XV

When I returned to myself, I looked around. I was in a long hall, with

posts all around. Some one gave me wine and water to drink, and it was

most grateful. I was in a bed, and beside me was an old gray-mustached

soldier, who, when he saw my eyes open, lifted up my head and held a

cup to my lips.

"Well," said he cheerfully, "well! we are better."

I could not help smiling as I thought that I was yet among the living.

My chest and arm were stiff with bandages; I felt as if a hot iron were

burning me there; but no matter, I lived!

I gazed at the heavy rafters crossing the space above me; at the tiles

of the roof, through which the daylight entered in more than one spot;

I turned and looked to the other side, and saw that I was in one of

those vast sheds used by the brewers of the country as a shelter for

their casks and wagons. All around, on mattresses and heaps of straw,

numbers of wounded lay ranged; and in the middle, on a large

kitchen-table, a surgeon-major and his two aids, their shirt-sleeves

rolled up, were amputating the leg of a soldier, who was shrieking in

agony. Behind them was a mass of legs and arms. I turned away sick

and trembling.

Five or six soldiers were walking about, giving bread and drink to the

wounded.

But the man who impressed himself most on my memory was a surgeon with

sleeves rolled up, who cut and cut without paying the slightest

attention to what was going on around; he was a man with a large nose

and wrinkled cheeks, and every moment flew into a passion at his

assistants, who could not give him his knives, pincers, lint, or linen

fast enough, or who were not quick enough sponging up the blood.

Things went on quickly, however, for in less than a quarter of an hour

he had cut off two legs.

Without, against the posts, was a large wagon full of straw.

They had just laid out on the table a Russian carbineer, six feet in

height at least; a ball had pierced his neck near the ear, and while

the surgeon was asking for his little knives, a cavalry surgeon passed

before the shed. He was short, stout, and badly pitted with the

small-pox, and held a portfolio under his arm.

"Ha! Forel!" cried he, cheerfully.

"It is Duchene," said our surgeon, turning around. "How many wounded?"

"Seventeen to eighteen thousand."

"Aha! Well, how goes it this morning?"

"Passably--I am looking for a tavern."

Our surgeon left the shed to chat with his comrade; they conversed

quietly, while the assistants sat down to drink a cup of wine, and the

Russian rolled his eyes despairingly.

"See, Duchene; you have only to go down the street, opposite that well,

do you see?"

"Very well indeed."

"Just opposite you will see the canteen."

"Very good; thank you; I am off."

He started, and our surgeon called after him:

"A good appetite to you, Duchene!"

Then he returned to his Russian, whose neck he laid open. He worked

ill-humoredly, constantly scolding his aids.

"Be quick!" he said, "be quick!"

The Russian writhed and groaned, but he paid no attention to that, and

at last, throwing the bullet upon the ground, he bandaged up the wound,

and cried, "Carry him off!"

They lifted the Russian from the table, and stretched him on a mattress

beside the others; then they laid his neighbor upon the table.

I could not think that such horrors took place in the world; but I was

yet to see worse than this.

At five or six beds from mine sat an old corporal with his leg bound

up. He closed one eye knowingly, and said to his neighbor, whose arm

had just been cut off:

"Conscript, look at that heap! I will bet that you cannot recognize

your arm."

The other, who had hitherto shown the greatest courage, looked, and

fell back senseless.

Then the corporal began laughing, saying:

"He has recognized it. It is the lower one, with the little blue

flower. It always produces that effect."

He looked around self-approvingly, but no one laughed with him.

Every moment the wounded called for water.

"Drink! Drink!"

When one began, all followed, and the old soldier had certainly

conceived a liking for me, for each time he passed, he presented the

cup.

I did not remain in the shed more than an hour. A dozen ambulances

drew up before the door, and the peasants of the country round, in

their velvet jackets, and large black slouched hats, their whips on

their shoulders, held the horses by the reins. A picket of hussars

arrived soon after, and their officer dismounting, entered and said:

"Excuse me, major, but here is an order to escort twelve wagons of

wounded as far as Lutzen. Is it here that we are to receive them?"

"Yes, it is here," replied the surgeon.

The peasants and the ambulance-drivers, after giving us a last draught

of wine, began carrying us to the wagons. As one was filled, it

departed, and another advanced. I was in the third, seated on the

straw, in the front row, beside a conscript of the Twenty-seventh, who

had lost his right hand; behind was another who had lost a leg; then

came one whose head was laid open, and another whose jaw was broken; so

was the wagon filled.

They had given us our great-coats; but despite them and the sun, which

was shining brightly, we shivered with cold, and left only our noses

and forage-caps, or linen bandages on the splints visible. No one

spoke; each was too much occupied thinking of himself.

At moments I was terribly cold; then flashes of heat would dart through

me, and flush me as in a fever; and indeed it was the beginning of the

fever. But as we left Kaya, I was yet well; I saw everything clearly,

and it was not until we neared Leipzig that I felt indeed sick.

At last we were all placed in the wagons, and arranged according to our

condition--those able to sit up, in the first that set out, the others

stretched in the last, and we started. The hussars rode beside us,

smoking and chatting, paying no attention to us.

In passing through Kaya, I saw all the horrors of war. The village was

but a mass of cinders; the roofs had fallen, and the walls alone

remained standing; the rafters were broken; we could see the remnants

of rooms, stairs, and doors heaped within. The poor villagers, women,

children, and old men, came and went with sorrowful faces. We could

see them going up and down in their houses, as if they were in cages in

the open air; and in one we saw a mirror and an evergreen branch,

showing where dwelt a young girl in time of peace.

Ah! who could foresee that their happiness would so soon be destroyed,

not by the fury of the winds or the wrath of heaven, but by the rage of

man!

Even the cattle and pigeons seemed seeking their lost homes among the

ruins; the oxen and the goats, scattered through the streets, lowed and

bleated plaintively. Fowls were roosting upon the trees, and

everywhere, everywhere we saw the traces of cannon-balls.

At the last house an old man with flowing white hair, sat at the

threshold of what had been his cottage, with a child upon his knees,

glaring on us as we passed. "Did he see us?" I do not know. His

furrowed brow and stony eyes spoke of despair. How many years of

labor, of patient economy, of suffering, had he passed to make sure a

quiet old age! Now all was crushed, ruined; the child and he had no

longer a roof to cover their heads.

And those great trenches--fully a mile of them--at which the country

people were working in such haste, to keep the plague from completing

the work war began! I saw them, too, from the top of the hill of Kaya,

and turned away my eyes, horror-stricken. Russians, French, Prussians,

were there heaped pell-mell, as if God had made them to love each other

before the invention of arms and uniforms, which divide them for the

profit of those who rule them. There they lay, side by side; and the

part of them which could not die knew no more of war, but cursed the

crimes that had for centuries kept them apart.

But what was sadder yet, was the long line of ambulances--bearing the

agonized wounded--those of whom they speak so much in the bulletins to

make the loss seem less, and who die by thousands in the hospitals, far

from all they love; while at their homes cannon are firing, and

church-bells are ringing with joyous chimes--rejoicing that thousands

of men are slain!

At length we reach Lutzen, but it was so full of wounded that we were

obliged to continue on to Leipzig. We saw in the streets only

half-dead wretches, stretched on straw along the walls of the houses.

It was more than an hour before we reached a church, where fifteen or

twenty of us who could no longer proceed were left.

Our ambulance conductor and his men, after refreshing themselves at a

tavern at the street corner, remounted, and we continued our journey to

Leipzig.

I saw and heard no more; my head swam; a murmuring filled my ears, I

thought trees were men, and an intolerable thirst burned my lips.

For a long while past, many in the wagons had been shrieking, calling

upon their mothers, trying to rise and fling themselves upon the road.

I know not whether I did the same; but I awoke as from a horrible

dream, as two men seized me, each by a leg, placing their arms under my

body, and carried me through a dark square. The sky seemed covered

with stars, and innumerable lights shone from an immense edifice before

us. It was the hospital of the market-place at Leipzig.

The two men who were carrying me ascended a spiral stairway which led

to an immense hall where beds were laid together in three lines, so

close that they touched each other. On one of these beds I was placed,

in the midst of oaths, cries for pity, and muttered complaints from

hundreds of fever-stricken wounded. The windows were open, and the

flames of the lanterns flickered in the gusts of wind. Surgeons,

assistants, and nurses with great aprons tied beneath their arms, came

and went, while the groans from the halls below, and the rolling of

ambulances, cracking of whips and neighing of horses without, seemed to

pierce my very brain. While they were undressing me, they handled me

roughly, and my wound pained me so horribly that I could not avoid

shrieking. A surgeon came up at once, and scolded them for not being

more careful. That is all I remember that night; for I became

delirious, and raved constantly of Catharine, Monsieur Goulden, and

Aunt Gredel, as my neighbor, an old artilleryman, whom my cries

prevented from sleeping, afterward told me. I awoke the next morning

at about eight o'clock, at the first roll of the drum, and saw the hall

better, and then learned that I had the bone of my left shoulder

broken. A dozen surgeons were around me; one of them, a stout, dark

man, whom they called Monsieur the Baron, was opening my bandages,

while an assistant at the foot of the bed held a basin of warm water.

The baron examined my wound; all the others bent forward to hear what

he might say. He spoke a few moments, but all that I could understand

was, that the ball had struck from below, breaking the bone and passing

out behind. I saw that he knew his business well, for the Prussians

had fired from below, over the garden wall, so that the ball must have

ranged upward. He washed the wound himself, and with a couple of turns

of his hand, replaced the bandage, so that my shoulder could not move,

and everything was in order.

I felt much better. Ten minutes after a hospital steward put a shirt

on me without hurting me--such was his skill.

The surgeon, passing to another bed, cried:

"What! You here again, old fellow?"

"Yes; it is I, Monsieur the Baron," replied the artilleryman, proud to

be recognized; "the first time was at Austerlitz, the second at Jena,

and then I received two thrusts of a lance at Smolensk."

"Yes, yes," said the surgeon kindly; "and now what is the matter with

you?"

"Three sabre-cuts on my left arm while I was defending my piece from

the Prussian hussars."

The surgeon unwound the bandage, and asked,

"Have you the cross?"

"No, Monsieur the Baron."

"What is your name?"

"Christian Zimmer, of the Second horse artillery."

"Very good!"

He dressed the wounds, and went to the next, saying:

"You will soon be well."

He returned, chatting with the others, and went out after finishing his

round and giving some orders to the nurses.

The old artilleryman's heart seemed overflowing with joy; and, as I

concluded from his name that he came from Alsace, I spoke to him in our

language, at which he was still more rejoiced. He was a tall

fellow--at least six feet in height, with round shoulders, a flat

forehead, large nose, light red mustaches, and was as hard as a rock,

but a good man for all that. His eyes twinkled when I spoke Alsatian

to him, and he pricked up his ears at once. If I asked him in our

tongue he was willing to give me everything he had, but he had only a

clasp of the hand, which cracked the bones in mine to give. He called

me _Josephel_, as they did at home, and said:

"Josephel, be careful how you swallow the medicines they give you, only

take what you know. All that does not smell good is good for nothing.

If they would give us a bottle of _Rikevir_ every day we would soon be

well; but it is easier to spoil our digestion with a handful of vile

boiled herbs, than to bring us a little of the good white wine of

Alsace."

When I told him I was afraid of dying of the fever, he looked angry

with his great gray eyes, and said:

"Josephel, you are a fool. Do you think that such tall fellows as you

and I were born to die in a hospital? No, no; drive the idea from your

head."

But he spoke in vain, for every morning the surgeons, making their

rounds, found seven or eight dead. Some died in fevers, some in deadly

chill; so that heat or cold might be the presage of death.

Zimmer said that all this proceeded from the evil drugs which the

doctors invented. "Do you see that tall, thin fellow?" he asked.

"Well, that man can boast of having killed more men than a field-piece;

he is always primed, with his match lighted; and that little brown

fellow--I would send him instead of the Emperor to the Russians and

Prussians; he would kill more of them than a whole army corps."

He would have made me laugh with his jokes if the litters had not been

constantly passing.

At the end of three weeks my shoulder began to heal, and Zimmer's

wounds were also doing well. They gave us every morning some good

boiled beef which warmed our hearts, and in the evening a little beef

with half a glass of wine, the sight alone of which rejoiced us and

made the future look hopeful.

About this time, too, they allowed us to walk in the large garden, full

of elms, behind the hospital. There were benches under the trees, and

we walked the paths like millionnaires in our gray great-coats and

forage-caps. The weather was magnificent; and we could see far along

the poplar bordered Partha. This river falls into the Elster, on the

left, forming a long blue line. On the same side stretches a forest of

beech trees, and in front are three or four great white roads, which

cross fields of wheat, barley and hay, and hop plantations; no sight

could be pleasanter, or richer, especially when the breeze falls upon

it and these harvests rise and fall in the sunlight like waves of the

sea. The increasing heat presaged a fine year and often, when looking

at the beautiful scenery around, I thought of Phalsbourg, and the tears

came to my eyes.

"I would like to know what makes you cry so, Josephel," said Zimmer.

"Instead of catching a fever in the hospital, or losing a leg or arm,

like hundreds of others, here we are quietly seated in the shade; we

are well fed, and can smoke when we have any tobacco; and still you

cry. What more do you want, Josephel?"

Then I told him of Catharine; of our walks at Quatre-Vents; of our

promises; of all my former life, which then seemed a dream. He

listened, smoking his pipe.

"Yes, yes," said he; "all this is very sad. Before the conscription of

1798, I too was going to marry a girl of our village, who was named

Margredel, and whom I loved better than all the world beside. We had

promised to marry each other, and all through the campaign of Zurich, I

never passed a day without thinking of her. But when I first received

a furlough and reached home, what did I hear? Margredel had been three

months married to a shoemaker, named Passauf."

"You may imagine my wrath, Josephel; I could not see clearly; I wanted

to demolish everything; and, as they told me that Passauf was at the

_Grand-Cerf_ brewery, thither I started, looking neither to the right

nor left. There I saw him drinking with three or four rogues. As I

rushed forward, he cried, 'There comes Christian Zimmer! How goes it,

Christian? Margredel sends you her compliments.' He winked his eye.

I seized a glass, which I hurled at his head, and broke to pieces,

saying, 'Give her that for my wedding present, you beggar!' The

others, seeing their friend thus maltreated, very naturally fell upon

me. I knocked two or three of them over with a jug, jumped on a table,

sprang through a window, and beat a retreat.

"'It was time,' I thought.

"But that was not all," he continued; "I had scarcely reached my

mother's when the gendarmerie arrived, and they arrested me. They put

me on a wagon and conducted me from brigade to brigade until we reached

my regiment, which was at Strasbourg. I remained six weeks at

Finckmatt, and would probably have received the ball and chain, if we

had not had to cross the Rhine to Hohenlinden.

"The Commandant Courtaud himself said to me:

"'You can boast of striking a hard blow, but if you happen again to

knock people over with jugs, it will not be well for you--I warn you.

Is that any way to fight, animal? Why do we wear sabres, if not to use

them and do our country honor?'

"I had no reply to make.

"From that day, Josephel, the thought of marriage never troubled me.

Don't talk to me of a soldier who has a wife to think of. Look at our

generals who are married, do they fight as they used to? No, they have

but one idea, and that is to increase their store and to profit by

their wealth by living well with their duchesses and little dukes at

home. My grandfather Yeri, the forester, always said that a good hound

should be lean, and I think the same of good generals and good

soldiers. The poor fellows are always in working order, but our

generals grow fat from their good dinners at home."

So spoke my friend Zimmer in the honesty of his heart, and all this did

not lessen my sadness.

As soon as I could sit up, I hastened to inform Monsieur Goulden, by

letter, that I was in the hospital of Halle, in one of the five

buildings of Leipzig, slightly wounded in the arm, but that he need

fear nothing for me, for I was growing better and better. I asked him

to show my letter to Catharine and Aunt Gredel to comfort them in the

midst of such fearful war. I told him, too, that my greatest happiness

would be to receive news from home and of the health of all whom I

loved.

From that moment I had no rest; every morning I expected an answer, and

to see the postmaster distribute twenty or thirty letters in our ward,

without my receiving one, almost broke my heart; I hurried to the

garden and wept. There was a little dark corner where they threw

broken pottery--a place buried in shade, which pleased me much, because

no one ever came there--there I passed my time dreaming on an old

moss-covered bench. Evil thoughts crossed my brain--I almost believed

that Catharine could forget her promises, and I muttered to myself,

"Ah! if you had not been picked up at Kaya! All would then have been

ended! Why were you not abandoned? Better to have been, than to

suffer thus!"

To such a pass did I finally arrive, that I no longer wished to

recover, when one morning the letter-carrier, among other names, called

that of Joseph Bertha. I lifted my hand without being able to speak,

and a large, square letter, covered with innumerable post-marks, was

handed me. I recognized Monsieur Goulden's handwriting, and turned

pale.

"Well," said Zimmer, laughing, "it is come at last."

I did not answer, but thrust the letter in my pocket, to read it at

leisure and alone. I went to the end of the garden and opened it. Two

or three apple-blossoms dropped upon the ground, with an order for

money, on which Monsieur Goulden had written a few words. But what

touched me most was the handwriting of Catharine, which I gazed at

without reading a word, while my heart beat as if about to burst

through my bosom.

At last I grew a little calmer and read the letter slowly, stopping

from time to time to make sure that I made no mistake--that it was

indeed my dear Catharine who wrote, and that I was not in a dream.

I have kept that letter, because it brought, so to speak, life back to

me. Here it is as I received it on the eighth day of June, 1813:

"MY DEAR JOSEPH:--I write you to tell you I yet love you alone, and

that, day by day, I love you more.

"My greatest grief is to know that you are wounded, in a hospital, and

that I cannot take care of you. Since the conscripts departed, we have

not had a moment's peace of mind. My mother says I am silly to weep

night and day, but she weeps as much as I, and her wrath falls heavily

on Pinacle, who dared not come to the market-place, because she carried

a hammer in her basket.

"But our greatest grief was when we heard that the battle had taken

place, and that thousands of men had fallen; mother ran every morning

to the post-office, while I could not move from the house. At last

your letter came, thank heaven! to cheer us. Now I am better, for I

can weep at my ease, thanking God that He has saved your life.

"And when I think how happy we used to be, Joseph--when you came every

Sunday, and we sat side by side without stirring and thought of

nothing! Ah! we did not know how happy we were; we knew not what might

happen--but God's will be done. If you only recover! if we may only

hope to be once again as happy as we were!

"Many people talk of peace, but the Emperor so loves war, that I fear

it is far off.

"What pleases me most is to know that your wound is not dangerous, and

that you still love me. Ah! Joseph, I will love you forever--that is

all I can say. I can say it from the bottom of my heart; and I know my

mother loves you too!

"Now, Monsieur Goulden wishes to say a few words to you, so I will

close. The weather is beautiful here, and the great apple-tree in the

garden is full of flowers; I have plucked a few, which I shall put in

this letter when M. Goulden has written. Perhaps with God's blessing

we shall yet eat together one of those large apples. Embrace me as I

embrace you, Joseph, Farewell! Farewell!"

As I finished reading this, Zimmer arrived, and in my joy, I said:

"Sit down, Zimmer, and I will read you my sweetheart's letter. You

will see whether she is a Margredel."

"Let me light my pipe first," he answered; and having done so, he

added: "Go on, Josephel, but I warn you that I am an old bird, and do

not believe all I hear; women are more cunning than we."

Notwithstanding this bit of philosophy, I read Catharine's letter

slowly to him. When I had ended, he took it, and for a long time gazed

at it dreamily, and then handed it back, saying:

"There! Josephel. She _is_ a good girl, and a sensible one, and will

never marry any one but you."

"Do you really think so?"

"Yes; you may rely upon her; she will never marry a Passauf. I would

rather distrust the Emperor than such a girl."