We opened a door, and the men who were lying within began to scream at the top of their voices. Some, lying on their stretchers on the floor, seized us by the legs as we passed, imploring us to attend to them. A few bewildered orderlies hurried hither and thither, powerless to meet the needs of this mass of suffering. Every moment I felt my coat seized, and heard a voice saying:

"I have been here four days. Dress my wounds, for God's sake."

And when I answered that I would come back again immediately, the poor fellow began to cry.

"They all say they will come back, but they never do."

Occasionally a man in delirium talked to us incoherently as we moved along. Sometimes we went round a quiet bed to see the face of the sufferer, and found only a corpse.

Each ward we inspected revealed the same distress, exhaled the same odour of antiseptics and excrements, for the orderlies could not always get to the patient in time, and many of the men relieved themselves apparently unconcerned.

I remember a little deserted room in disorder, on the table a bowl of coffee with bread floating in it; a woman's slippers on the floor, and in a corner, toilet articles and some strands of fair hair.... I remember a corner where a wounded man suffering from meningitis, called out unceasingly: 27, 28, 29... 27, 28, 29... a prey to a strange obsession of numbers. I see a kitchen where a soldier was plucking a white fowl... I see an Algerian non-commissioned officer pacing the corridor....

Towards noon, the head doctor arrived followed by my comrades, and our vehicles. With him I made the round of the buildings again while they were unpacking our stores. I had got hold of a syringe, while waiting for a knife, and I set to work distributing morphia. The task before us seemed immense, and every minute it increased. We began to divide it hastily, to assign to each his part. The cries of the sufferers muffled the sound of a formidable cannonade. An assistant at my side, whom I knew to be energetic and resolute, muttered between his teeth: "No! no! Anything rather than war!"

But we had first to introduce some order into our Inferno.

In a few hours this order appeared and reigned. We were exhausted by days of marching and nights of broken sleep, but men put off their packs and set to work with a silent courage that seemed to exalt even the least generous natures. Our first spell lasted for thirty-six hours, during which each one gave to the full measure of his powers, without a thought of self.

Four operation-wards had been arranged. The wounded were brought in unceasingly, and a grave and prudent mind pronounced upon the state of each, upon his fate, his future.... Confronted by the overwhelming flood of work to be done, the surgeon, before seizing the knife, had to meditate deeply, and make a decision as to the sacrifice which would ensure life, or give some hope of life. In a moment of effective thought, he had to perceive and weigh a man's whole existence, then act, with method and audacity.

As soon as one wounded man left the ward, another was brought in; while the preparations for the operation were being made, we went to choose among and classify the patients beforehand, for many needed nothing more; they had passed beyond human aid, and awaited, numb and unconscious, the crowning mercy of death.

The word "untransportable" once pronounced, directed all our work. The wounded capable of waiting a few hours longer for attention, and of going elsewhere for it were removed. But when the buzz of the motors was heard, every one wanted to go, and men begging to be taken away entered upon their death agony as they assured us they felt quite strong enough to travel....

Some told us their histories; the majority were silent. They wanted to go elsewhere... and above all, to sleep, to drink. Natural wants dominated, and made them forget the anguish of their wounds....

I remember one poor fellow who was asked if he wanted anything. ... He had a terrible wound in the chest, and was waiting to be examined. He replied timidly that he wanted the urinal, and when the orderly hurried to him bringing it, he was dead.

The pressure of urgent duty had made us quite unmindful of the battle close by, and of the deafening cannonade. However, towards evening, the buildings trembled under the fury of the detonations. A little armoured train had taken up its position near us. The muzzle of a naval gun protruded from it, and from moment to moment thrust out a broad tongue of flame with a catastrophic roar.

The work was accelerated at the very height of the uproar. Rivers of water had run along the corridors, washing down the mud, the blood and the refuse of the operation-wards. The men who had been operated on were carried to beds on which clean sheets had been spread. The open windows let in the pure, keen air, and night fell on the hillsides of the Meuse, where the tumult raged and lightnings flashed.

Sometimes a wounded man brought us the latest news of the battle. Between his groans, he described the incredible bombardment, the obstinate resistance, the counter-attacks at the height of the hurly-burly.

All these simple fellows ended their story with the same words, surprising words at such a moment of suffering:

"They can't get through now...."

Then they began to moan again.

During the terrible weeks of the battle, it was from the lips of these tortured men that we heard the most amazing words of hope and confidence, uttered between two cries of anguish.

The first night passed under this stress and pressure. The morning found us face to face with labours still vast, but classified, divided, and half determined.

A superior officer came to visit us. He seemed anxious.

"They have spotted you," he said. "I hope you mayn't have to work upon each other. You will certainly be bombarded at noon."

We had forgotten this prophecy by the time it was fulfilled.

About noon, the air was rent by a screeching whistle, and some dozen shells fell within the hospital enclosure, piercing one of the buildings, but sparing the men. This was the beginning of an irregular but almost continuous bombardment, which was not specially directed against us, no doubt, but which threatened us incessantly.

No cellars. Nothing but thin walls. The work went on.

On the third day a lull enabled us to complete our organisation. The enemy was bombarding the town and the lines persistently. Our artillery replied, shell for shell, in furious salvos; a sort of thunderous wall rose around us which seemed to us like a rampart. ... The afflux of wounded had diminished. We had just received men who had been fighting in the open country, as in the first days of the war, but under a hail of projectiles hitherto reserved for the destruction of fortresses. Our comrade D——arrived from the battlefield on foot, livid, supporting his shattered elbow. He stammered out a tragic story: his regiment had held its ground under a surging tide of fire; thousands of huge shells had fallen in a narrow ravine, and he had seen limbs hanging in the thicket, a savage dispersal of human bodies. The men had held their ground, and then had fought....

A quarter of an hour after his arrival D——, refreshed and strengthened, was contemplating the big wound in his arm on the operating table, and talking calmly of his ruined future....

Towards the evening of this day, we were able to go out of the building, and breathe the unpolluted air for a few minutes.

The noise reigned supreme, as silence reigns elsewhere. We were impregnated, almost intoxicated with it....

A dozen of those captive balloons which the soldiers call "sausages" formed an aerial semi-circle and kept watch.

On the other side of the hills the German balloons also watched in the purple mist to the East.

Night came, and the balloons remained faithfully at their posts. We were in the centre of a circus of fire, woven by all the lightnings of the cannonade. To the south-west, however, a black breach opened, and one divined a free passage there towards the interior of the country and towards silence. A few hundred feet from us, a cross-road continually shelled by the enemy echoed to the shock of projectiles battering the ground like hammers on an anvil. We often found at our feet fragments of steel still hot, which in the gloom seemed slightly phosphorescent.

From this day forth, a skilful combination of our hours and our means enabled us to take short spells of rest in turn. However, for a hundred reasons sleep was impossible to me, and for several weeks I forgot what it was to slumber.

I used to retire, then, from time to time to the room set apart for my friend V——and myself, and lie down on a bed, overcome by a fatigue that verged on stupefaction; but the perpetual clatter of sabots and shoes in the passage kept the mind alert and the eyes open. The chorus of the wounded rose in gusts; there were always in the adjoining wards some dozen men wounded in the head, and suffering from meningitis, which provoked a kind of monotonous howling; there were men wounded in the abdomen, and crying out for the drink that was denied them; there were the men wounded in the chest, and racked by a low cough choked with blood... and all the rest who lay moaning, hoping for an impossible repose....

Then I would get up and go back to work, haunted by the terrible fear that excess of fatigue might have made my eye less keen, my hand less steady than imperious duty required.

At night more especially, the bombardment was renewed, in hurricane gusts.

The air, rent by projectiles, mewed like a furious cat; the detonations came closer, then retired methodically, like the footsteps of a giant on guard around us, above us, upon us.

Every morning the orderlies took advantage of a moment of respite to run and inspect the new craters, and unearth the fuses of shells.... I thought of the delightful phrase of assistant-surgeon M——whom we had attended for a wound on the head, and who said to me as I was taking him back to bed, and we heard the explosions close by:

"Oh, the marmites (big shells) always fall short of one."

But to a great many of the wounded, the perpetual uproar was intolerable. They implored us with tears to send them somewhere else; those we kept were, as a fact, unable to bear removal; we had to soothe them and keep them, in spite of everything. Some, overcome by fatigue, slept all day; others showed extraordinary indifference, perhaps due to a touch of delirium, like the man with a wound in the abdomen which I was dressing one morning, and who when he saw me turn my head at the sound of an explosion which ploughed up a neighbouring field, assured me quietly that "those things weren't dangerous."

One night a policeman ran in with his face covered with blood.

He was waving a lantern which he used to regulate the wheeled traffic, and he maintained that the enemy had spotted his lamp and had peppered him with bullets. As a fact, he had only some slight scratches. He went off, washed and bandaged, but only to come back to us the next day dead. A large fragment of iron had penetrated his eye.

There was an entrance ward, where we sorted the cases. Ten times a day we thought we had emptied this reservoir of misery; but we always found it full again, paved with muddy stretchers on which men lay, panting and waiting.

Opposite to this ante-room was a clearing ward; it seemed less dismal than the other, though it was just as bare, and not any lighter; but the wounded there were clean; they had been operated on, they wore white bandages, they had been comforted with hot drinks and with all sorts of hopes, for they had already escaped the first summons of Death.

Between these two rooms, a clerk lived in the draught, the victim of an accumulation of indispensable and stupefying documents.

In the beginning, the same man sat for three days and three nights chained to this ungrateful task until at last we saw him, his face convulsed, almost mad after unremittingly labelling all this suffering with names and figures.

The first days of March were chilly, with alternations of snow and sunshine. When the air was pure, we heard it vibrate with the life of aeroplanes and echo to their contests. The dry throb of machine-guns, the incessant scream of shrapnel formed a kind of crackling dome over our heads. The German aeroplanes overwhelmed the environs with bombs which gave a prolonged whistle before tearing up the soil or gutting a house. One fell a few paces from the ward where I was operating on a man who had been wounded in the head. I remember the brief glance I cast outwards and the screams and headlong flight of the men standing under the windows.

One morning I saw an airship which was cruising over the hills of the Meuse suddenly begin to trail after it, comet-wise, a thick tail of black smoke, and then rush to the earth, irradiated by a burst of flame, brilliant even in the daylight. And I thought of the two men who were experiencing this fall.

The military situation improved daily, but the battle was no less strenuous. The guns used by the enemy for the destruction of men produced horrible wounds, certainly more severe on the whole than those we had tended during the first twenty months of a war that has been pitiless from its inception. All doctors must have noted the hideous success achieved in a very short time, in perfecting means of laceration. And we marvelled bitterly that man could adventure his frail organism through the deflagrations of a chemistry hardly disciplined as yet, which attains and surpasses the brutality of the blind forces of Nature. We marvelled more especially that flesh so delicate, the product and the producer of harmony, could endure such shocks and such dilapidations without instant disintegration.

Many men came to us with one or several limbs torn off completely, yet they came still living.... Some had thirty or forty wounds, and even more. We examined each body systematically, passing from one sad discovery to another. They reminded us of those derelict vessels which let in the water everywhere. And just because these wrecks seemed irredeemably condemned to disaster, we clung to them in the obstinate hope of bringing them into port and perhaps floating them again.

When the pressure was greatest, it was impossible to undress the men and get them washed properly before bringing them into the operating-ward. The problem was in these cases to isolate the work of the knife as far as possible from the surrounding mud, dirt and vermin: I have seen soldiers so covered with lice that the different parts of the dressings were invaded by them, and even the wounds. The poor creatures apologised, as if they were in some way to blame....

At such moments patients succeeded each other so rapidly that we knew nothing of them beyond their wounds: the man was carried away, still plunged in sleep; we had made all the necessary decisions for him without having heard his voice or considered his face.

We avoided overcrowding by at once evacuating all those on whom we had operated as soon as they were no longer in danger of complications. We loaded them up on the ambulances which followed one upon the other before the door. Some of the patients came back a few minutes later, riddled with fragments of shell; the driver had not succeeded in dodging the shells, and he was often wounded himself. In like manner the stretcher-bearers as they passed along the road were often hit themselves, and were brought in on their own hand-carts.

One evening there was a "gas warning." Some gusts of wind arrived, bearing along an acrid odour. All the wounded were given masks and spectacles as a precaution. We hung them even on the heads of the beds where dying men lay... and then we waited. Happily, the wave spent itself before it reached us.

A wounded man was brought in that evening with several injuries caused by a gas-shell. His eyes had quite disappeared under his swollen lids. His clothing was so impregnated with the poison that we all began to cough and weep, and a penetrating odour of garlic and citric acid hung about the ward for some time.

Many things we had perforce to leave to chance, and I thought, during this alarm, of men just operated on, and plunged in the stupor of the chloroform, whom we should have to allow to wake, and then mask them immediately, or...

Ah, well!... in the midst of all this unimaginable tragedy, laughter was not quite quenched. This phenomenon is perhaps one of the characteristics, one of the greatnesses of our race—and in a more general way, no doubt, it is an imperative need of humanity at large.

Certain of the wounded took a pride in cracking jokes, and they did so in words to which circumstances lent a poignant picturesqueness. These jests drew a laugh from us which was often closely akin to tears.

One morning, in the sorting room, I noticed a big, curly-haired fellow who had lost a foot, and had all sorts of wounds and fractures in both legs. All these had been hastily bound up, clothing and all, in the hollow of the stretcher, which was stiff with blood. When I called the stretcher-bearers and contemplated this picture, the big man raised himself on his elbow and said:

"Please give me a cigarette."

Then he began to smoke, smiling cheerfully and telling absurd stories. We took off one of his legs up to the thigh, and as soon as he recovered consciousness, he asked for another cigarette, and set all the orderlies laughing.

When, on leaving him, I asked this extraordinary man what his calling was, he replied modestly:

"I am one of the employees of the Vichy Company."

The orderlies in particular, nearly all simple folks, had a desire to laugh, even when they were worn out with fatigue, which made a pretext of the slightest thing, and notably of danger. One of them, called Tailleur, a buffoon with the airs of an executioner's assistant, would call out at the first explosions of a hurricane of shells:

"Number your arms and legs! Look out for your nuts! The winkles are tumbling about!"

All my little band would begin to laugh. And I had not the heart to check them, for their faces were drawn with fatigue, and this moment of doleful merriment at least prevented them from falling asleep as they stood.

When the explosions came very close, this same Tailleur could not help exclaiming:

"I am not going to be killed by a brick! I am going outside."

I would look at him with a smile, and he would repeat: "As for me, I'm off," carefully rolling a bandage the while, which he did with great dexterity.

His mixture of terror and swagger was a perpetual entertainment to us. One night, a hand-grenade fell out of the pocket of one of the wounded. In defiance of orders, Tailleur, who knew nothing at all about the handling of such things, turned it over and examined it for some time, with comic curiosity and distrust.

One day a pig intended for our consumption was killed in the pig-sty by fragments of shell. We ate it, and the finding by one of the orderlies of some bits of metal in his portion of meat gave occasion for a great many jests.

For a fortnight we were unable to go beyond the hospital enclosure. Our longest expedition was to the piece of waste ground which had been allotted to us for a burial ground, a domain the shells were always threatening to plough up. This graveyard increased considerably. As it takes a man eight hours to dig a grave for his brother man, one had to set a numerous gang to work all day, to ensure a place for each corpse.

Sometimes we went into the wooden shed which served as our mortuary. Pere Duval, the oldest of our orderlies, sewed there all day, making shrouds of coarse linen for "his dead."

They were laid in the earth carefully, side by side, their feet together, their hands crossed on their breasts, when indeed they still possessed hands and feet.... Duval also looked after the human debris, and gave it decent sepulture.

Thus our function was not only to tend the living, but also to honour the dead. The care of what was magniloquently termed their "estate" fell to our manager, S——. It was he who put into a little canvas bag all the papers and small possessions found on the victims. He devoted days and nights to a kind of funereal bureaucracy, inevitable even under the fire of the enemy. His occupation, moreover, was not exempt from moral difficulties. Thus he found in the pocket of one dead man a woman's card which it was impossible to send on to his family, and in another case, a collection of songs of such a nature that after due deliberation it was decided to burn them.

Let us purify the memories of our martyrs!

We had several German wounded to attend. One of these, whose leg I had to take off, overwhelmed me with thanks in his native tongue; he had lain for six days on ground over which artillery played unceasingly, and contemplated his return to life and the care bestowed on him with a kind of stupefaction.

Another, who had a shattered arm, gave us a good deal of trouble by his amazing uncleanliness. Before giving him the anaesthetic, the orderly took from his mouth a set of false teeth, which he confessed he had not removed for several months, and which exhaled an unimaginable stench.

I remember, too, a little fair-haired chap of rather chilly demeanour, who suddenly said "Good-bye" to me with lips that quivered like those of a child about to cry.

The interpreter from Headquarters, my friend C——, came to see them all as soon as they had got over their stupor, and interrogated them with placid patience, comparing all their statements in order to glean some trustworthy indication.

Thus days and nights passed by in ceaseless toil, under a perpetual menace, in the midst of an ever-growing fatigue which gave things the substance and aspects they take on in a nightmare.

The very monotony of this existence was made up of a thousand dramatic details, each of which would have been an event in normal life. I still see, as through the mists of a dream, the orderly of a dying captain sobbing at his bedside and covering his hands with kisses. I still hear the little lad whose life blood had ebbed away, saying to me in imploring tones: "Save me, Doctor! Save me for my mother!"... and I think a man must have heard such words in such a place to understand them aright, I think that every day this man must gain a stricter, a more precise, a more pathetic idea of suffering and of death.

One Sunday evening, the bombardment was renewed with extraordinary violence. We had just sent off General S——, who was smoking on his stretcher, and chatting calmly and cheerfully; I was operating on an infantryman who had deep wounds in his arms and thighs. Suddenly there was a great commotion. A hurricane of shells fell upon the hospital. I heard a crash which shook the ground and the walls violently, then hurried footsteps and cries in the passage.

I looked at the man sleeping and breathing heavily, and I almost envied his forgetfulness of all things, the dissolution of his being in a darkness so akin to liberating death. My task completed, I went out to view the damage.

A shell had fallen on an angle of the building, blowing in the windows of three wards, scattering stones in all directions, and riddling walls and ceilings with large fragments of metal. The wounded were moaning, shrouded in acrid smoke. They were lying so close to the ground that they had been struck only by plaster and splinters of glass; but the shock had been so great that nearly all of them died within the following hour.

The next day it was decided that we should change our domicile, and we made ready to carry off our wounded and remove our hospital to a point rather more distant. It was a very clear day. In front of us, the main road was covered with men, whom motor vehicles were depositing in groups every minute. We were finishing our final operations and looking out occasionally at these men gathered in the sun, on the slopes and in the ditches. At about one o'clock in the afternoon the air was rent by the shriek of high explosives and some shells fell in the midst of the groups. We saw them disperse through the yellowish smoke, and go to lie down a little farther off in the fields. Some did not even stir. Stretcher-bearers came up at once, running across the meadow, and brought us two dead men, and nine wounded, who were laid on the operating-table.

As we tended them during the following hour we looked anxiously at the knots of men who remained in the open, and gradually increased, and we asked whether they would not soon go. But there they stayed, and again we heard the dull growl of the discharge, then the whistling overhead, and the explosions of some dozen shells falling upon the men. Crowding to the window, we watched the massacre, and waited to receive the victims. My colleague M——drew my attention to a soldier who was running up the grassy slope on the other side of the road, and whom the shells seemed to be pursuing.

These were the last wounded we received in the suburb of G——. Three hours afterwards, we took up the same life and the same labours again, some way off, for many weeks more....

Thus things went on, until the day when we, in our turn, were carried off by the automobiles of the Grand' Route, and landed on the banks of a fair river in a village where there were trees in blossom, and where the next morning we were awakened by the sound of bells and the voices of women.



THE SACRIFICE

We had had all the windows opened. From their beds, the wounded could see, through the dancing waves of heat, the heights of Berru and Nogent l'Abbesse, the towers of the Cathedral, still crouching like a dying lion in the middle of the plain of Reims, and the chalky lines of the trenches intersecting the landscape.

A kind of torpor seemed to hang over the battle-field. Sometimes, a perpendicular column of smoke rose up, in the motionless distance, and the detonation reached us a little while afterwards, as if astray, and ashamed of outraging the radiant silence.

It was one of the fine days of the summer of 1915, one of those days when the supreme indifference of Nature makes one feel the burden of war more cruelly, when the beauty of the sky seems to proclaim its remoteness from the anguish of the human heart.

We had finished our morning round when an ambulance drew up at the entrance.

"Doctor on duty!"

I went down the steps. The chauffeur explained:

"There are three slightly wounded men. I am going to take on further, and then there are some severely wounded..."

He opened the back of his car. On one side three soldiers were seated, dozing. On the other, there were stretchers, and I saw the feet of the men lying upon them. Then, from the depths of the vehicle came a low, grave, uncertain voice which said:

"I am one of the severely wounded, Monsieur."

He was a lad rather than a man. He had a little soft down on his chin, a well-cut aquiline nose, dark eyes to which extreme weakness gave an appearance of exaggerated size, and the grey pallor of those who have lost much blood.

"Oh! how tired I am!" he said.

He held on to the stretcher with both hands as he was carried up the steps. He raised his head a little, gave a glance full of astonishment, distress, and lassitude at the green trees, the smiling hills, the glowing horizon, and then he found himself inside the house.

Here begins the story of Gaston Leglise. It is a modest story and a very sad story; but indeed, are there any stories now in the world that are not sad?

I will tell it day by day, as we lived it, as it is graven in my memory, and as it is graven in your memory and in your flesh, my friend Leglise.

Leglise only had a whiff of chloroform, and he fell at once into a sleep closely akin to death.

"Let us make haste," said the head doctor. "We shall have the poor boy dying on the table."

Then he shook his head, adding:

"Both knees! Both knees! What a future!"

The burden of experience is a sorrowful one. It is always sorrowful to have sufficient memory to discern the future.

Small splinters from a grenade make very little wounds in a man's legs; but great disorders may enter by way of those little wounds, and the knee is such a complicated, delicate marvel!

Corporal Leglise is in bed now. He breathes with difficulty, and catches his breath now and again like a person who has been sobbing. He looks about him languidly, and hardly seems to have made up his mind to live. He contemplates the bottle of serum, the tubes, the needles, all the apparatus set in motion to revive his fluttering heart, and he seems bowed down by grief. He wants something to drink, but he must not have anything yet; he wants to sleep, but we have to deny sleep to those who need it most; he wants to die perhaps, and we will not let him.

He sees again the listening post where he spent the night, in advance of all his comrades. He sees again the narrow doorway bordered by sandbags through which he came out at dawn to breathe the cold air and look at the sky from the bottom of the communication-trench. All was quiet, and the early summer morning was sweet even in the depths of the trench. But some one was watching and listening for the faint sound of his footsteps. An invisible hand hurled a bomb. He rushed back to the door; but his pack was on his back, and he was caught in the aperture like a rat in a trap. The air was rent by the detonation, and his legs were rent, like the pure air, like the summer morning, like the lovely silence.

The days pass, and once more, the coursing blood begins to make the vessels of the neck throb, to tinge the lips, and give depth and brilliance to the eye.

Death, which had overrun the whole body like an invader, retired, yielding ground by degrees; but it has halted now, and makes a stand at the legs; these it will not relinquish; it demands something by way of spoil; it will not be baulked of its prey entirely.

We fight for the portion Death has chosen. The wounded Corporal looks on at our labours and our efforts, like a poor man who has placed his cause in the hands of a knight, and who can only be a spectator of the combat, can only pray and wait.

We shall have to give the monster a share; one of the legs must go. Now another struggle begins with the man himself. Several times a day I go and sit by his bed. All our attempts at conversation break down one by one. We always end in the same silence and anxiety. To-day Leglise said to me:

"Oh! I know quite well what you're thinking about!"

As I made no answer, he intreated:

"Perhaps we could wait a little longer? Perhaps to-morrow I may be better..."

Then suddenly, in great confusion:

"Forgive me. I do trust you all. I know what you do is necessary. But perhaps it will not be too late in two or three days...."

Two or three days! We will see to-morrow.

The nights are terribly hot; I suffer for his sake.

I come to see him in the evening for the last time, and encourage him to sleep. But his eyes are wide open in the night and I feel that they are anxiously fixed on mine.

Fever makes his voice tremble.

"How can I sleep with all the things I am thinking about?"

Then he adds faintly:

"Must you? Must you?"

The darkness gives me courage, and I nod my head: "Yes!"

As I finish his dressings, I speak from the depths of my heart:

"Leglise, we will put you to sleep to-morrow. We will make an examination without letting you suffer, and we will do what is necessary."

"I know quite well that you will take it off."

"We shall do what we must do."

I divine that the corners of his mouth are drawn down a little, and that his lips are quivering. He thinks aloud:

"If only the other leg was all right!"

I have been thinking of that too, but I pretend not to have heard. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

I spend part of the afternoon sewing pieces of waterproof stuff together. He asks me:

"What are you doing?"

"I am making you a mask, to give you ether."

"Thank you; I can't bear the smell of chloroform."

I answer "Yes, that's why." The real reason is that we are not sure he could bear the brutal chloroform, in his present state.

Leglise's leg was taken off at the thigh this morning. He was still unconscious when we carried him into the dark room to examine his other leg under the X-rays.

He was already beginning to moan and to open his eyes, and the radiographer was not hurrying. I did all I could to hasten the business, and to get him back into his bed. Thus he regained consciousness in bright sunshine.

What would he, who once again was so close to the dark kingdom, have thought if he had awakened in a gloom peopled by shadows, full of whisperings, sparks and flashes of light?

As soon as he could speak, he said to me:

"You have cut off my leg?"

I made a sign. His eyes filled, and as his head was low, the great tears trickled on to the pillow.

To-day he is calmer. The first dressings were very painful. He looked at the raw, bloody, oozing stump, trembling, and said:

"It looks pretty horrible!"

We took so many precautions that now he is refreshed for a few hours.

"They say you are to have the Military Medal," the head doctor told him.

Leglise confided to me later, with some hesitation:

"I don't suppose they would really give me the medal!"

"And why not?"

"I was punished; one of my men had some buttons off his overcoat."

Oh, my friend, scrupulous lad, could I love my countrymen if they could remember those wretched buttons for an instant?

"My men!" he said gravely. I look at his narrow chest, his thin face, his boyish forehead with the serious furrow on it of one who accepts all responsibilities, and I do not know how to show him my respect and affection.

Leglise's fears were baseless. General G——arrived just now. I met him on the terrace. His face pleased me. It was refined and intelligent.

"I have come to see Corporal Leglise," he said.

I took him into the ward, full of wounded men, and he at once went towards Leglise unhesitatingly, as if he knew him perfectly.

"How are you?" he asked, taking the young man's hand.

"Mon General, they've cut off my leg..."

"Yes, yes, I know, my poor fellow. And I have brought you the Military Medal."

He pinned it on to Leglise's shirt, and kissed my friend on both cheeks, simply and affectionately.

Then he talked to him again for a few minutes.

I was greatly pleased. Really, this General is one of the right sort.

The medal has been wrapped in a bit of muslin, so that the flies may not soil it, and hung on the wall over the bed. It seems to be watching over the wounded man, to be looking on at what is happening. Unfortunately, what it sees is sad enough. The right leg, the only leg, is giving us trouble now. The knee is diseased, it is in a very bad state, and all we have done to save it seems to have been in vain. Then a sore has appeared on the back, and then another sore. Every morning, we pass from one misery to another, telling the beads of suffering in due order.

So a man does not die of pain, or Leglise would certainly be dead. I see him still, opening his eyes desperately and checking the scream that rises to his lips. Oh! I thought indeed that he was going to die. But his agony demands full endurance; it does not even stupefy those it assails.

I call on every one for help.

"Genest, Barrassin, Prevot, come, all of you."

Yes, let ten of us do our best if necessary, to support Leglise, to hold him, to soothe him. A minute of his endurance is equal to ten years of such effort as ours.

Alas! were there a hundred of us he would still have to bear the heaviest burden alone.

All humanity at this hour is bearing a very cruel burden. Every minute aggravates its sufferings, and will no one, no one come to its aid?

We made an examination of the wounded man, together with our chief, who muttered almost inaudibly between his teeth:

"He must be prepared for another sacrifice."

Yes, the sacrifice is not yet entirely consummated.

But Leglise understood. He no longer weeps. He has the weary and somewhat bewildered look of the man who is rowing against the storm. I steal a look at him, and he says at once in a clear, calm, resolute voice:

"I would much rather die."

I go into the garden. It is a brilliant morning, but I can see nothing, I want to see nothing. I repeat as I walk to and fro:

"He would much rather die."

And I ask despairingly whether he is not right perhaps.

All the poplars rustle softly. With one voice, the voice of Summer itself, they say: "No! No! He is not right!"

A little beetle crosses the path before me. I step on it unintentionally, but it flies away in desperate haste. It too has answered in its own way: "No, really, your friend is not right."

"Tell him he is wrong," sing the swarm of insects that buzz about the lime-tree.

And even a loud roar from the guns that travels across the landscape seems to say gruffly: "He is wrong! He is wrong!"

During the evening the chief came back to see Leglise, who said to him with the same mournful gravity:

"No, I won't, Monsieur, I would rather die."

We go down into the garden, and the chief says a strange thing to me:

"Try to convince him. I begin at last to feel ashamed of demanding such a sacrifice from him."

And I too... am I not ashamed?

I consult the warm, star-decked night; I am quite sure now that he is wrong, but I don't know how to tell him so. What can I offer him in exchange for the thing I am about to ask him? Where shall I find the words that induce a man to live? Oh you, all things around me, tell me, repeat to me that it is sweet to live, even with a body so grievously mutilated.

This morning I extracted a little projectile from one of his wounds. He secretly concluded that this would perhaps make the great operation unnecessary, and it hurt me to see his joy. I could not leave him this satisfaction.

The struggle began again; this time it was desperate. For we have no time to lose. Every hour of delay exhausts our man further. A few days more, and there will be no choice open to him: only death, after a long ordeal....

He repeats:

"I am not afraid, but I would rather die."

Then I talk to him as if I were the advocate of Life. Who gave me this right? Who gave me eloquence? The things I said were just the right things, and they came so readily that now and then I was afraid of holding out so sure a promise of a life I am not certain I can preserve, of guaranteeing a future that is not in man's hands.

Gradually, I feel his resistance weakening. There is something in Leglise which involuntarily sides with me and pleads with me. There are moments when he does not know what to say, and formulates trivial objections, just because there are others so much weightier.

"I live with my mother," he says. "I am twenty years old. What work is there for a cripple? Ought I to live to suffer poverty and misery?"

"Leglise, all France owes you too much, she would blush not to pay her debt."

And I promise again, in the name of our country, sure that she will never fall short of what I undertake for her. The whole French nation is behind me at this moment, silently ratifying my promise.

We are at the edge of the terrace; evening has come. I hold his burning wrist in which the feeble pulse beats with exhausted fury. The night is so beautiful, so beautiful! Rockets rise above the hills, and fall slowly bathing the horizon in silvery rays. The lightning of the guns flashes furtively, like a winking eye. In spite of all this, in spite of war, the night is like waters dark and divine. Leglise breathes it in to his wasted breast in long draughts, and says:

"Oh, I don't know, I don't know!... Wait another day, please, please...."

We waited three whole days, and then Leglise gave in. "Well, do what you must. Do what you like."

On the morning of the operation, he asked to be carried down to the ward by the steps into the park. I went with him, and I saw him looking at all things round him, as if taking them to witness.

If only, only it is not too late!

Again he was laid on the table. Again we cut through flesh and bones. The second leg was amputated at the thigh.

I took him in my arms to lay him on his bed, and he was so light, so light....

This time when he woke he asked no question. But I saw his hands groping to feel where his body ended.

A few days have passed since the operation. We have done all it was humanly possible to do, and Leglise comes back to life with a kind of bewilderment.

"I thought I should have died," he said to me this morning, while I was encouraging him to eat.

He added:

"When I went down to the operation-ward, I looked well at everything, and I thought it was for the last time."

"Look, dear boy. Everything is just the same, just as beautiful as ever."

"Oh!" he says, going back to his memories, "I had made up my mind to die."

To make up one's mind to die is to take a certain resolution, in the hope of becoming quieter, calmer, and less unhappy. The man who makes up his mind to die severs a good many ties, and indeed actually dies to some extent.

With secret anxiety, I say gently, as if I were asking a question:

"It is always good to eat, to drink, to breathe, to see the light. ..."

He does not answer. He is dreaming. I spoke too soon. I go away, still anxious.

We have some bad moments yet, but the fever gradually abates. I have an impression that Leglise bears his pain more resolutely, like one who has given all he had to give, and fears nothing further.

When I have finished the dressing, I turned him over on his side, to ease his sore back. He smiled for the first time this morning, saying:

"I have already gained something by getting rid of my legs. I can lie on my side now."

But he cannot balance himself well; he is afraid of falling.

Think of him, and you will be afraid with him and for him.

Sometimes he goes to sleep in broad daylight and dozes for a few minutes. He has shrunk to the size of a child. I lay a piece of gauze over his face, as one does to a child, to keep the flies off. I bring him a little bottle of Eau de Cologne and a fan, they help him to bear the final assaults of the fever.

He begins to smoke again. We smoke together on the terrace, where I have had his bed brought. I show him the garden and say: "In a few days, I will carry you down into the garden."

He is anxious about his neighbours, asks their names, and inquires about their wounds. For each one he has a compassionate word that comes from the depths of his being. He says to me:

"I hear that little Camus is dead. Poor Camus!"

His eyes fill with tears. I was almost glad to see them. He had not cried for so long. He adds:

"Excuse me, I used to see Camus sometimes. It's so sad."

He becomes extraordinarily sensitive. He is touched by all he sees around him, by the sufferings of others, by their individual misfortunes. He vibrates like an elect soul, exalted by a great crisis.

When he speaks of his own case, it is always to make light of his misfortune:

"Dumont got it in the belly. Ah, it's lucky for me that none of my organs are touched; I can't complain."

I watch him with admiration, but I am waiting for something more, something more....

His chief crony is Legrand.

Legrand is a stonemason with a face like a young girl. He has lost a big piece of his skull. He has also lost the use of language, and we teach him words, as to a baby. He is beginning to get up now, and he hovers round Leglise's bed to perform little services for him. He tries to master his rebellious tongue, but failing in the attempt, he smiles, and expresses himself with a limpid glance, full of intelligence.

Leglise pities him too:

"It must be wretched not to be able to speak."

To-day we laughed, yes, indeed, we laughed heartily, Leglise, the orderlies and I.

We were talking of his future pension while the dressings were being prepared, and someone said to him:

"You will live like a little man of means."

Leglise looked at his body and answered:

"Oh, yes, a little man, a very little man."

The dressing went off very well. To make our task easier, Leglise suggested that he should hold on to the head of the bed with both hands and throw himself back on his shoulders, holding his stumps up in the air. It was a terrible, an unimaginable sight; but he began to laugh, and the spectacle became comic. We all laughed. But the dressing was easy and was quickly finished.

The stumps are healing healthily. In the afternoon, he sits up in bed. He begins to read and to smoke, chatting to his companions.

I explain to him how he will be able to walk with artificial legs. He jokes again:

"I was rather short before; but now I can be just the height I choose."

I bring him some cigarettes that had been sent me for him, some sweets and dainties. He makes a sign that he wants to whisper to me, and says very softly:

"I have far too many things. But Legrand is very badly off; his home is in the invaded district, and he has nothing, they can't send him anything."

I understand. I come back presently with a packet in which there are tobacco, some good cigarettes, and also a little note....

"Here is something for Legrand. You must give it to him. I'm off."

In the afternoon I find Leglise troubled and perplexed.

"I can't give all this to Legrand myself, he would be offended."

So then we have to devise a discreet method of presentation.

It takes some minutes. He invents romantic possibilities. He becomes flushed, animated, interested.

"Think," I say, "find a way. Give it to him yourself, from some one or other."

But Leglise is too much afraid of wounding Legrand's susceptibilities. He ruminates on the matter till evening.

The little parcel is at the head of Legrand's bed. Leglise calls my attention to it with his chin, and whispers:

"I found some one to give it to him. He doesn't know who sent it. He has made all sorts of guesses; it is very amusing!" Oh, Leglise, can it be that there is still something amusing, and that it is to be kind? Isn't this alone enough to make it worth while to live?

So now we have a great secret between us. All the morning, as I come and go in the ward, he looks at me meaningly, and smiles to himself. Legrand gravely offers me a cigarette; Leglise finds it hard not to burst out laughing. But he keeps his counsel.

The orderlies have put him on a neighbouring bed while they make his. He stays there very quietly, his bandaged stumps in view, and sings a little song, like a child's cradle-song. Then, all of a sudden, he begins to cry, sobbing aloud.

I put my arm round him and ask anxiously: "Why? What is the matter?"

Then he answers in a broken voice: "I am crying with joy and thankfulness."

Oh! I did not expect so much. But I am very happy, much comforted. I kiss him, he kisses me, and I think I cried a little too.

I have wrapped him in a flannel dressing-gown, and I carry him in my arms. I go down the steps to the park very carefully, like a mother carrying her new-born babe for the first time, and I call out: "An arm-chair! An arm-chair."

He clings to my neck as I walk, and says in some confusion:

"I shall tire you."

No indeed! I am too well pleased. I would not let any one take my place. The arm-chair has been set under the trees, near a grove. I deposit Leglise among the cushions. They bring him a kepi. He breathes the scent of green things, of the newly mown lawns, of the warm gravel. He looks at the facade of the mansion, and says:

"I had not even seen the place where I very nearly died."

All the wounded who are walking about come and visit him; they almost seem to be paying him homage. He talks to them with a cordial authority. Is he not the chief among them, in virtue of his sufferings and his sacrifice?

Some one in the ward was talking this morning of love and marriage, and a home.

I glanced at Leglise now and then; he seemed to be dreaming and he murmured:

"Oh, for me, now..."

Then I told him something I knew: I know young girls who have sworn to marry only a mutilated man. Well, we must believe in the vows of these young girls. France is a country richer in warmth of heart than in any other virtue. It is a blessed duty to give happiness to those who have sacrificed so much. And a thousand hearts, the generous hearts of women, applaud me at this moment.

Leglise listens, shaking his head. He does not venture to say "No."

Leglise has not only the Military Medal, but also the War Cross. The notice has just come. He reads it with blushes.

"I shall never dare to show this," he says; "it is a good deal exaggerated."

He hands me the paper, which states, in substance, that Corporal Leglise behaved with great gallantry under a hail of bombs, and that his left leg has been amputated.

"I didn't behave with great gallantry," he says; "I was at my post, that's all. As to the bombs, I only got one."

I reject this point of view summarily.

"Wasn't it a gallant act to go to that advanced post, so near the enemy, all alone, at the head of all the Frenchmen? Weren't they all behind you, to the very end of the country, right away to the Pyrenees? Did they not all rely on your coolness, your keen sight, your vigilance? You were only hit by one bomb, but I think you might have had several, and still be with us. And besides, the notice, far from being exaggerated, is really insufficient; it says you have lost a leg, whereas you have lost two! It seems to me that this fully compensates for anything excessive with regard to the bombs."

"That's true!" agrees Leglise, laughing. "But I don't want to be made out a hero."

"My good lad, people won't ask what you think before they appreciate and honour you. It will be quite enough to look at your body."

Then we had to part, for the war goes on, and every day there are fresh wounded.

Leglise left us nearly cured. He left with some comrades, and he was not the least lively of the group.

"I was the most severely wounded man in the train," he wrote to me, not without a certain pride.

Since then, Leglise has written to me often. His letters breathe a contented calm. I receive them among the vicissitudes of the campaign; on the highways, in wards where other wounded men are moaning, in fields scoured by the gallop of the cannonade.

And always something beside me murmurs, mutely:

"You see, you see, he was wrong when he said he would rather die."

I am convinced of it, and this is why I have told your story. You will forgive me, won't you, Leglise, my friend?



THE THIRD SYMPHONY

Every morning the stretcher-bearers brought Vize-Feldwebel Spat down to the dressing ward, and his appearance always introduced a certain chill in the atmosphere.

There are some German wounded whom kind treatment, suffering, or some more obscure agency move to composition with the enemy, and who receive what we do for them with a certain amount of gratitude. Spat was not one of these. For weeks we had made strenuous efforts to snatch him from death, and then to alleviate his sufferings, without eliciting the slightest sign of satisfaction from him, or receiving the least word of thanks.

He could speak a little French, which he utilised strictly for his material wants, to say, for instance, "A little more cotton-wool under the foot, Monsieur," or, "Have I any fever to-day?"

Apart from this, he always showed us the same icy face, the same pale, hard eyes, enframed by colourless lashes. We gathered, from certain indications, that the man was intelligent and well educated; but he was obviously under the domination of a lively hatred, and a strict sense of his own dignity.

He bore pain bravely, and like one who makes it a point of honour to repress the most excusable reactions of the martyred flesh. I do not remember ever hearing him cry out, though this would have seemed to me natural enough, and would by no means have lowered Monsieur Spat in my opinion. All I ever heard from him was a stifled moan, the dull panting of the woodman as he swings his axe.

One day we were obliged to give him an anaesthetic in order to make incisions in the wounds in his leg; he turned very red and said, in a tone that was almost imploring: "You won't cut it off, gentlemen, will you?" But no sooner did he regain consciousness than he at once resumed his attitude of stiff hostility.

After a time, I ceased to believe mat his features could ever express anything but this repressed animosity. I was undeceived by an unforeseen incident.

The habit of whistling between one's teeth is a token, with me as with many other persons, of a certain absorption. It is perhaps rather a vulgar habit, but I often feel impelled to whistle, especially when I have a serious piece of work in hand.

One morning accordingly, I was finishing Vize-Feldwebel Spat's dressing, and whistling something at random. I was looking at his leg, and was paying no attention to his face, when I suddenly became curiously aware that the look he had fixed upon me had changed in quality, and I raised my eyes.

Certainly, something very extraordinary had taken place: the German's face glowed with a kind of warmth and contentment, and was so smiling and radiant that I hardly recognised it. I could scarcely believe that he had been able to improvise this face, which was sensitive and trustful, out of the features he generally showed us.

"Tell me, Monsieur," he murmured, "it's the Third Symphony, isn't it, that you are... what do you call it?—yes... whistling."

First, I stopped whistling. Then I answered: "Yes, I believe it is the Third Symphony"; then I remained silent and confused.

A slender bridge had just been flung across the abyss.

The thing lasted for a few seconds, and I was still dreaming of it when once more I felt an icy, irrevocable shadow falling upon me—the hostile glance of Herr Spat.



GRACE

It is a common saying that all men are equal in the presence of suffering, but I know very well that this is not true.

Auger! Auger! humble basket-maker of La Charente, who are you, you who seem able to suffer without being unhappy? Why are you touched with grace, whereas Gregoire is not? Why are you the prince of a world in which Gregoire is merely a pariah?

Kind ladies who pass through the wards where the wounded lie, and give them cigarettes and sweet-meats, come with me.

We will go through the large ward on the first floor, where the windows are caressed by the boughs of chestnut-trees. I will not point out Auger, you will give him the lion's share of the cigarettes and sweets of your own accord; but if I don't point out Gregoire, you will leave without, noticing him, and he will get no sweets, and will have nothing to smoke.

It is not because of this that I call Gregoire a pariah. It is because of a much sadder and more intimate thing... Gregoire lacks endurance, he is not what we call a good patient.

In a general way those who tend the wounded call the men who do not give them much trouble "good patients." Judged by this standard, every one in the hospital will tell you that Gregoire is not a good patient.

All day long, he lies on his left side, because of his wound, and stares at the wall. I said to him a day or two after he came:

"I am going to move you and put you over in the other corner; there you will be able to see your comrades."

He answered, in his dull, surly voice:

"It's not worth while. I'm all right here."

"But you can see nothing but the wall."

"That's quite enough."

Scarcely have the stretcher-bearers touched his bed, when Gregoire begins to cry out in a doleful, irritable tone:

"Ah! don't shake me like that! Ah, you mustn't touch me."

The stretcher-bearers I give him are very gentle fellows, and he always has the same: Paffin, a fat shoe-maker with a stammer, and Monsieur Bouin, a professor of mathematics, with a grey beard and very precise movements.

They take hold of Gregoire most carefully to lay him on the stretcher. The wounded man criticises all their movements peevishly:

"Ah! don't turn me over like that. And you must hold my leg better than that!"

The sweat breaks out on Baffin's face. Monsieur Bouin's eye-glasses fall off. At last they bring the patient along.

As soon as he comes into the dressing ward, Gregoire is pale and perspiring. His harsh tawny beard quivers, hair by hair. I divine all this, and say a few words of encouragement to him from afar.

"I shan't be long with you this morning, Gregoire. You won't have time to say 'oof'!"

He preserves a sulky silence, full of reservations. He looks like a condemned criminal awaiting execution. He is so pre-occupied that he does not even answer when the sarcastic Sergeant says as he passes him:

"Ah! here's our grouser."

At last he is laid on the table which the wounded men call the "billiard-table."

Then, things become very trying. I feel at once that whatever I do, Gregoire will suffer. I uncover the wound in his thigh, and he screams. I wash the wound carefully, and he screams. I probe the wound, from which I remove small particles of bone, very gently, and he utters unimaginable yells. I see his tongue trembling in his open mouth. His hands tremble in the hands that hold them, I have an impression that every fibre of his body trembles, that the raw flesh of the wound trembles and retracts. In spite of my determination, this misery affects me, and I wonder whether I too shall begin to tremble sympathetically. I say:

"Try to be patient, my poor Gregoire."

He replies in a voice hoarse with pain and terror: "I can't help it."

I add, just to say something: "Courage, a little courage."

He does not even answer, and I feel that to exhort him to show courage, is to recommend an impossible thing, as if I were to advise him to have black eyes instead of his pale blue ones.

The dressing is completed in an atmosphere of general discomfort. Nothing could persuade me that Gregoire does not cordially detest me at this moment. While they are carrying him away, I ask myself bitterly why Gregoire is so deficient in grace, why he cannot suffer decently?

The Sergeant says, as he sponges the table: "He's working against one all the time." Well, the Sergeant is wrong. Gregoire is not deliberately hostile. Sometimes I divine, when he knits his brows, that he is making an effort to resist suffering, to meet it with a stouter and more cheerful heart. But he does not know how to set about it.

If you were asked to lift a railway-engine, you would perhaps make an effort; but you would do so without confidence and without success. So you must not say hard things of Gregoire.

Gregoire is unable to bear suffering, just as one is unable to talk an unknown language. And, then, it is easier to learn Chinese than to learn the art of suffering.

When I say that he is unable to bear suffering, I really mean that he has to suffer a great deal more than others.... I know the human body, and I cannot be deceived as to certain signs.

Gregoire begins very badly. He reminds one of those children who have such a terror of dogs that they are bound to be bitten. Gregoire trembles at once. The dogs of pain throw themselves upon this defenceless man and pull him down.

A great load of misery is heavy for a man to bear alone, but it is supportable when he is helped. Unfortunately Gregoire has no friends. He does nothing to obtain them, it almost seems as if he did not want any.

He is not coarse, noisy and foul-mouthed, like the rascal Groult who amuses the whole ward. He is only dull and reserved.

He does not often say "Thank you" when he is offered something, and many touchy people take offence at this.

When I sit down by his bed, he gives no sign of any pleasure at my visit. I ask him:

"What was your business in civil life?"

He does not answer immediately. At last he says: "Odd jobs; I carried and loaded here and there."

"Are you married?"

"Yes."

"Have you any children?"

"Yes."

"How many?"

"Three."

The conversation languishes. I get up and say: "Good-bye till to-morrow, Gregoire."

"Ah! you will hurt me again to-morrow."

I reassure him, or at least I try to reassure him. Then, that I may not go away leaving a bad impression, I ask:

"How did you get wounded?"

"Well, down there in the plain, with the others...."

That is all. I go away. Gregoire's eyes follow me for a moment, and I cannot even say whether he is pleased or annoyed by my visit.

Good-bye, poor Gregoire. I cross the ward and go to sit down by Auger.

Auger is busy writing up his "book."

It is a big ledger some one has given him, in which he notes the important events of his life.

Auger writes a round schoolboy hand. In fact, he can just write sufficiently well for his needs, I might almost say for his pleasure.

"Would you care to look at my book?" he says, and he hands it to me with the air of a man who has no secrets.

Auger receives many letters, and he copies them out carefully, especially when they are fine letters, full of generous sentiments. His lieutenant, for instance, wrote him a remarkable letter.

He also copies into his book the letters he writes to his wife and his little girl. Then he notes the incidents of the day: "Wound dressed at 10 o'clock. The pus is diminishing. After dinner Madame la Princesse Moreau paid us a visit, and distributed caps all round; I got a fine green one. The little chap who had such a bad wound in the belly died at 2 o'clock...."

Auger closes his book and puts it back under his bolster.

He has a face that it does one good to look at. His complexion is warm and fresh; his hair stiff and rather curly. He has a youthful moustache, a well-shaped chin, with a lively dimple in the middle, and eyes which seem to be looking out on a smiling landscape, gay with sunshine and running waters.

"I am getting on splendidly," he says with great satisfaction. "Would you like to see Mariette?"

He lifts up the sheet, and I see the apparatus in which we have placed the stump of his leg. It makes a kind of big white doll, which he takes in both hands with a laugh, and to which he has given the playful name of "Mariette."

Auger was a sapper in the Engineers. A shell broke his thigh and tore off his foot. But as the foot was still hanging by a strip of flesh, Auger took out his pocket-knife, and got rid of it. Then he said to his terror-stricken comrades: "Well, boys, that's all right. It might have been worse. Now carry me somewhere out of this."

"Did you suffer terribly?" I asked him.

"Well, Monsieur, not as much as you might think. Honestly, it did not hurt so very, very much. Afterwards, indeed, the pain was pretty bad."

I understand why every one is fond of Auger. It is because he is reassuring. Seeing him and listening to him one opines that suffering is not such a horrible thing after all. Those who live far from the battle-field, and visit hospitals to get a whiff of the war, look at Auger and go away well satisfied with everything: current events, him, and themselves. They are persuaded that the country is well defended, that our soldiers are brave, and that wounds and mutilations, though they may be serious things, are not unbearable.

Yet pain has come to Auger as to the rest. But there is a way of taking it.

He suffers in an enlightened, intelligent, almost methodical fashion. He does not confuse issues, and complain indiscriminately. Even when in the hands of others, he remains the man who had the courage to cut off his own foot, and finish the work of the shrapnel. He is too modest and respectful to give advice to the surgeon, but he offers him valuable information.

He says:

"Just there you are against the bone, it hurts me very much. Ah! there you can scrape, I don't feel it much. Take care! You're pressing rather too hard. All right: you can go on, I see what it's for...."

And this is how we work together.

"What are you doing? Ah, you're washing it. I like that. It does me good. Good blood! Rub a little more just there. You don't know how it itches. Oh! if you're going to put the tube in, you must tell me, that I may hold on tight to the table."

So the work gets on famously. Auger will make a rapid and excellent recovery. With him, one need never hesitate to do what is necessary. I wanted to give him an anaesthetic before scraping the bone of his leg. He said:

"I don't suppose it will be a very terrible business. If you don't mind, don't send me to sleep, but just do what is necessary. I will see to the rest."

True, he could not help making a few grimaces. Then the Sergeant said to him:

"Would you like to learn the song of the grunting pigs?"

"How does your song go?"

The Sergeant begins in a high, shrill voice:

Quand en passant dedans la plai-ai-ne On entend les cochons... Cela prouve d'une facon certai-ai-ne Qu'ils non pas l'trooo du... bouche.

Auger begins to laugh; everybody laughs. And meanwhile we are bending over the wounded leg and our work gets on apace.

"Now, repeat," says the Sergeant.

He goes over it again, verse by verse, and Auger accompanies him.

Quand en passant dedans la plai-ai-ne...

Auger stops now and then to make a slight grimace. Sometimes, too, his voice breaks. He apologises simply:

"I could never sing in tune."

Nevertheless, the song is learnt, more or less, and when the General comes to visit the hospital, Auger says to him:

"Mon General, I can sing you a fine song."

And he would, the rascal, if the head doctor did not look reprovingly at him.

It is very dismal, after this, to attend to Gregoire, and to hear him groaning:

"Ah! don't pull like that. You're dragging out my heart."

I point out that if he won't let us attend to him, he will become much worse. Then he begins to cry.

"What do I care, since I shall die anyhow?"

He has depressed the orderlies, the stretcher-bearers, everybody. He does not discourage me; but he gives me a great deal of trouble.

All you gentlemen who meet together to discuss the causes of the war, the end of the war, the using-up of effectives and the future bases of society, excuse me if I do not give you my opinion on these grave questions. I am really too much taken up with the wound of our unhappy Gregoire.

It is not satisfactory, this wound, and when I look at it, I cannot think of anything else; the screams of the wounded man would prevent me from considering the conditions of the decisive battle and the results of the rearrangement of the map of Europe with sufficient detachment.

Listen: Gregoire tells me he is going to die. I think and believe that he is wrong. But he certainly will die if I do not take it upon myself to make him suffer. He will die, because every one is forsaking him. And he has long ago forsaken himself.

"My dear chap," remarked Auger to a very prim orderly, "it is no doubt unpleasant to have only one shoe to put on, but it gives one a chance of saving. And now, moreover, I only run half as much risk of scratching my wife with my toe-nails in bed as you do. ..."

"Quite so," added the Sergeant; "with Mariette he will caress his good lady, so to speak."

Auger and the Sergeant crack jokes like two old cronies. The embarrassed orderly, failing to find a retort, goes away laughing constrainedly.

I sat down by Auger, and we were left alone.

"I am a basket-maker," he said gravely. "I shall be able to take up my trade again more or less. But think of workers on the land, like Groult, who has lost a hand, and Lerondeau, with his useless leg!... That's really terrible!"

Auger rolls his r's in a way that gives piquancy and vigour to his conversation. He talks of others with a natural magnanimity which comes from the heart, like the expression of his eyes, and rings true, like the sound of his voice. And then again, he really need not envy any one. Have I not said it! He is a prince.

"I have had some very grand visitors," he says. "Look, another lady came a little while ago, and left me this big box of sweets. Do take one, Monsieur, it would be a pleasure to me. And please, will you hand them round to the others, from me?"

He adds in a lower tone:

"Look under my bed. I put everything I am given there. Really, there's too much. I'm ashamed. There are some chaps here who never get anything, and they were brave fellows who did their duty just as well as I did."

It is true, there are many brave soldiers in the ward, but only one Military Medal was given among them, and it came to Auger. Its arrival was the occasion of a regular little fete; his comrades all took part in it cordially, for strange to say, no one is jealous of Auger. A miracle indeed! Did you ever hear of any other prince of whom no one was jealous?

"Are you going?" said Auger. "Please just say a few words to Groult. He is a bit of a grouser, but he likes a talk."

Auger has given me a lesson. I will go and smoke a cigarette with Groult, and above all, I will go and see Gregoire.

Groult, indeed, is not altogether neglected. He is an original, a perverse fellow. He is pointed out as a curious animal. He gets his share of presents and attention.

But no one knows anything about Gregoire; he lies staring at the wall, and growing thinner every day, and Death seems the only person who is interested in him.

You shall not die, Gregoire! I vow to keep hold of you, to suffer with you, and to endure your ill-temper humbly. You, who seem to be bearing the misery of an entire world, shall not be miserable all alone.

Kind ladies who come to see our wounded and give them picture-books, tri-coloured caps and sweetmeats, do not forget Gregoire, who is wretched. Above all, give him your sweetest smiles.

You go away well pleased with yourselves because you have been generous to Auger. But there is no merit in being kind to Auger. With a single story, a single clasp of his hand, he gives you much more than he received from you. He gives you confidence; he restores your peace of mind.

Go and see Gregoire who has nothing but his suffering to give, and who very nearly gave his life.

If you go away without a smile for Gregoire, you may fear that you have not fulfilled your task. And don't expect him to return your smile, for where would your liberality be in that case?

It is easy to pity Auger, who needs no pity. It is difficult to pity Gregoire, and yet he is so pitiable.

Do not forget; Auger is touched with grace; but Gregoire will be damned if you do not hold out your hand to him.

God Himself, who has withheld grace from the damned, must feel pity for them.

It is a very artless desire for equality which makes us say that all men are equal in the presence of suffering. No! no! they are not. And as we know nothing of Death but that which precedes and determines it, men are not even equal in the presence of Death.



NIGHTS IN ARTOIS

I

One more glance into the dark ward, in which something begins to reign which is not sleep, but merely a kind of nocturnal stupor.

The billiard-table has been pushed into a corner; it is loaded with an incoherent mass of linen, bottles, and articles of furniture. A smell of soup and excrements circulates between the stretchers, and seems to insult the slender onyx vases that surmount the cabinet.

And now, quickly! quickly! Let us escape on tiptoe into the open air.

The night is clear and cold, without a breath of wind: a vast block of transparent ice between the snow and the stars. Will it suffice to cleanse throat and lungs, nauseated by the close effluvium of suppurating wounds?

The snow clings and balls under our sabots. How good it would be to have a game.... But we are overwhelmed by a fatigue that has become a kind of exasperation. We will go to the end of the lawn.

Here is the great trench in which the refuse of the dressing-ward, all the residuum of infection, steams and rots. Further on we come to the musical pines, which Dalcour the miner visits every night, lantern in hand, to catch sparrows, Dalcour, the formidable Zouave, whom no one can persuade not to carry about his stiff leg and the gaping wound in his bandaged skull in the rain.

Let us go as far as the wall of the graveyard, which time has caused to swell like a protuberance on the side of the park, and which is so providentially close at hand.

The old Chateau looms, a stately mass, through the shadows. To-night, lamps are gleaming softly in every window. It looks like a silent, illuminated ship, the prow of which is cutting through an ice-bank. Nothing emerges from it but this quiet light. Nothing reveals the nature of its terrible freight.

We know that in every room, in every storey, on the level of every floor, young mutilated bodies are ranged side by side. A hundred hearts send the over-heated blood in swift pulsations towards the suffering limbs. Through all these bodies the projectile in its furious course made its way, crushing delicate mechanisms, rending the precious organs which make us take pleasure in walking, breathing, drinking....

Up there, this innocent joy of order no longer exists; and in order to recapture it, a hundred bodies are performing labours so slow and hard that they call forth tears and sighs from the strongest.

But how the murmurs of this centre of suffering are muffled by the walls! How silently and darkly it broods in space!

Like a dressing on a large inflamed wound, the Chateau covers its contents closely, and one sees nothing but these lamps, just such lamps as might illuminate a studious solitude, or a conversation between intimate friends at evening, or a love lost in self-contemplation.

We are now walking through thickets of spindle-wood, resplendent under the snow, and the indifference of these living things to the monstrous misery round them makes the impotent soul that is strangling me seem odious and even ridiculous to me. In spite of all protestations of sympathy, the mortal must always suffer alone in his flesh, and this indeed is why war is possible....

Philippe here thinks perhaps as I do; but he and I have these thoughts thrust on us in the same pressing fashion. Men who are sleeping twenty paces from this spot would be wakened by a cry; yet they are undisturbed by this formidable presence, inarticulate as a mollusc in the depths of the sea.

In despair, I stamp on the soft snow with my sabot. The winter grass it covers subsists obstinately, and has no solidarity with anything else on earth. Let the pain of man wear itself out; the grass will not wither. Sleep, good folks of the whole world. Those who suffer here will not disturb your rest.

And suddenly, beyond the woods a rocket rises and bursts against the sky, brilliant as a meteor. It means something most certainly, and it warns some one; but its coarse ingenuity does not deceive me. No barbarous signal such as this could give me back confidence in my soul to-night.

II

The little room adjoining the closet where I sleep has been set apart for those whose cries or effluvia make them intolerable to the rest. As it is small and encumbered, it will only admit a single stretcher, and men are brought in there to die in turn.

But lately, when the Chateau was reigning gracefully in the midst of verdure, the centre of the great star of alleys piercing its groves of limes and beeches, its owners occasionally entertained a brilliant society; and if they had under their roof some gay and lovely milk-white maiden, they gave her this little room at the summit of the right wing, whence the sun may be seen rising above the forests, to dream, and sleep, and adorn herself in.

To-day, the facade of the Chateau seems to be listening, strained and anxious, to the cannonade; and the little room has become a death-chamber.

Madelan was the first we put there. He was raving in such a brutal and disturbing manner, in spite of the immobility of his long, paralysed limbs, that his companions implored us to remove him. I think Madelan neither understood nor noticed this isolation, for he was already given over to a deeper solitude; but his incessant vociferation, after he was deprived of listeners, took on a strange and terrible character.

For four days and four nights, he never ceased talking vehemently; and listening to him, one began to think that all the life of the big body that was already dead, had fled in frenzy to his throat. For four nights I heard him shouting incoherent, elusive things, which seemed to be replies to some mysterious interlocutor.

At dawn, and from hour to hour throughout the day, I went to see him where he sprawled on a paillasse on the floor, like some red-haired stricken beast, with out-stretched limbs, convulsed by spasms which displaced the dirty blanket that covered him.

He lost flesh with such incredible rapidity that he seemed to be evaporating through the gaping wound in the nape of his neck.

Then I would speak to him, saying things that were kindly meant but futile, because conversation is impossible between a man who is being whirled along by the waters of a torrent, and one who is seated among the rushes on the bank. Madelan did not listen to me, and he continued his strange colloquy with the other. He did not want us or any one else; he had ceased to eat or to drink, and relieved himself as he lay, asking neither help nor tendance.

One day, the wind blew the door of the room to, and there was no key to open it. A long ladder was put up to the window, and a pane of glass was broken to effect an entrance. Directly this was done, Madelan was heard, continuing his dream aloud.

He died, and was at once replaced by the man with his skull battered in, of whom we knew nothing, because when he came to us he could neither see nor speak, and had nothing by way of history but a red and white ticket, as large as the palm of a child's hand.

This man spent only one night in the room, filling the silence with painful eructations, and thumping on the partition which separated him from my bed.

Listening alertly, with the cold air from the open window blowing on my face, I heard in turn the crowing of the cocks in the village, the irregular breathing of Philippe, sleeping the sleep of exhaustion not far from me, and the blows and the death-rattle of the man who took so long to die. He became silent, however, in the morning, when the wind began to drop, and the first detonation of the day boomed through the vault-like quiet of the darkness.

Then we had as our neighbour the hospital orderly, Sergeant Gidel, who was nearing his end, and whose cruel hiccough we had been unable to alleviate for a week past. This man knew his business, he knew the meaning of probe, of fever, of hardened abdomen. He knew too that he had a bullet in the spinal cord. He never asked us for anything, and as we dared not tell him lies, we were overcome by a kind of shame in his presence. He stayed barely two days in the room, looking with dim eyes at the engravings on the walls, and the Empire bureau on which vases were piled.

But what need is there to tell of all those whom this unhappy room swallowed up and ejected?

III

We have no lights this evening.... We must learn to do without them.... I grope my way along the passages, where the wind is muttering, to the great staircase. Here there is a fitful lamp which makes one prefer the darkness. I see the steps, which are white and smeared with mud, pictures and tapestries, a sumptuous scheme of decoration flooded at the bottom by filth and desolation. As I approach the room where the wounded are lying, I hear the calm sound of their conversation. I go in quietly. They cease talking; then they begin to chat again, for now they know me.

At first one can only distinguish long forms ranged upon the ground. The stretchers seem to be holding forth with human voices. One of these is narrating:

"We were all three sitting side by side... though I had told the adjutant that corner was not a good place.... They had just brought us a ration of soup with a little bit of meat that was all covered with white frost. Then bullets began to arrive by the dozen, and we avoided them as well as we could, and the earth flew about, and we were laughing, because we had an idea that among all those bullets there was not one that would find its billet. And then they stopped firing, and we came back to sit on the ledge. There were Chagniol and Duc and I, and I had them both to the right of me. We began to talk about Giromagny, and about Danjoutin, because that's the district we all came from, and this went on for about half an hour. And then, all of a sudden, a bullet came, just a single one, but this time it was a good one. It went through Chagniol's head, then through Duc's, and as I was a little taller than they, it only passed through my neck...."

"And then?"

"Then it went off to the devil! Chagniol fell forward on his face. Duc got up, and ran along on all fours as far as the bend in the trench, and there he began to scratch out the earth like a rabbit, and then he died. The blood was pouring down me right and left, and I thought it was time for me to go. I set off running, holding a finger to each side of my neck, because of the blood. I was thinking: just a single bullet! It's too much! It was really a mighty good one! And then I saw the adjutant. So I said to him: 'I warned you, mon adjutant, that that corner was not a good place!' But the blood rushed up into my mouth, and I began to run again."

There was a silence, and I heard a voice murmur with conviction:

"YOU were jolly lucky, weren't you?"

Mulet, too, tells his story:

"They had taken our fire... 'That's not your fire,' I said to him. 'Not our fire?' he said. Then the other came up and he said: 'Hold your jaw about the fire...' 'It's not yours,' I said. Then he said: 'You don't know who you're talking to.' And he turned his cap, which had been inside out... 'Ah! I beg your pardon,' I said, 'but I could not tell...' And so they kept our fire...."

Maville remarks calmly: "Yes, things like that will happen sometimes."

Silence again. The tempest shakes the windows with a furious hand. The room is faintly illuminated by a candle which has St. Vitus' dance. Rousselot, our little orderly, knits away industriously in the circle of light. I smoke a pipe at once acrid and consoling, like this minute itself in the midst of the infernal adventure.

Before going away, I think of Croquelet, the silent, whose long silhouette I see at the end of the room. "He sleeps all the time," says Mulet, "he sleeps all day." I approach the stretcher, I bend over it, and I see two large open eyes, which look at me gravely and steadily in the gloom. And this look is so sad, so poignant, that I am filled with impotent distress.

"You sleep too much, my poor Croquelet."

He answers me with his rugged accent, but in a feeble voice:

"Don't listen to him; it's not true. You know quite well that I can't sleep, and that you won't give me a draught to let me get a real nap. This afternoon, I read a little.... But it wasn't very interesting.... If I could have another book...."

"Show me your book, Croquelet."

He thrusts out his chin towards a little tract. I strike a match, and I read on the grey cover: "Of the Quality of Prayers addressed to God."

"All right, Croquelet, I'll try to get you a book with pictures in it. How do you feel this evening?"

"Ah! bad! very bad! They're thawing now...."

He has had frost-bite in his feet, and is beginning to suffer so much from them that he forgets the wound in his side, which is mortal, but less active.

IV

I have come to take refuge among my wounded to smoke in peace, and meditate in the shadow. Here, the moral atmosphere is pure. These men are so wretched, so utterly humiliated, so absorbed in their relentless sufferings that they seem to have relinquished the burden of the passions in order to concentrate their powers on the one endeavour: to live.

In spite of their solidarity they are for the time isolated by their individual sufferings. Later on, they will communicate; but this is the moment when each one contemplates his own anguish, and fights his own battle, with cries of pain....

They are all my friends. I will stay among them, associating myself with all my soul in their ordeal.

Perhaps here I shall find peace. Perhaps all ignoble discord will call a truce on the threshold of this empire.

But a short distance from us the battle-field has thundered unceasingly for days. Like a noisy, complicated mechanism which turns out the products of its internal activity, the stupid machine of war throws out, from minute to minute, bleeding men. We pick them up, and here they are, swathed in bandages. They have been crushed in the twinkling of an eye; and now we shall have to ask months and years to repair or palliate the damage.

How silent they are this evening! And how it makes one's heart ache to look at them! Here is Bourreau, with the brutal name and the gentle nature, who never utters a complaint, and whom a single bullet has deprived of sight for ever. Here is Bride, whom we fear to touch, so covered is he with bandages, but who looks at us with touching, liquid eyes, his mind already wandering. Here is Lerouet, who will not see next morning dawn over the pine-trees, and who has a gangrened wound near his heart. And the others, all of whom I know by their individual misfortunes.

How difficult it is to realise what they were, all these men who a year ago, were walking in streets, tilling the land, or writing in an office. Their present is too poignant. Here they lie on the ground, like some fair work of art defaced. Behold them! The creature par excellence has received a great outrage, an outrage it has wrought upon itself.

We are ignorant of their past. But have they a future? I consider these innocent victims in the tragic majesty of the hour, and I feel ashamed of living and breathing freely among them.

Poor, poor brothers! What could one do for you which would not be insufficient, unworthy, mediocre? We can at least give up everything and devote ourselves heart and soul to our holy and exacting work.

But no! round the beds on which your solitary drama is enacted, men are still taking part in a sinister comedy. Every kind of folly, the most ignoble and also the most imbecile passions, pursue their enterprises and their satisfactions over your heads.

Neither the four corpses we buried this morning, nor your daily agonies will disarm these appetites, suspend these calculations, and destroy these ambitions the development and fruition of which even your martyrdom, may be made to serve.



I will spend the whole evening among my wounded, and we will talk together, gently, of their misery; it will please them, and they will make me forget the horrible atmosphere of discussion that reigns here.

Alas! during the outburst of the great catastrophe, seeing the volume of blood and fire, listening to the uproar, smelling the stench of the vast gangrene, we thought that all passions would be laid aside, like cumbersome weapons, and that we should give ourselves up with clean hearts and empty hands to battle against the fiery nightmare. He who fights and defends himself needs a pure heart: so does he who wanders among charnel houses, gives drink to parched lips, washes fevered faces and bathes wounds. We thought there would be a great forgetfulness of self and of former hopes, and of the whole world. O Union of pure hearts to meet the ordeal!

But no! The first explosion was tremendous, yet hardly had its echoes died away when the rag-pickers were already at work among the ruins, in quest of cutlet-bones and waste paper.

And yet, think of the sacred anguish of those first hours!

Well, so be it! For my part, I will stay here, between these stretchers with their burdens of anguish.

At this hour one is inclined to distrust everything, man and the universe, and the future of Right. But we cannot have any doubts as to the suffering of man. It is the one certain thing at this moment.

So I will stay and drink in this sinister testimony. And each time that Beal, who has a gaping wound in the stomach, holds out his hands to me with a little smile, I will get up and hold his hands in mine, for he is feverish, and he knows that my hands are always icy.

V

Bride is dead. We had been working all day, and in the evening we had to find time to go and bury Bride.

It is not a very long ceremony. The burial-ground is near. About a dozen of us follow the lantern, slipping in the mud, and stumbling over the graves. Here we are at the wall, and here is the long ditch, always open, which every day is prolonged a little to the right, and filled in a little to the left. Here is the line of white crosses, and the flickering shadows on the wall caused by the lantern.

The men arrange the planks, slip the ropes, and lower the body, disputing in undertones, for it is not so easy as one might think to be a grave-digger. One must have the knack of it. And the night is very dark and the mud very sticky.

At last the body is at the bottom of the trench, and the muddy ropes are withdrawn. The little consumptive priest who stands at the graveside murmurs the prayer for the dead. The rain beats in our faces. The familiar demon of Artois, the wind, leaps among the ancient trees. The little priest murmurs the terrible words: Dies irae, dies illa....

And this present day is surely the day of wrath... I too utter my prayer: "In the name of the unhappy world, Bride, I remit all thy sins, I absolve thee from all thy faults! Let this day, at least, be a day of rest."

The little priest stands bare-headed in the blast. An orderly who is an ecclesiastic holds the end of an apron over his head. A man raises the lantern to the level of his eye. And the rain-drops gleam and sparkle furtively.

Bride is dead....

Now we meet again in the little room where friendship reigns.

Pierre and Jacques, gallant fellows, I shall not forget your beautiful, painful smile at the moment which brings discouragement to the experienced man. I shall not forget.

The beef and rice, which one needs to be very hungry to swallow, is distributed. And a gentle cheerfulness blossoms in the circle of lamplight, a cheerfulness which tries to catch something of the gaiety of the past. Man has such a deep-seated need of joy that he improvises it everywhere, even in the heart of misery.

And suddenly, through the steam of the soup, I see Bride's look distinctly.

It was no ordinary look. The extremity of suffering, the approach of death, perhaps, and also the hidden riches of his soul, gave it extraordinary light, sweetness, and gentleness. When one came to his bedside, and bent over him, the look was there, a well-spring of refreshment.

But Bride is dead: we saw his eyes transformed into dull, meaningless membranes.

Where is that well-spring? Can it be quenched?

Bride is dead. Involuntarily, I repeat aloud: "Bride is dead."

Have I roused a responsive echo in these sympathetic souls? A religious silence falls upon them. The oldest of all problems comes and takes its place at the table like a familiar guest. It breathes mysteriously into every ear: "Where is Bride? Where is Bride's look?"

VI

A lantern advances, swinging among the pines. Who is coming to meet us?

Philippe recognises the figure of Monsieur Julien. Here is the man, indeed, with his porter's livery, and his base air as of an insolent slave. He waves a stable-lantern which throws grotesque shadows upwards on his face; and he is obviously furious at having been forced to render a service.

He brandishes the lantern angrily, and thrusts out his chin to show us the advancing figures: two men are carrying a stretcher on which lies a big body wrapped in a coarse winding sheet. The two men are weary, and set the stretcher down carefully in the mud.

"Is it Fumat?"

"Yes. He has just died, very peacefully."

"Where are you going?"

"There is no place anywhere for a corpse. So we are taking him to the chapel in the burial-ground. But he is heavy."

"We will give you a hand."

Philippe and I take hold of the stretcher. The men follow us in silence. The body is heavy, very heavy. We drag our sabots out of the clay laboriously. And we walk slowly, breathing hard.

How heavy he is!... He was called Fumat... He was a giant. He came from the mountains of the Centre, leaving a red-tiled village on a hill-side, among juniper-bushes and volcanic boulders. He left his native place with its violet peaks and strong aromatic scents and came to the war in Artois. He was past the age when men can march to the attack, but he guarded the trenches and cooked. He received his death-wound while he was cooking. The giant of Auvergne was peppered with small missiles. He had no wound at all proportionate to his huge body. Nothing but splinters of metal. Once again, David has slain Goliath.

He was two days dying. He was asked: "Is there anything you would like?" And he answered with white lips: "Nothing, thank you." When we were anxious and asked him "How do you feel?" he was always quite satisfied. "I am getting on very well." He died with a discretion, a modesty, a self-forgetfulness which redeemed the egotism of the universe.

How heavy he is! He was wounded as he was blowing up the fire for the soup. He did not die fighting. He uttered no historic word. He fell at his post as a cook.... He was not a hero.

You are not a hero, Fumat. You are only a martyr. And we are going to lay you in the earth of France, which has engulfed a noble and innumerable army of martyrs.

The shadow of the trees sweeps like a huge sickle across space. An acrid smell of cold decay rises on the night. The wind wails its threnody for Fumat.

"Open the door, Monsieur Julien."

The lout pushes the door, grumbling to himself. We lay the body on the pavement of the chapel.

Renaud covers the corpse carefully with a faded flag. And suddenly, as if to celebrate the moment, the brutal roar of guns comes to us from the depths of the woods, breaks violently into the chapel, seizes and rattles the trembling window-panes. A hundred times over, a whole nation of cannon yells in honour of Fumat. And each time other Fumats fall in the mud yonder, in their appointed places.

VII

They ought not to have cut off all the light in this manner, and it would not have been done, perhaps, if...

There is a kind of mania for organisation which is the sworn enemy of order; in its efforts to discover the best place for everything, it ends by diverting everything from its right function and locality, and making everything as inopportune as itself. It was a mistake to cut off all the lights this evening, on some pretext or the other. The rooms of the old mansion are not packed with bales of cotton, but with men who have anxious minds and tortured bodies.