Part 25

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.