Chapter 5

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.