Calvary

sleep on. It was very difficult for me to get out of the tent; for a while I was obliged to crawl on my knees on all fours, my legs refusing to carry me. My limbs were frozen stiff like bars of iron, I could not move my head on my paralyzed neck, and my eyes which felt as if they had been pricked by numerous tiny needles, kept shedding tears in ceaseless streams.⁠ ⁠… At the same time I felt an acute, lancinating, unbearable pain in my back and shoulders. I noticed that my comrades fared no better. With drawn faces of ghostly pallor they were advancing, some limping piteously, others bent down and staggering over clumps of underbrush⁠—all lame, mournful and covered with mud. I saw several men who, seized with the colic, writhed and twisted their mouths, holding their hands to their bellies. Some of them were shivering with fever, and their teeth chattered with cold. All around us one could hear dry coughs rending human breasts, groans, short and raucous breathing. A hare ventured out of its cover and fled wildly, with its ears flapping, but no one thought of pursuing the animal as we used sometimes to do. After the roll call, foodstuffs were distributed, as the commissary regained our regiment. We made some soup which we ate as greedily as half-starved dogs.

I was still suffering. After the soup I had an attack of dizziness followed by vomiting, and I shook with fever. Everything around me was in a whirl⁠—the tents, the forest, the fields, the small town way yonder, whose chimneys were smoking in the mist, and the sky where huge clouds were floating, bleak and low. I asked the sergeant for permission to see a doctor.

Our tents were arranged in two rows, backed against the forest on each side of the road of Senonches which led into the open country through a magnificent grove of oak trees, crossed the Chartre road three hundred meters away and still further the town of Belhomert and extended farther toward Loupe. At the crossing of these two roads there was a small dilapidated building covered with thatch, a sort of abandoned shed which provided shelter for the laborers on the road during rain. It was here that the surgeon had established a sort of improvised field hospital recognizable by a Red Cross flag put up in a crack in the wall and adorning it.

In front of the house a crowd was waiting. A long line of human beings, wan and worn out, some standing with fixed looks, others sitting on the ground, sad with stooped and pointed shoulders, their heads buried in their hands. Death had already laid its terrible hand upon these emaciated countenances, these scraggy frames, these members which hung loose, devoid of blood and marrow. And confronted with this heartbreaking sight, I forgot my own suffering, and my heart was touched with pity. Three months were sufficient to break down these robust bodies, inured to labor and fatigue!⁠ ⁠… Three months! And these young men who loved life, these children of the soil who grew up as dreamers in the freedom of the fields, trusting in the goodness of nature, these youths were done for!⁠ ⁠… To the marine who dies is given the sea as a burying place; he descends into eternal darkness to the rhythm of its murmuring waves. But these!⁠ ⁠… A few more days of grace perhaps, and then these tatterdemalions will suddenly tumble down into the mud of a ditch, their corpses delivered up to the fangs of prowling dogs and to the beaks of nightbirds.

I was swept by a feeling of such brotherly and sorrowful pity for them that I wished I could press all these unhappy men to my breast, in a single embrace, and I wished, oh, how ardently I wished it!⁠—I had a hundred female breasts, like Isis, swollen with milk, that I might offer to all these bloodless lips.⁠ ⁠… They were entering the house one by one and were leaving it as quickly, pursued by growling and swearing sounds. For the rest, the surgeon did not bother with them at all. Very angry, he was demanding of his orderly his medicine chest which was missing from the luggage.

“My medicine chest, for God’s sake!” he shouted. “Where is my medicine chest? And my instrument case?⁠ ⁠… What did you do with my instrument case? Ah! for God’s sake!⁠ ⁠…”

A little soldier of the reserves who suffered from an abscess on his knee came back hopping on one foot, crying, pulling his hair in despair. They did not want to attend to him. When it was my turn to go in I was all atremble. Inside the place which was dark, four patients, lying flat in the straw, were emitting rattling sounds like the cock of a musket; a fifth one was gesticulating, muttering incoherent words in delirium; still another, half-reclining, with head drooped on his chest, was moaning and asking for a drink in a feeble voice, the voice of an infant. Squatted in front of the fireplace, an attendant was holding over the flame, on the end of a stick, a piece of stale pudding whose stench of burned grease filled the room. The adjutant did not even look at me. He shouted:

“Well, what’s the matter now?⁠ ⁠… A bunch of lazy buggers. A good ten league run at a stretch will fix you up, you straggler.⁠ ⁠… Face about!⁠ ⁠… March!”

On the threshold I met a peasant woman who asked me:

“Is this the place where you can see the doctor.”

“Women now!” growled the adjutant. “What do you want now?”

“Beg pardon, excuse me, Doctor,” rejoined the peasant woman, who came up very timidly. “I came for my son who is a soldier.”

“Tell me now, old woman, am I here to keep track of your son, or what?”

With her hands crossed on the handle of her umbrella, timorous, she examined the place about her.

“It seems like he is very sick, my son is, very,