured. The A.C.A., surfeited at last,

worked at high pressure, and hummed like well-tended machines that drip

with oil, shining and flashing from every point.

Flash! The word is not too strong. I was dazzled on entering the

operating hut. Night had just fallen--one of those warm beautiful

nights of this brutal spring. The gunfire came and went in short

spasms, like a sick giant. The wards of the hospital overflowed with a

heaving mass of pain, and death was trying to restore order there. I

breathed in deeply the night air of the garden and, as I was saying, I

entered the operating hut.

It had been partitioned off into several rooms. The one I suddenly

stepped into made a bulge in the side of the building. It was as hot

as a puddling-oven. Men were cleaning, scrubbing, and polishing, with

scrupulous care, a mass of shining instruments, while others were

stoking fires which gave out the white heat of soldering lamps. With

never a pause, orderlies were coming and going, carrying trays held

out rather stiffly at arm’s length, like hotel-keepers devoted to the

ceremonious rites of the table.

“It’s warm here,” I murmured, in order to say something.

“Come over here: you’ll find it all right,” said a grinning little chap

as hairy as a kobold.

I lifted a lid, feeling I was opening the breast of some monster. In

front of me steps led to a kind of throne on which, seated like a king,

the heart of the thing was to be found. It was a steriliser--an immense

pot in which a calf could easily have been cooked whole. It lay on its

stomach and emitted a jet of steam that stupefied one, and its weary

monotony made one hardly conscious of time and space. But suddenly the

infernal noise stopped, and it was like the end of eternity. On the

back of the machine a load of kettles continued to spit and gurgle. A

man looking like a ship’s pilot was turning a large heavy wheel, and

the lid of the cauldron, suddenly unbolted, rose, exposing to view

its red-hot bowels, from which all sorts of boxes and packages were

taken out. The heat of the furnace had given way to the damp, crushing

atmosphere of a drying-stove.

“But where do they operate on the wounded?” I asked a boy who was

washing a pair of rubber gloves in a big copper tub.

“Over there, in the operating-room, of course. But don’t go in that

way.”

I went out again into the freshness of the night, and proceeded to the

waiting-room to find my stretcher-bearers.

At that moment it was the turn of the cuirassiers to be brought in. A

division of “foot cavalry” had been fighting since morning. Hundreds of

the finest men in France had fallen, and they waited there like broken

statues which are still beautiful in their ruins. Their limbs were

so strong, and their chests so solid, that they could not believe in

death, and as they felt their rich healthy blood dripping from their

wounds, they held at bay, with curses and laughter, the weakness of

their broken flesh.

“They can do what they like with this flesh of mine,” said one of the

two; “but to make me unconscious, damn me! I’m not having any.”

“Yes, whatever they like,” said another, “but not amputation! I want my

paw; even done to the world, I want it!”

These two men were coming out of the X-ray ward. They lay naked under a

sheet, and carried, pinned to their bandages, papers of different sizes

and shapes, rough sketches, formulæ, and something like an algebraical

statement of their wounds, the expression in numbers of their misery

and disordered organs.

They spoke of this their first visit to the laboratory like clever

children who realise that the modern world would not know how to live

or die without the meticulous discipline of the sciences.

“What did he say, the X-rays major?”

“He said it was an antero-posterior axis.”

“Just what I feared.”

“It’s in my belly. I heard him say _abdomen_. But I am sure it’s in my

belly. Ah, damn it! but I’m not going to be put to sleep. That I won’t

stand!”

The door of the operating theatre opened at this point, and the

waiting-room was flooded with light. A voice cried:

“The next lot! And the belly chap first!”

The black bearers adjusted their straps, and the two talkers were

carried off. I followed the stretchers.

Imagine a shining rectangular block set in sheer night like a jewel

in coal. The door closed again, and I found myself imprisoned in that

light, which was reflected from the spotless canvas of the ceiling. The

floor, level and springy, was strewn with red soaked linen which the

orderlies picked up quickly with forceps. Between the floor and the

ceiling, four strange forms that were men. They were dressed completely

in white, their faces hidden behind masks which, like those of Touareg,

only admit the eyes to view. Like Chinese dancers, they held in the air

their hands covered with rubber, and the perspiration streamed from

their brows.

You could hear the muffled vibrations of the motor which generated

the light. Filled up again to overflowing, the steriliser disturbed

the world with its piercing lament. Small radiators were snorting like

animals when they are stroked the wrong way. It all made a savage,

flamboyant music, and the men who were moving about seemed to perform

rhythmically a religious dance--a kind of austere and mysterious ballet.

The stretchers glided in between the tables like canoes in an

archipelago. The instruments were set out on spotless linen and

sparkled like jewels in glass cases; and the little Madagascar negroes,

alert and obedient, took great care in handling their burden. They

stopped on the word of command, and waited. Their dark slender necks

yoked with the straps, and their fingers clutching the handles of the

stretchers, reminded one of sacred apes trained to carry idols. The

heads and feet of the two wan and enormous cuirassiers stuck out beyond

the limits of the stretchers.

A few gestures that were almost ritualistic, and the wounded men were

placed on the operating-tables.

At that moment I caught the eye of one of the negroes, and I

experienced a feeling of extreme discomfort. It was the calm deep

look of a child or a young dog. The savage was slowly turning his

head from left to right and looked at the extraordinary men and the

extraordinary things all around him. His dark eyes stopped lightly

on all the wonderful parts of this workshop devoted to repairing the

human machine. And those eyes, which betrayed no thought, were on that

account even more disquieting. For one second I was fool enough to

think “How astonished he must be!” But the absurd thought soon left me,

and I was overwhelmed with unutterable shame.

The four negroes left the room. That afforded me a little comfort. The

wounded looked dazed and bewildered. The ambulance men hastened to bind

their hands and feet and rub them with alcohol. The masked men were

giving orders and moving about the tables with the deliberate gestures

of officiating priests.

“Who is the head here?” I whispered to some one.

He was pointed out to me. He was a man of medium height and was sitting

down, with his gloved hands held up, dictating something to a clerk.

Fatigue, the blinding light, the booming of the guns, the rumble of

the machinery acted as a sort of lucid drug on my brain. I remained

fixed where I was, in a veritable whirl of thought. Everything here

worked for one’s good ... it was civilisation finding within itself

the supreme reply, the corrective to its destructive excesses; nothing

less than this complex organism would suffice to reduce by the smallest

degree the immense evil creation of the machine age. I thought again of

the indecipherable look of the savage, and my emotion was a mixture of

pity, anger and loathing....

The man who, as I had learnt, was in charge of the operating theatre

had finished dictating. He remained fixed in the position of a heraldic

messenger and seemed to be absorbed in thought. I noticed that behind

his spectacles gleamed a look that was solemn, tranquil and sad,

though full of purpose. Scarcely anything of his face was visible,

the mask hiding his mouth and beard; but on his temples could be seen

a few fresh grey hairs, and a large swollen vein marked his forehead,

betraying the strained efforts of a tense will.

“The man’s unconscious,” said some one.

The surgeon approached the table. The man had indeed lost

consciousness; and I saw it was the very one who swore he would

not take the anæsthetic. The poor man had not dared even to make a

protest. Caught, as it were, in the cogs of the wheel, he was at once

overpowered, and he delivered himself up to the hungry machine, like

pig-iron devoured by the rolling-mills. And then, too, he must have

known it was for his good, because this is all the good that is left to

us in these days.

“Sergeant,” some one remarked, “you are not allowed to remain in the

operating theatre without a cap.”

On going out, I looked once again at the surgeon. He hung over his work

with an assiduity in which, despite his overalls, his mask and his

gloves, a feeling of tenderness was plainly marked.