This evil precedent did not deter another from coming to my aid and venturing on a fresh attempt to rescue me. It was Sergeant Strichalsky of the Medical Corps. He took me on his shoulders and carried me safely to the blind side of the rise of ground.
It was getting dark. The men found the groundsheet of a dead man and carried me over a deserted stretch of ground over which, far and near, jagged flashes were flaming up. I had to struggle for breath, one of the most painful sensations there are. The smoke of the cigarette that a man was smoking ten paces in front threatened to suffocate me.
At length we reached a dressing-station in charge of a friend of mine, Dr. Key. He made me a divine lemon-squash, and then put me into a refreshing sleep with an injection of morphine.
Next day began the usual journey by stages to the rear. The terrible journey by car to the war hospital brought me to the edge of the grave. Then I was in nurses’ hands. Though I am no misogynist, I was always irritated by the presence of women every time that the fate of battle threw me into the bed of a hospital ward. One sank, after the manly and purposeful activities of the war, into a vague atmosphere of warmth. The clear objectivity of the Catholic nursing sisterhoods afforded a welcome exception. I found with them an atmosphere very congenial to soldiering.
My wound was made lighter by many expressions of sympathy; and indeed bodily suffering always increases the sensibility of the inner being. From the Plancots I had a delightful letter, written when the enemy, who were gaining ground very slowly, first began shelling Cambrai. They sent me also a tin of milk they could ill spare, and the only melon their garden had produced. I must not let slip this opportunity of saying that I found many an example among the French civilian population of that internationality of the heart that every decent man and educated soldier ought to uphold. The last of my long series of batmen, too, was no exception to the rest. He stuck by me, though the hospital allowed no provisions to be made for him and he had to beg what he could in the kitchen.
I amused myself once during the monotonous hours on my back by counting the number of times I had been hit. I found that I had been hit in all fourteen times: six times by rifle-bullets, once by a shrapnel bullet, once by a shell splinter, three times by bomb splinters, and twice by splinters of rifle-bullets. Counting the ins and outs, this made precisely twenty punctures, so that I might confidently, with that Roman centurion, Holkschen Reiter, take my place in every warlike circle. Certainly I could at any time assert my claim to belong to one order at least, namely, that of the gold wound-stripes. This honour did in fact come to me at this very time, though the gold, certainly, was only yellow-lacquered metal. Yet I must confess I had it sewn on my coat with a certain pleasure, for if doctors and professors, for all their correctness, do not look askance upon the stamp of an official title, why should the soldier refuse a visible sign of his gallantry? The worth of an order, as of everything else, lies not on but beneath the surface; and who would grudge a heart that has so often beaten fast in the excitement of battle for country’s sake the adornment of a bit of enamel as the outward sign? In huckstering times, indeed, when everything turns on money, these things lose their value, for it rests solely within the ideal with which they are bound up.
After fourteen days I was lying on the feather mattress of a hospital train. Once again a German landscape flitted by me, tinged this time with the first dyes of autumn, and once again, as on that time at Heidelberg, I was gripped by the sad and proud feeling of being more closely bound to my country because of the blood shed for her greatness. Why should I conceal that tears smarted in my eyes when I thought of the end of the enterprise in which I had borne my share? I had set out to the war gaily enough, thinking we were to hold a festival on which all the pride of youth was lavished, and I had thought little, once I was in the thick of it, about the ideal that I had to stand for. Now I looked back: four years of development in the midst of a generation predestined to death, spent in caves, smoke-filled trenches, and shell-illumined wastes; years enlivened only by the pleasures of a mercenary, and nights of guard after guard in an endless perspective; in short, a monotonous calendar full of hardships and privation, divided by the red-letter days of battles. And almost without any thought of mine, the idea of the Fatherland had been distilled from all these afflictions in a clearer and brighter essence. That was the final winnings in a game on which so often all had been staked: the nation was no longer for me an empty thought veiled in symbols; and how could it have been otherwise when I had seen so many die for its sake, and been schooled myself to stake my life for its credit every minute, day and night, without a thought? And so, strange as it may sound, I learned from this very four years’ schooling in force and in all the fantastic extravagance of material warfare that life has
