The New Book of Martyrs Part 16

Thus days and nights pa.s.sed 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 sh.e.l.ls fell upon the hospital.

I heard a crash which shook the ground and the walls violently, then hurried footsteps and cries in the pa.s.sage.

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 sh.e.l.l 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 gla.s.s; 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 sh.e.l.ls falling upon the men. Crowding to the window, we watched the ma.s.sacre, and waited to receive the victims. My colleague M----drew my attention to a soldier who was running up the gra.s.sy slope on the other side of the road, and whom the sh.e.l.ls 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 la.s.situde 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 pa.s.s, 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.