The New Book of Martyrs Part 23

Auger has given me a lesson. I will go and smoke a cigarette with Groult, and above all, I will go and see Gregoire.

Groult, indeed, is not altogether neglected. He is an original, a perverse fellow. He is pointed out as a curious animal. He gets his share of presents and attention.

But no one knows anything about Gregoire; he lies staring at the wall, and growing thinner every day, and Death seems the only person who is interested in him.

You shall not die, Gregoire! I vow to keep hold of you, to suffer with you, and to endure your ill-temper humbly. You, who seem to be bearing the misery of an entire world, shall not be miserable all alone.

Kind ladies who come to see our wounded and give them picture-books, tri-coloured caps and sweetmeats, do not forget Gregoire, who is wretched. Above all, give him your sweetest smiles.

You go away well pleased with yourselves because you have been generous to Auger. But there is no merit in being kind to Auger. With a single story, a single clasp of his hand, he gives you much more than he received from you. He gives you confidence; he restores your peace of mind.

Go and see Gregoire who has nothing but his suffering to give, and who very nearly gave his life.

If you go away without a smile for Gregoire, you may fear that you have not fulfilled your task. And don't expect him to return your smile, for where would your liberality be in that case?

It is easy to pity Auger, who needs no pity. It is difficult to pity Gregoire, and yet he is so pitiable.

Do not forget; Auger is touched with grace; but Gregoire will be d.a.m.ned if you do not hold out your hand to him.

G.o.d Himself, who has withheld grace from the d.a.m.ned, must feel pity for them.

It is a very artless desire for equality which makes us say that all men are equal in the presence of suffering. No! no! they are not. And as we know nothing of Death but that which precedes and determines it, men are not even equal in the presence of Death.

NIGHTS IN ARTOIS

I

One more glance into the dark ward, in which something begins to reign which is not sleep, but merely a kind of nocturnal stupor.

The billiard-table has been pushed into a corner; it is loaded with an incoherent ma.s.s of linen, bottles, and articles of furniture. A smell of soup and excrements circulates between the stretchers, and seems to insult the slender onyx vases that surmount the cabinet.

And now, quickly! quickly! Let us escape on tiptoe into the open air.

The night is clear and cold, without a breath of wind: a vast block of transparent ice between the snow and the stars. Will it suffice to cleanse throat and lungs, nauseated by the close effluvium of suppurating wounds?

The snow clings and b.a.l.l.s under our sabots. How good it would be to have a game.... But we are overwhelmed by a fatigue that has become a kind of exasperation. We will go to the end of the lawn.

Here is the great trench in which the refuse of the dressing-ward, all the residuum of infection, steams and rots. Further on we come to the musical pines, which Dalcour the miner visits every night, lantern in hand, to catch sparrows, Dalcour, the formidable Zouave, whom no one can persuade not to carry about his stiff leg and the gaping wound in his bandaged skull in the rain.

Let us go as far as the wall of the graveyard, which time has caused to swell like a protuberance on the side of the park, and which is so providentially close at hand.

The old Chateau looms, a stately ma.s.s, through the shadows. To-night, lamps are gleaming softly in every window. It looks like a silent, illuminated ship, the prow of which is cutting through an ice-bank.

Nothing emerges from it but this quiet light. Nothing reveals the nature of its terrible freight.

We know that in every room, in every storey, on the level of every floor, young mutilated bodies are ranged side by side. A hundred hearts send the over-heated blood in swift pulsations towards the suffering limbs. Through all these bodies the projectile in its furious course made its way, crushing delicate mechanisms, rending the precious organs which make us take pleasure in walking, breathing, drinking....

Up there, this innocent joy of order no longer exists; and in order to recapture it, a hundred bodies are performing labours so slow and hard that they call forth tears and sighs from the strongest.

But how the murmurs of this centre of suffering are m.u.f.fled by the walls! How silently and darkly it broods in s.p.a.ce!

Like a dressing on a large inflamed wound, the Chateau covers its contents closely, and one sees nothing but these lamps, just such lamps as might illuminate a studious solitude, or a conversation between intimate friends at evening, or a love lost in self-contemplation.

We are now walking through thickets of spindle-wood, resplendent under the snow, and the indifference of these living things to the monstrous misery round them makes the impotent soul that is strangling me seem odious and even ridiculous to me. In spite of all protestations of sympathy, the mortal must always suffer alone in his flesh, and this indeed is why war is possible....

Philippe here thinks perhaps as I do; but he and I have these thoughts thrust on us in the same pressing fashion. Men who are sleeping twenty paces from this spot would be wakened by a cry; yet they are undisturbed by this formidable presence, inarticulate as a mollusc in the depths of the sea.

In despair, I stamp on the soft snow with my sabot. The winter gra.s.s it covers subsists obstinately, and has no solidarity with anything else on earth. Let the pain of man wear itself out; the gra.s.s will not wither.

Sleep, good folks of the whole world. Those who suffer here will not disturb your rest.

And suddenly, beyond the woods a rocket rises and bursts against the sky, brilliant as a meteor. It means something most certainly, and it warns some one; but its coa.r.s.e ingenuity does not deceive me. No barbarous signal such as this could give me back confidence in my soul to-night.

II

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 enc.u.mbered, 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 pailla.s.se 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 gla.s.s 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 part.i.tion 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 c.o.c.ks 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?