But Georges laughed too soon, he ducked just too late! There was a
terrific explosion, and suddenly he felt paralyzed all over—as if by
an electric shock. No pain anywhere at first; only a fearful feeling
that something dire had happened to him. He was stunned; “sort of
upside-down, all over,” he said. Dragging himself out of the shower
of dirt, dazed and frightened, he saw that his left foot was covered
with blood. Then, a sudden leap of pain! He had a savage burst of anger
that he should have been so treated. The pain every moment grew more
excruciating....
Just how he got to the rear he didn’t know, but after crawling and
limping somehow, with his rifle as a crutch, he found himself at last
by the wall of a house outside the village, and there he lay down to
rest.
But there was to be little rest for Georges Cucurou. From that moment,
for a whole week, he lived in a sort of waking nightmare. One foot
bare, hopping along, hugging the walls of the village, savagely
bombarded by German batteries—lying under big trees, watching his
retreating regiment leaving him to almost certain capture—limping away
on the arm of a stray wounded soldier in desperate haste before the
“Bosches” came that ride in a galloping ammunition wagon, bounced and
jolted, bouncing into ditches, bumping over stones—and then, after a
hurried first-aid dressing, that fearful journey to Ville-sur-Tourbes!
That journey—more than three miles—Georges made along the hard macadam
road, crawling on his hands and knees. He had thrown away his
knapsack, he had thrown away his rifle. “But,” said Georges, “there was
one thing I’d have died before I’d have thrown away—and that was that
Prussian helmet!” The last half mile he was carried on horseback, half
fainting, behind a friendly chasseur.
That was but an incident, however—the rest of his ordeal became a
confused horror of days and days in a ruined farm, with a hundred
others suffering like him, without any food, except unsugared tea,
with their wounds undressed—at a farm where threatening German shells
dropped intermittently, keeping up the constant fear of death.
Then—after endless hours, torturing hours when he thought of nothing
but his ankle and his stomach, the flying automobiles of the Red Cross!
Georges was wafted to a semi-heaven of beds and bandages and women’s
kindly hands and faces—warm food—cleanliness; rest—at Châlons!
[Illustration]
Georges’s soldiering was over—over, that is, if you except his trip to
Toulouse. To some, perhaps, a three days’ railway trip in a crowded
compartment with a crushed ankle might be considered an ordeal. But to
Georges it was a holiday. He was going home! Home.