The Conscript Part 20

They lifted the Russian from the table, and stretched him on a mattress beside the others; then they laid his neighbor upon the table.

I could not think that such horrors took place in the world; but I was yet to see worse than this.

At five or six beds from mine sat an old corporal with his leg bound up. He closed one eye knowingly, and said to his neighbor, whose arm had just been cut off:

"Conscript, look at that heap! I will bet that you cannot recognize your arm."

The other, who had hitherto shown the greatest courage, looked, and fell back senseless.

Then the corporal began laughing, saying:

"He has recognized it. It is the lower one, with the little blue flower. It always produces that effect."

He looked around self-approvingly, but no one laughed with him.

Every moment the wounded called for water.

"Drink! Drink!"

When one began, all followed, and the old soldier had certainly conceived a liking for me, for each time he pa.s.sed, he presented the cup.

I did not remain in the shed more than an hour. A dozen ambulances drew up before the door, and the peasants of the country round, in their velvet jackets, and large black slouched hats, their whips on their shoulders, held the horses by the reins. A picket of hussars arrived soon after, and their officer dismounting, entered and said:

"Excuse me, major, but here is an order to escort twelve wagons of wounded as far as Lutzen. Is it here that we are to receive them?"

"Yes, it is here," replied the surgeon.

The peasants and the ambulance-drivers, after giving us a last draught of wine, began carrying us to the wagons. As one was filled, it departed, and another advanced. I was in the third, seated on the straw, in the front row, beside a conscript of the Twenty-seventh, who had lost his right hand; behind was another who had lost a leg; then came one whose head was laid open, and another whose jaw was broken; so was the wagon filled.

They had given us our great-coats; but despite them and the sun, which was shining brightly, we shivered with cold, and left only our noses and forage-caps, or linen bandages on the splints visible. No one spoke; each was too much occupied thinking of himself.

At moments I was terribly cold; then flashes of heat would dart through me, and flush me as in a fever; and indeed it was the beginning of the fever. But as we left Kaya, I was yet well; I saw everything clearly, and it was not until we neared Leipzig that I felt indeed sick.

At last we were all placed in the wagons, and arranged according to our condition--those able to sit up, in the first that set out, the others stretched in the last, and we started. The hussars rode beside us, smoking and chatting, paying no attention to us.

In pa.s.sing through Kaya, I saw all the horrors of war. The village was but a ma.s.s of cinders; the roofs had fallen, and the walls alone remained standing; the rafters were broken; we could see the remnants of rooms, stairs, and doors heaped within. The poor villagers, women, children, and old men, came and went with sorrowful faces. We could see them going up and down in their houses, as if they were in cages in the open air; and in one we saw a mirror and an evergreen branch, showing where dwelt a young girl in time of peace.

Ah! who could foresee that their happiness would so soon be destroyed, not by the fury of the winds or the wrath of heaven, but by the rage of man!

Even the cattle and pigeons seemed seeking their lost homes among the ruins; the oxen and the goats, scattered through the streets, lowed and bleated plaintively. Fowls were roosting upon the trees, and everywhere, everywhere we saw the traces of cannon-b.a.l.l.s.

At the last house an old man with flowing white hair, sat at the threshold of what had been his cottage, with a child upon his knees, glaring on us as we pa.s.sed. "Did he see us?" I do not know. His furrowed brow and stony eyes spoke of despair. How many years of labor, of patient economy, of suffering, had he pa.s.sed to make sure a quiet old age! Now all was crushed, ruined; the child and he had no longer a roof to cover their heads.

And those great trenches--fully a mile of them--at which the country people were working in such haste, to keep the plague from completing the work war began! I saw them, too, from the top of the hill of Kaya, and turned away my eyes, horror-stricken. Russians, French, Prussians, were there heaped pell-mell, as if G.o.d had made them to love each other before the invention of arms and uniforms, which divide them for the profit of those who rule them. There they lay, side by side; and the part of them which could not die knew no more of war, but cursed the crimes that had for centuries kept them apart.

But what was sadder yet, was the long line of ambulances--bearing the agonized wounded--those of whom they speak so much in the bulletins to make the loss seem less, and who die by thousands in the hospitals, far from all they love; while at their homes cannon are firing, and church-bells are ringing with joyous chimes--rejoicing that thousands of men are slain!

At length we reach Lutzen, but it was so full of wounded that we were obliged to continue on to Leipzig. We saw in the streets only half-dead wretches, stretched on straw along the walls of the houses.

It was more than an hour before we reached a church, where fifteen or twenty of us who could no longer proceed were left.

Our ambulance conductor and his men, after refreshing themselves at a tavern at the street corner, remounted, and we continued our journey to Leipzig.

I saw and heard no more; my head swam; a murmuring filled my ears, I thought trees were men, and an intolerable thirst burned my lips.

For a long while past, many in the wagons had been shrieking, calling upon their mothers, trying to rise and fling themselves upon the road.

I know not whether I did the same; but I awoke as from a horrible dream, as two men seized me, each by a leg, placing their arms under my body, and carried me through a dark square. The sky seemed covered with stars, and innumerable lights shone from an immense edifice before us. It was the hospital of the market-place at Leipzig.

The two men who were carrying me ascended a spiral stairway which led to an immense hall where beds were laid together in three lines, so close that they touched each other. On one of these beds I was placed, in the midst of oaths, cries for pity, and muttered complaints from hundreds of fever-stricken wounded. The windows were open, and the flames of the lanterns flickered in the gusts of wind. Surgeons, a.s.sistants, and nurses with great ap.r.o.ns tied beneath their arms, came and went, while the groans from the halls below, and the rolling of ambulances, cracking of whips and neighing of horses without, seemed to pierce my very brain. While they were undressing me, they handled me roughly, and my wound pained me so horribly that I could not avoid shrieking. A surgeon came up at once, and scolded them for not being more careful. That is all I remember that night; for I became delirious, and raved constantly of Catharine, Monsieur Goulden, and Aunt Gredel, as my neighbor, an old artilleryman, whom my cries prevented from sleeping, afterward told me. I awoke the next morning at about eight o'clock, at the first roll of the drum, and saw the hall better, and then learned that I had the bone of my left shoulder broken. A dozen surgeons were around me; one of them, a stout, dark man, whom they called Monsieur the Baron, was opening my bandages, while an a.s.sistant at the foot of the bed held a basin of warm water.

The baron examined my wound; all the others bent forward to hear what he might say. He spoke a few moments, but all that I could understand was, that the ball had struck from below, breaking the bone and pa.s.sing out behind. I saw that he knew his business well, for the Prussians had fired from below, over the garden wall, so that the ball must have ranged upward. He washed the wound himself, and with a couple of turns of his hand, replaced the bandage, so that my shoulder could not move, and everything was in order.

I felt much better. Ten minutes after a hospital steward put a shirt on me without hurting me--such was his skill.

The surgeon, pa.s.sing to another bed, cried:

"What! You here again, old fellow?"

"Yes; it is I, Monsieur the Baron," replied the artilleryman, proud to be recognized; "the first time was at Austerlitz, the second at Jena, and then I received two thrusts of a lance at Smolensk."

"Yes, yes," said the surgeon kindly; "and now what is the matter with you?"

"Three sabre-cuts on my left arm while I was defending my piece from the Prussian hussars."

The surgeon unwound the bandage, and asked,

"Have you the cross?"

"No, Monsieur the Baron."

"What is your name?"

"Christian Zimmer, of the Second horse artillery."

"Very good!"

He dressed the wounds, and went to the next, saying:

"You will soon be well."

He returned, chatting with the others, and went out after finishing his round and giving some orders to the nurses.

The old artilleryman's heart seemed overflowing with joy; and, as I concluded from his name that he came from Alsace, I spoke to him in our language, at which he was still more rejoiced. He was a tall fellow--at least six feet in height, with round shoulders, a flat forehead, large nose, light red mustaches, and was as hard as a rock, but a good man for all that. His eyes twinkled when I spoke Alsatian to him, and he p.r.i.c.ked up his ears at once. If I asked him in our tongue he was willing to give me everything he had, but he had only a clasp of the hand, which cracked the bones in mine to give. He called me _Josephel_, as they did at home, and said:

"Josephel, be careful how you swallow the medicines they give you, only take what you know. All that does not smell good is good for nothing.

If they would give us a bottle of _Rikevir_ every day we would soon be well; but it is easier to spoil our digestion with a handful of vile boiled herbs, than to bring us a little of the good white wine of Alsace."

When I told him I was afraid of dying of the fever, he looked angry with his great gray eyes, and said:

"Josephel, you are a fool. Do you think that such tall fellows as you and I were born to die in a hospital? No, no; drive the idea from your head."