It happened that for several days I worked in the bandaging room directly under Nikitin. The work had a peculiar and really unanalysable fascination for me. It was perhaps the directness of contact that pleased me. I suppose one felt that here at any rate one was doing immediate practical good, relieving distress and agony that must, by someone, be immediately relieved; and, at any rate, in the first days at M⸺ when the press of wounded was terrific (we treated, in one day and night, nine hundred wounded soldiers) there could be no doubt of the real demand for incessant tireless work. But there was in my pleasure more than this. It was as though, through the bodies of the wounded soldiers, I was helping to drive home the attack upon our enemy. By our enemy I do not mean anything as concretely commonplace as the German nation. One scarcely considered Germany as a definite personality. One was resolved to cripple its power because one believed that power to be a menace to the helpless, the innocent, the lovers of truth and beauty; but that resolve, although it never altered, seemed (the nearer one approached the citadel) in some way to be farther and farther removed from the real question. Germany was of no importance, and the ruin that Germany was wreaking was of no importance compared with the histories of the individual souls that were now in the making. Here were we: Nikitin, Trenchard, Sister K⸺, Molozov, myself and the others—engaged upon our great adventure. Across the surface of the world, at this same instant, out upon the same hunt, seeking the same answer to their mystery, were millions of our fellows. Somewhere in the heart of the deep forest the enemy was hiding. We would defeat him? He would catch us unawares? He had some plot, some hidden surprise? What should we find when we met him? … We hated Germany, God knows, with a quiet, unresting, interminable hatred, but it was not Germany that we were fighting.
And these wounded knew something that we did not. In the first moments of their agony when we met them their souls had not recovered from the shock of their encounter. It was, with many of them, more than the mere physical pain. They were still held by some discovery at whose very doors they had been. The discovery itself had not been made by them, but they had been so near to it that many of them would never be the same man again. “No, your Honour,” one soldier said to me. “It isn’t my arm. … That is nothing, Slava Bogu … but life isn’t so real now. It is half gone.” He would explain no more.
Since the battle of S⸺, I had been restless. I wanted to be back there again and this work was to me like talking to travellers who had come from some country that one knew and desired.
In the early morning, when the light was so cold and inhuman, when the candles stuck in bottles on the windowsills shivered and quavered in the little breeze, when the big basin on the floor seemed to swell ever larger and larger, with its burden of bloody rags and soiled bandages and filthy fragments of dirty clothes, when the air was weighted down with the smell of blood and human flesh, when the sighs and groans and cries kept up a perpetual undercurrent that one did not notice and yet faltered before, when again and again bodies, torn almost in half, faces mangled for life, hands battered into pulp, legs hanging almost by a thread, rose before one, passed and rose again in endless procession, then, in those early hours, some fantastic world was about one. The poplar trees beyond the window, the little beechwood on the hill, the pond across the road, a round grey sheet of ruffled water, these things in the half-light seemed to wait for our defeat. One instant on our part and it seemed that all the pain and torture would rise in a flood and overwhelm one … in those early morning hours the enemy crept very close indeed. We could almost hear his hot breath behind the bars of our fastened doors.
There was a peculiar little headache that I have felt nowhere else, before or since, that attacked one on those early mornings. It was not a headache that afflicted one with definite physical pain. It was like a cold hand pressing upon the brow, a hand that touched the eyes, the nose, the mouth, then remained, a chill weight upon the head; the blood seemed to stop in its course, one’s heart beat feebly, and things were dim before one’s eyes. One was stupid and chose one’s words slowly, looking at people closely to see whether one really knew them, even unsure about oneself, one’s history, one’s future; neither hungry, tired, nor thirsty, neither sad nor joyful, neither excited nor dull, only with the cold hand upon one’s brow, catching (with troubled breath) the beating of one’s heart.
In normal times the night-duty was of course taken in rotation, but during the pressure of these four days we had to snatch our rest when we might.
About midnight on the fifth day the procession of wounded suddenly slackened, and by two o’clock in the morning had ceased entirely. The two nurses went to bed leaving Nikitin, myself, and some sleepy sanitars alone. The little room was empty of all wounded, they having been removed to the tent on the farther side of the road. The candles had sunk deep into the bottles and were spluttering in a sea of grease. The room smelt abominably, the blood on the floor had trickled in thin red lines into the cracks between the boards, and the basins
