Part 40

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."