On the 21st the order came to go to M. The _Boches_ had made their
first attack that morning; this, however, we did not know. At M., a
rather unlovely eighteenth-century château stands in a park built out
on the meadows of the Meuse. The flooded river flowed round the dark
pines. At night one could hear the water roaring under the bridges.
The château, which had been a hospital since the beginning of the war,
reeked with ether and iodoform; pasty-faced, tired attendants unloaded
mud, cloth, bandages, and blood that turned out to be human beings;
an over-wrought doctor-in-chief screamed contradictory orders at
everybody, and flared into crises of hysterical rage.
Ambulance after ambulance came from the lines full of clients; kindly
hands pulled out the stretchers, and bore them to the wash-room. This
was in the cellar of the dove-cote, in a kind of salt-shaker turret.
_Snip, snap_ went the scissors of the _brancardiers_, who looked after
the bath,--good souls these two; the uniforms were slit from mangled
limbs. The wounded lay naked in their stretchers while the attendant
daubed them with a hot soapy sponge; the blood ran from their wounds
through the stretcher to the floor, and seeped into the cracks of the
stones. A lean, bearded man, closed his eyes over the agony of his
opened entrails and died there. I thought of Henner's dead Christ.
Outside, mingling with the roaring of the river, came the great,
terrible drumming of the bombardment. An endless file of troops were
passing down the great road. Night came on. Our ambulances were in
a little side street at right angles to the great road; their lamps
flares beat fiercely on a little section of the great highway.
Suddenly, plunging out of the darkness into the intense radiance of
the acetylene beams, came a battery of 75's, the helmeted men leaning
over on the horses, the guns rattling and the harness clanking, a swift
picture of movement that plunged again into darkness. And with the
darkness, the whole horizon became brilliant with cannon fire.
V
We were well within the horseshoe of German fire that surrounded the
French lines. It was between midnight and one o'clock, the sky was deep
and clear, with big ice-blue winter stars. We halted at a certain road
to wait our chance to deliver our wounded. It was a _mêlée_ of beams of
light, of voices, of obscure motions, sounds. Refugees went by, decent
people in black, the women being escorted by a soldier. One saw sad,
harassed faces. A woman came out of the turmoil, carrying a cat in a
canary cage; the animal swept the gilded bars with curved claws, and
its eyes shone black and crazily. Others went by pushing baby carriages
full to the brim with knick-knacks and packages. Some pushed a kind of
barrow. At the very edge of earth and sky was a kind of violet-white
inferno, the thousand finger-like jabs of the artillery shot unceasing
to the stars, the great semi-circular auréole flares of the shorter
pieces were seen a hundred times a minute. Over the moorland came a
terrible roaring such as a river might make tumbling through some
subterranean abyss. A few miles below, a dull, ruddy smouldering in the
sky told of fires in Verdun. The morning clouded over, the dawn brought
snow. Even in the daytime the great cannon flashes could be seen in the
low, brownish snow-clouds.
On the way to M., two horses that had died of exhaustion lay in a
frozen ditch. Ravens, driven from their repast by the storm, cawed
hungrily in the trees.