Chapter III: Part 3

Rabot was sandy-haired, with a pale complexion splashed with freckles. He had so little brain that he looked like a rabbit or a bird. Directly a stranger spoke to him his underlip began to tremble and his chin wrinkled all over like a walnut. You had first of all to explain to him that you were not going to beat him.

Poor Rabot! I would have given anything to see him laugh. Everything, on the contrary, seemed to conspire to make him cry: there were the terrible endless dressings that had to be renewed every day for months; then he was compelled to lie so quiet and motionless that he was never able to play with his comrades. And after all, the fact remained that Rabot had never learned to play at all, and really was not much interested in anything.

I was, I think, the only one who became at all intimate with him; and, as I said before, this intimacy consisted chiefly in shutting my left eye when I passed near his bed.

Rabot did not smoke. When cigarettes were handed round he would join in with the others and play with them for a moment, moving his great thin fingers, deformed and emaciated. Long illness seems to rob the fingers of manual labourers of all beauty and significance: directly they lose their hardness and their healthy appearance they look like nothing at all in the world.

I think that Rabot would have willingly offered his good cigarettes to his neighbours; but it is so difficult to talk sometimes, especially to give something to some one. The cigarettes got slowly covered with dust on the table, and Rabot lay flat on his back, quite thin and straight, like a bit of straw carried away by the torrent of war, and understanding nothing of what was happening all around him.

One day a staff officer came into the ward and went up to Rabot.

“That is the man,” he said. “Well, I have brought him the Military Medal and the Croix de Guerre.”

He made Rabot sign a little paper and left him alone with his playthings. Rabot did not laugh. He put the case out on the bedclothes in front of him, and he looked at it from nine o’clock in the morning till three in the afternoon.

At three the officer returned, and said:

“I made a mistake. The decorations were not for Rabot, but for Raboux.”

Then he took the jewel-case, tore up the receipt, and went away.

Rabot cried from three o’clock in the afternoon till nine o’clock in the evening. Then he went to sleep. The next morning he began to cry again. M. Gossin, who is a good Director, went to Headquarters and came back with a medal and a cross just like the last; he even made Rabot sign another paper.

Rabot stopped crying. But his face was still haunted by a shadow--the shadow of a constant dread, as if he feared that one day or other they would come and take away all his treasures.

Some weeks passed. I often looked at Rabot’s face, and I tried to imagine what laughter would make of it. I imagined and looked in vain; it was obvious that Rabot did not know how to laugh, and that his face was not made that way.

It was then that the lady in green arrived.

She came in one fine morning through one of the doors, like everybody else. On the other hand, she was not like everybody else: she was more like an angel, a queen, or a doll. She was not dressed like the nurses who worked in the wards, or like the mothers and wives who came to visit their wounded husbands and sons. She was not even like the women one meets in the streets. She was much more beautiful, much more majestic. She made one think of the fairies of one’s childhood, or of those splendid forms one sees on great coloured calendars under which the artist has written “Reveries,” or “Melancholy,” or “Poetry.” She was surrounded by well-dressed, good-looking officers, who attended to her slightest word, and who lavished on her the most extravagant compliments.

“Come in, then, Madame,” said one of them, “since you wish to see some of our wounded.”...

She made two steps into the room, stopped short, and said in a deep voice:

“The poor things!”

Every one in the ward opened his eyes and pricked up his ears. Mery put down his pipe; Tarrissant changed his crutches from one hand to the other, which, with him, is a sign of emotion; Domenge and Burnier stopped playing and pressed their cards against their bodies to hide them. Poupot did not move, because he is paralysed, but one could easily see that he was listening with all his might.

The lady in green went first to Sorri, the negro.

“Your name is Sorri?” she asked, reading his card.

The negro moved his head; the lady in green went on in a voice as sweet and melodious as an actress:

“You have come to fight for France, Sorri; and you have left your beautiful country--the fresh and smiling oasis in an ocean of burning sand. Ah, Sorri! how beautiful are the African evenings, at the hour when the young woman returns along the avenue of palm trees, carrying on her head an aromatic pitcher full of honey and cocoanut milk!”

The officers murmured their appreciation, and Sorri, who understands French, repeated, nodding his head, “Cocoa! cocoa!”

Already the lady in green was gliding away over the tiled floor. She came to Rabot, and sat down on the end of his bed, like a swallow on a telegraph wire.

“Rabot,” she said, “you are a brave man!”

Rabot did not answer; but in his usual way he blinked his eyes, like a child who fears a blow.

“Ah, Rabot!” said the lady in green, “what gratitude do we not owe you, who have guarded safely for us our dear France! But, Rabot, you have already gained the great reward. Glory! The joy of battle! The exquisite agony of plunging forward, your bayonet shining in the sun! The pleasure of plunging the iron of vengeance into the bleeding side of the enemy! And then the suffering--divine suffering to be endured for the sake of all; the sacred wound which, of a hero, makes a god! Ah! wonderful memories, Rabot!”

The lady in green ceased, and a religious silence reigned in the ward.

Then something unexpected happened.

Rabot stopped looking like himself. All his features contracted, changing in an almost tragic way. A hoarse noise burst forth in spasms from his fleshless chest, and all the world realised that Rabot was laughing.

He laughed for over three-quarters of an hour. Long after the lady in green had gone, Rabot was still laughing--in fits, as one coughs, with a rattling noise.

After that the life of Rabot changed a little. When he was on the verge of tears and misery one could sometimes distract his attention and get a little laugh out of him if one said at the right moment:

“Rabot! they are going to bring the lady in green to see you.”

IN THE VINEYARD

Between Epernay and Château-Thierry, the Marne flows through an exquisite valley, whose gay hills are rich in orchards and vine plantations, and crowned with verdure like woodland goddesses, and abundantly adorned with those plants which have made France a country without price, beautiful and noble.

It is the valley of rest. Jaulgonne, Dormans, Châtillons, Œuilly, Port-à-Binson--those old smiling villages can never be repaid for lavishing such hours of forgetful repose, that refresh like spring water, on the exhausted troops leaving Verdun for the once quiet sectors of the Aisne.

During the summer of 1916 the ---- Corps was once again concentrated on the Marne, ready to take its share in the immense and bloody sacrifice on the Somme front. Our battalion was patiently waiting the word which would send them up the line; as they waited, they passed the time in calculating, from the top of the hills, the number of waggons that could be seen struggling along far down in the valley, and as usual they made all sorts of conjectures.

Most of the time we passed in the fields with our friends, avoiding serious thought as much as possible, and letting the body enjoy to the full the repose which offered itself far from the murderous struggles on the front.

There had been a few days of dazzling heat, then the storm had come with a thundering sky, the clouds wildly charging, and a wide sweeping wind carrying along with it the dust or the mist.

Late one afternoon we happened to be on the road which rises gently from Chavenay to the copses of the south.

There were three of us. Conversation flagged, and, imperceptibly, we had each fallen back on our secret thoughts--thoughts that were full of pain, and which the climbing road seemed to make harder to bear.

“Let’s sit down on this bank,” said a voice softly.

Without replying, we found ourselves all at once lying in the silver-weed. We tore it up abstractedly, like men who are obliged to work their muscles in order to think more freely.

A little grape-vine was growing at our feet and reached, with two graceful efforts, a ridge of earth gleaming with the freshness of wet grass. It was a neat, pure little vine of Champagne, bursting with juice, cared for like a divine and sacred thing. No wild plants; nothing but the stubbly vine-stock and the soil--that rich soil which the rains wash away and which, each season, the peasants carry up again, on their backs, right to the summit of the hills.

From amid this blend of green herbage we saw suddenly emerging an old thin woman, with a rusty complexion and hair white and disordered. In one hand she held a pail full of ashes, and with the other scattered handfuls of it on the feet of the vines.

On seeing us, she stopped, and adjusted with a dusty finger a coil of hair blown about by the wind. She stared at us. Then she spoke:

“What’s your regiment, you others?”

“The 110th line, Madame.”

“Mine did not belong to that regiment.”

“You have boys in the army?”

“Ah! I had once.”

There was silence, broken by the cry of animals, the gusts of the high wind, and the hissing murmur of the shaken foliage. The old woman scattered a few handfuls of the ashes, and then came near and began in a stumbling voice that often lost itself in the wind:

“I once had boys in the army. Now I have none. The two youngest are dead. I have one remaining--a poor wretch, who is hardly a soldier now.”

“He is wounded, perhaps?”

“Yes, he is wounded. He has lost both arms.”

The old woman put her bucket of ashes on the ground, removed some grass from her waist-belt and tied a wayward vine branch to a supporting stick, and, standing erect again, she exclaimed:

“He has been wounded as few have been. He has lost his two arms, and in his thigh there is a hole big enough to contain a small bowl of milk. For ten days he was on the verge of death. I went to see him, and I said to him:

“‘Clovis, you are not going to leave me all alone?’--for I must tell you they had been for a long while without a father.

“And he always used to reply:

“‘I’ll be better to-morrow.’

“No one was gentler than this boy.”

We remained silent. One of us at length murmured:

“Your boy is brave, Madame!”

The old woman, who was looking at her grape-vine, turned her dim eyes towards us and said in an abrupt tone:

“Brave! of course! My boys could not be anything else!”

A laugh escaped her--a laugh almost of pride, a strangled laugh that lost itself at once in the wind. Then she appeared to talk absently:

“My poor unfortunate son will some day be able to look forward to marriage, for there is no one so gentle as he is. But my two youngest, my two little ones! It’s too much! Oh, God, it’s too much!”

We could find nothing to say. There was nothing to say. With hair flying in the wind, she began again to scatter the ashes, like a sower of death. Her lips were compressed, and in her face there was a mixture of despair, bewilderment and defiance.

“What are you doing this for, Madame?” I asked, somewhat at random.

“You see, I’m mixing the ashes with the sulphate. It’s the season. I shall never finish: I’ve too much to do, too much to do.”

We had got up, as if we felt ashamed of disturbing this tireless worker in her task. Moved by a common impulse, we took off our hats to her.

“Good-night,” she said, “and good luck, too, you others.”

We climbed up the hill to the very edge of the wood without saying a word. Then we turned round and had a last look at the valley.

There on the hillside, in a mosaic of plots, as it were, the vine plantation could be seen, with the old woman, ever so small, who was still sowing the ashes in the wind heavy with rain clouds. The gentle country maintained in face of the stormy heavens an attitude of innocence and resignation. Here and there, humble villages that glistened seemed to be set like coloured jewels in the earth. And right in the fields that were dressed for the needs of August, small specks that moved could be seen: a race of old men were at grips with the soil.

THE RAILWAY JUNCTION

To die is simple enough; only you should have the good taste to die in some selected spot--unless, of course, you are in China, where the dead are supreme and exercise almost more authority than the living. But in our country you have got to die properly, otherwise the living will look askance at you and say, “What does this corpse want? There’s no room for it here.”

In 1915 I was going through a kind of probation period at the railway junction of X., and I went on duty two or three times a week. Going on duty meant being on the spot and doing small insignificant jobs, being on guard or making a note of what was passing. Usually the man in charge used to be found in some gloomy place leading to the lamp-room. There he endured the long weary hours without interruption, and watched the military trains passing, full of men who had undergone six months’ campaigning. They sang while they journeyed from one hell to another, because in war men do not let their thoughts travel far; as soon as they have got away from the guns they abandon themselves without restraint to the joy of being alive.

One Saturday night I was lying on a thick mattress which served as a bed. It was alive with mice. I felt these amiable little beasts at a finger’s length from my ears, and I listened with wandering attention to the noises coming from the junction. They were the sounds of a great railway station: whistles, shrieks, puffing engines, cries of the winches and the cranes, the vibrations of the taut iron rails, the sharp clatter of the signals, the repeated clash of the buffers of colliding trucks; and in the midst of it all, the clamour and the rhythm of military movements, the swing of a detachment on the march, the challenges of the sentries, commands, bell-ringings--all those things which indicate the forcible possession by armed might of the industrial organism.

My thoughts were running along these lines when I saw Corporal Bonardent entering my dug-out, blinding me with the flare of his acetylene lamp.

“Lieutenant!”

“I’m all attention, Bonardent.”

“Some poor devil in the food transport has just got himself done in, on the semi-permanent way 17. I’m told it’s a dreadful----”

“Let’s go there at once, Corporal!”

Two men were waiting for me outside with a stretcher. It was a glorious night, upon which the pale and flickering lights of the station hardly made an impression.

“It’s at La Folie,” said Bonardent: “it’s rather far from here.”

La Folie is a road-crossing, about a mile off. I asked a porter how to get there, and we started.

What is really amazing, in a large station, is that the organising imperative will which directs the rush of moving things lies hidden behind an apparent state of chaos and entanglement. We began to walk along lines of trucks that never ended. They seemed to have been left there and forgotten since the beginning of the war--rolling-stock that appeared to have had its day, with stiffened axles and couplings devoured by rust; but suddenly our lamp would light up an open door, and some soldiers were seen in a heap, sleeping on the straw, or there were cattle with stupefied looks. A few compartments had been turned into travelling offices, where clerks drudged through a mass of papers in a light reflected from a drawing-room lamp-shade; one felt that the terrible grasp of the administration had closed over the railways, just as its monstrous grip was in possession from the deep-dug trenches to the outfitting shops far away in the Pyrenees. Sometimes, crossing wide, dark spaces, we slipped between two trains that seemed petrified with eternal sleep; but all at once, though no one could be seen, the trains began to move towards each other, their ends clashing with a terrific clatter. Farther on we had to stop while hospital trains were passing. They afforded little comfort then, and there came to us, as the trains went by, a broadside of heart-rending coughs and puffs of the saturated chloride air with which the hospitals reeked. In addition, there were masses of fat mortars lashed on trucks, heaps of kitchens on wheels, and machinery whose uses one could not possibly guess, and all sorts of munitions of war, which night made fantastic. Heavy circular armour protected the cowering engines snorting in the pale light of the arc lamps. There were also, reminding one of former times, suburban trains that bore along drowsy passengers and express trains that swept over the intricate lines swift as a lash of the whip. In a word, a tumultuous roar, in which military movements clashed with the routine of civilian life.

At last we arrived at La Folie. It was an inextricable network of railways, discs, switches and metal cables. Three aged railway workers were living there in a shed. They were in shirt sleeves, and were turning the cranks, pulling the switches, directing with an orderly calm born of experience all the whirling forces which accumulated in that spot. They made me think of the foremen in past times who used to carry on when the managing directors were indulging in the pleasures of social life.

Above the rumbling noises a telegraph bell could be heard patiently ringing.

“We have come for the A.S.C. man,” said Bonardent.

“Oh! for that poor devil. He is there, under the sack and all around. My God!”

We entered the zone occupied by the corpse. I say “zone” deliberately, for the poor wretch had been cut up and scattered like a handful of grain at seed-time.

“God in Heaven!” said a railwayman with white hair; “why did the poor man come off the truck without looking round first? He made a terrible mistake. Here there is too much traffic for anyone to leave one’s post.”

The face of the dead man was intact, but sixty trucks had passed over his body, splitting it diagonally from the feet to the shoulders. We picked up, in one place and another, the remains--bleeding pieces of flesh, intestines, and, as I well remember, a hand clutching a piece of cheese. Death had struck the man as he was eating.

The extraordinary thing was that his overcoat remained whole: it concealed from view the hideous annihilation of the body. Lifting it slightly, I saw his discipline book, on which one could decipher the name Lamailleux.

“I think,” I said, “we’ve got him all now.”

An electric lamp, perched high up, gave a fitful light and seemed to be suffering from irritating twitches.

I decided that we should take a short cut back across “The Artillery”--a huge siding where munition trains had been shunted. But, as we got near the railways, a sentry appeared:

“Halt! Who goes there?”

None of us had thought of the password. The territorial barred the way with his rifle. He was adamant:

“I am sorry, Lieutenant, but you must go another way: those are my orders.”

A long turning brought us before another sentry.

“The password, please! You can’t go through ‘The Artillery’ without it.”

“My friend, we are taking away a dead body.”

I raised the corner of the sacking and uncovered the bluish face. In the light of the acetylene a portion of the pale skin with some tattooed marks could be seen through the chaotic heap of clothes that were saturated with blood. A look of horror passed over the guard’s face, but he said again:

“Lieutenant, go along the main line! It’s not possible this way.”

We plunged back again along the network of rails, disturbed by the clatter of the signals and the rumbling convoys. Sometimes the exhausted stretcher-bearers stopped and placed their burden on the stony embankment and carefully spat on their hands. Trains went by, and we could see, in the bright compartments, women reading, tightly clasping beautiful children who had fallen asleep.

At last the station lights came into view.

“Where are we taking the corpse?” I asked Bonardent.

“I don’t know, sir.”

I finally decided to present myself at the _Petite Vitesse_. A room there had been taken to receive the wreckage cast off from the swirling activity of the railway station--lost trunks, unemployed men, riderless beasts, stores with no destination, and, when necessary, corpses. A gendarme was smoking a cigarette in front of the door.

“Lieutenant, there’s no room here to-day. It’s full of fugitives from the north, with their kids and packages.”

I uttered a few words of encouragement to my men, and made up my mind to try the “draft-pavilion.” It was occupied by detachments that were rejoining their corps. The men were sleeping in heaps on the straw.

“Oh! you must see it’s quite impossible to put it here with the men,” said an adjutant, shaking his head. He added, as if to excuse himself:

“Put yourself in my place, Lieutenant. I have no authority.... I can’t take charge of a corpse without orders....”

I sat down on a stone. The stretcher-bearers, worn out, mopped their brows and uttered the word “Drink!” I looked at the shapeless mass of Lamailleux, which seemed quite indifferent to this last cross it had to bear, and it waited for its eternal resting-place with the sovereign patience of death.

“I don’t suppose you are well acquainted with the station,” said the Adjutant to me; “but there’s a guard-room there for the transport men stationed here. I’ll go and see.”

I let him go and began to smoke, contemplating the night, which was warm and glorious. The tranquillity of the objects seemed, like the agitation of the men, to say distinctly: “Why is this man upsetting us all with this useless corpse?” And an insect, ecstatic in the rare grass, emitted a sharpening crescendo of sound like a little being who imagines that the whole earth exists and was made for him.

The Adjutant emerged from the darkness.

“It’s most unfortunate. A man is locked up there for drunkenness: he has been sick all over the place.”

“Well, all right! Let’s go and see the station-master.”

He was asleep. His deputy was reading the illustrated papers. While I stated my case he asked me to advise him what pictures he should cut out to stick on the walls from among the little women of the _Vie fantaisiste_, of which he seemed to be an inveterate reader. As I remained surly, he said, as if in parenthesis:

“As for this dreadful business, it is an awful pity that the hospital is at the other end of the town. You can’t go there at this time of night. Put the thing in a truck until to-morrow morning, old chap!”

Having, by this wonderful suggestion, relieved himself of all responsibility, the young man stuck his nose again into the illustrated paper.

At that time they had not erected at the railway stations those large hospitals of wood and cardboard which are to be seen everywhere now. The idea of the truck I did not entertain for two seconds. In imagination I saw this improvised mortuary starting out during the night and taking away the corpse. It was a mad idea!

I went to the postmen: they were sorting out the letters. They were humming: “It is I who am Nénesse.” There wasn’t room for a rat in their hutch, and at once they regarded the question as quite beyond their jurisdiction....

I came out overcome with a kind of annoyance. Really, nobody took the slightest interest in my dead man. I muttered to myself: “Why, why, Lamailleux, did you let yourself die in a place where corpses are not wanted, and at a moment when no one has time to deal with them?” But even as I said that, I felt none the less a kind of link being established between me and this wreckage, and I looked at it as at something which puzzles you, but which belongs to you in spite of everything.

“Where shall we put the poor man?” said Bonardent.

Then the simplest solution struck me.

“Follow me,” I said.

Quietly we went back towards the lamp-room.

“There’s no room there, Lieutenant.”

“Proceed, Corporal.”

I got the stretcher carried into the room reserved for my use.

“Now, put it there, alongside my mattress, and go to bed.”

The men went out, shaking their heads with amazement. I remained alone with Lamailleux and lay down on the sheets. War had already taught me to live and to sleep in the company of the dead, and I was surprised that I had not, from the first, thought of so natural a solution.

For a long time, in the light of a candle, I looked at the frightful heap which was my night companion. There was no smell yet. I blew out the candle and could think at leisure.

From the stretcher there fell softly every second a drop of something which must have been blood. For a long time I counted the drops, thinking of many things that were as mournful as the epoch I lived in. Loud whistles pierced the blackness, and I had already counted several hundreds of the drops when I fell into a sleep that was like that of my comrade--undisturbed by dreams.

THE HORSE-DEALERS

They have all been summoned to report at noon, though many of them will not be wanted until evening.

There they stand round the entrance--like a dark puddle, one would almost say; others are scattered about in the garden, gloomily walking up and down.

It is an afternoon of February. The heavy and anxious sky is surcharged in one limitless stretch. It appears to bear no relation to the little events that happen down here, so melancholy is its mood. The wind is surly. It must know what they are doing far away, but it says nothing; not even the deepest rumble of the cannon is borne along the breeze; we are far away, and must forget....

The wind swirls in between the buildings, sweeps back on itself, enraged like a wild beast caught in a trap.

The men pay no attention to the sky, or to the wind, or to the chilling light of winter; they are thinking of themselves.

They do not know each other; they have been brought here by a cause which is common to all of them. They are so bewildered and exhausted that they cannot even pretend to be indifferent.

On a closer view, there is about them something that sets them all into a class apart: a lack of physical vitality, a sickly look about the body, too much flesh or too little, eyes blazing with fever, sometimes an obvious infirmity, more often a wan skin faintly coloured with very poor blood. Never a joyous relaxation of healthy muscles: all of them have the slow, dragging movement of the snail.

Finding themselves herded together an unendurable thought, some have started a conversation to satisfy their pride; others are silent, too proud to talk.

There are wage-earners there, professional men, and long-haired intellectuals whose bitter looks are veiled by spectacles.

Everybody smokes. Never has it been so clear that tobacco is an anodyne for soul sickness.

From time to time, two or three men reach the garden gate and disappear for a few minutes. They return wiping their mouths, their breath reeking with wine.

Every few minutes the door opens. A gendarme appears and calls out some names. Those who are called push their way through the crowd, as if drawn by threads.

Their mouths twitch a little at the corners. They affect a detached, bored, or chaffing expression, and they vanish under the arch.

They no longer see the February sky; no longer do they breathe the cold odorous wind: they are pushed one against the other into a filthy corridor, from the walls of which--painted Heaven knows how!--oozes a thick, slimy sweat.

They remain there herded for some time, until another door opens. A gendarme counts them off by the dozen, like fruit or cattle, and hustles them into a large hall where the Thing is to take place....

At once a sickening smell of man makes them gasp. They cannot at first see very clearly what all the movement going on there is about. But they are left no time to think.

What indeed is the good of thinking at a time when an immense lamenting cry escapes from the entire stricken nation--a desperate call, the death-rattle of a drowning people?

Why think? Does that frenzied, roaring whirlwind which lays waste the old continent, does _that_ think? No, it is not indeed the time for thought.

The men have to undress quickly and fall in--in rows.

The hall is huge and forbidding. Its walls are decorated with texts, and there are busts of unknown men; in the centre a table, as at a tribunal.

Some big-wig, white-haired and rather arrogant, is enthroned there; he seems exhausted, but pertinacious. He is assisted by some obscure supernumeraries.

In front of the table, two doctors in white overalls--one old and wizened, the other still young, with a preoccupied, listless look.

The men advance in single files towards each of the doctors in white: they march one behind the other like suppliants proceeding to the altar of an angered God. They do not know what to do with their arms.

They are not the flower of the race: for a long time now the finest men in the land have been living up to their waists in mud, alert as cats to the dangers threatening them. It is long since the farmer found anything in his winnow except chaff and dust, and it is there still that he searches with an avaricious hand for a few scattered grains.

The men are not cold: hot blasts of air come rushing along the floor from a blazing heating apparatus. Yet many of the men shiver. Balancing sometimes on one hip, sometimes on another, they fold and unfold their arms, then drop them, failing to strike any attitude. They are ashamed of their nakedness.

In the corner, near the door, a gendarme is pushing and hustling a thin, frail little worker who is too slow in undressing: he thought he need not pull off his socks and pants. He is forced to do so, however, and he discloses two unwashed feet.

The men in overalls work with feverish haste, like scene-shifters on the stage.

They ask short, succinct questions, and at once they feel and press with their quickly moving hands.

The victim is rather pale. A warm dew comes out in beads on his temples. He mumbles and speaks entreatingly. Then, examined once again, he replies with more assurance.

“You only suffer from that. Do you cough?”

“Yes.”

“You are sure you suffer from palpitation of the heart?”

“Oh, quite sure, quite!”

“Then you have pain in talking?”

“Yes; that above all.”

“Your digestion is not good?”

“No; it never has been.”

The man seemed quite reassured. He replied with a kind of enthusiasm--like some one who is at last understood. But, all at once, the old doctor shrugs his shoulders and reveals the trap:

“You’ve got everything wrong with you--that’s quite clear. Well, you are classed A1--the fighting line.”

“But surely you are aware----”

“You have too many illnesses; there’s nothing wrong with you. Get out! The fighting line for you!”

Sometimes somebody coughs, and at once a storm of coughing breaks out among the men gathered there.

A big grey-haired fellow comes out of a dark corner. Everybody shrinks away from him, with a kind of disgust. Then he remonstrates with his neighbours:

“Hang it! D’you think that spots on the skin....”

Behind him, collapsed almost on a bench, a tall man who might be anything between twenty and sixty years of age is carefully undressing. His face makes you feel very sorry for him: he seems plunged in the depths of human despair. He takes off an incredible amount of clothing, knitted vests and woollen things; and then there appear some very touching articles: satchels, flannel fronts, scapularies, objects of devotion. All these he places on the bench. The men next to him shift suddenly, and his clothes slip on the floor and are trodden upon by those who have just come in. The man is very pale, as if people were trampling upon his intimate life and his self-respect.

A discussion suddenly breaks upon the silence. The old doctor was exclaiming in a furious tone:

“I tell you I can hear nothing!”

With both hands he was pressing down the shoulders of a poor weak wretch as thin as a poker, and who looked terrified.

With one word the poor devil was ordered into the fighting forces, and he went away, more upset, trembling and panic-stricken than he would ever be in the trenches in front of the machine-guns.

But at the other end of the hall something unusual was happening.

“I tell you I can walk,” protested a rasping voice, eaten away by goodness knows what disease.

“No,” replied the young doctor, “no; be reasonable, and go home. We’ll take you later when you’ve recovered.”

“If you don’t want me, I shall do myself in.... But I tell you I have reasons for going to the front. I am not going to stand any more insults day after day.”

A short silence takes possession of everyone in the room: the echo of a tragedy is felt. The man is obviously very ill. His chest is horrible, distorted by violent breathing. He can hardly stand on his swollen legs, which are marked with large purple veins.

“Rejected!” cries the judge.

And the unfortunate creature returns to his rags, with lowered shoulders, his eyes dazed like a bull that has been felled.

The man who followed was a fatalist: he refused to discuss his position.

“That won’t prevent you serving.”

“Bah! just as you like.”

“Then, the fighting line!”

“As you wish; I don’t care a damn.”

And he withdraws immediately, liberated like a man who stakes his future on a mere throw of the dice.

All those who go away leave behind them something of the heavy smell of unwashed bodies. Curious thing, they all have a fetid breath; for that day they have eaten too quickly, badly digested their food, smoked and drunk too much. From all these mouths comes the same warm, sour breath which betrays the same emotion--the same breakdown of the machine.

The atmosphere of the room gradually thickens. The lamps, which had been lit quite early, appear to be lined with a heavy clinging moisture that affects all the objects in the room. But above all hovers something more elusive and discordant--the air seems to be charged with nervous energy, the fragments of broken wills, the wreckage of the thoughts abandoned there by men who had to strip themselves naked, who were afraid, who yearned and did not yearn, who measured with anguish their powers of resistance and the sacrifice they had to make, who fought with all their might against the forces of destiny.

The men in overalls continue to move about among these human bodies. They do not stop feeling, manipulating, judging. They sink the ends of their fingers into the flesh of the shoulders and sides; they press the biceps with their thumb and middle finger, move joints, examine teeth and the inside of eyelids, pull hair, and tap chests as customs officers do casks. Then they make the men walk from left to right, and right to left. They make them bend, straighten themselves, kneel down, or expose the most secret parts of their person.

Sometimes a breath of fresh air seems to come into the room: two well-built young men are asking to be enlisted. One hardly understands why they are there.... The whole tribunal looks at them with astonishment, as at pieces of golden ore in a handful of mud.

They pass with a proud, rather forced smile. Again the procession begins of pathetic ugliness, terrors, despairs, incurable and ravaged fears. The tribunal made one think of a jagged cliff against which persons are dashed like sea-birds blown by a storm.

The doctors show signs of exhaustion. The oldest, who is rather deaf, throws himself doggedly into his work, like a boar into the thicket. The young doctor is obviously suffering and irritated. He has the shrinking and uneasy look of some one engaged in an odious task and who finds no relief.

And always human flesh abounds; always from the same corner of the room comes the long row of wan bodies, who walk gingerly on the floor.

Sacred human flesh, sacred substance which serves thought, art, love, everything great in life--it is now nothing but a vile, evil-smelling lump of suet which one handles with disgust to find whether it is yet ready for the slaughter.

Everybody begins to suffer from an insistent headache.

The work goes on as in a dream, with the silences, the dragging movements, and the dark gaps of bad dreams. Two hours more pass in this way. Then suddenly some one says:

“Here are the last ten.”

They come in and undress one after the other. They have waited so long they seem exhausted, emptied, crushed. They accept the verdict listlessly and mechanically, as if felled by a blow; they go away in haste, without speaking, without looking round.

The doctors wash their hands, as once did Pontius Pilate; they sign some papers ceremoniously and disappear.

Night has come. The wind has fallen. A fog that absorbs the factory smoke still hangs over the town. Leaning against a lamp-post one of the last men examined vomits, after excruciating efforts, the wine he drank in the afternoon. The road is dark and deserted.

The whole place reeks with the stench of the vomiting and the fog.

A BURIAL

As we seated ourselves at the table M. Gilbert asked:

“What time is Lieutenant Limberg’s funeral?”

“Three o’clock, Doctor,” replied the faithful Augustus; “an infantry platoon will come from his own regiment, which is at the moment leaving the firing line and is billeted at Morcourt.”

“That’s right; send for Bénezech.”

And we began to enjoy the piquancy of a cucumber salad. September was fading slowly, but the furnace on the Somme was getting ever fiercer. The roar of the cannon seemed to fill the immensity of the heavens, as if a great tragedy was happening in the heart of the world. We were slightly stupefied through having spent many nights without sleep--nights passed in trying to stem the torrent of blood, and save some of the wreckage that swept down with it.

Lieutenant Limberg was one of the saddest cases: for two weeks we tried to drag him out of the swirling eddy, when, all of a sudden, he sank rapidly, attacked by virulent meningitis, stammering and uttering aloud fantastic things, which gave his death a monstrous atmosphere of comedy.

Nothing gives greater offence or greater pain than to witness the torture and delirium suffered by men injured in the brain. How many times have I wished, when confronted with these terrible sights, that our indifferent rulers should be forced to look at them! But it is useless insisting on this. If people have no imagination, they can never learn. I had better go on with my tale.

We were struggling with a tough piece of beef when Bénezech came in.

The Abbé Bénezech, a second-grade hospital orderly, combined various functions, including those of a secretary and chaplain. He was a plump, slow-witted man, with a formidable jaw. He grew a large unkempt beard, and he badly felt the want of those cares and attentions which a devoted flock had showered on him. Much too holy a person to attach any importance to cares of the toilette, he had gradually degenerated into a slovenly old man. But it was with patience that he waited for his return to the sweet amenities of his living.

“Bénezech,” said M. Gilbert, rather familiarly, “what time do you bury Lieutenant Limberg?”

“Three o’clock, sir.”

“The body has been taken out?”

“It should be in the mortuary shed.”

“Good! Was the lieutenant a Catholic?”

“Oh! yes; he most certainly was, sir. Thank God! He took the sacrament yesterday.”

“Then everything is all right. Thank you, Bénezech.”

The chaplain went out. Relapsing again into our somnolent state, we returned to our unappetising dish of vermicelli. As we were finishing, an orderly came in and handed a card to M. Gilbert.

“The officer,” he added, “insists on seeing you at once.”

M. Gilbert repeatedly looked at the card with the strained attention of a man who feels he is falling asleep.

“Oh! well,” he sighed; “show him in.”

And he added, turning towards us:

“Second Lieutenant David? Do you know him? You don’t?”

The Second Lieutenant was already at the door. Over his frizzly hair he wore the small cap distinctive of the light infantry. He had big lips, a faint, twisted moustache, the magnificent dark eyes of a Jewish trader, a hint of corpulence, short fat hands.

“Monsieur,” he said, “my battalion is going up the line, and I’m taking advantage of my passing here to get permission to see one of your patients--Lieutenant Limberg, a friend of mine.”

M. Gilbert, who had rather an expressive little nose, showed by a convulsive movement of that organ that he was much upset.

“Give the lieutenant a chair,” he began, with the calm good sense of a man who knows how to break bad news. Then he proceeded:

“My dear friend, the news I have to give you of Lieutenant Limberg is very sad: the unfortunate man had a serious wound in the skull, and----”

“He is dead?” asked the officer, in a strangled voice.

“Yes, he is dead. We are burying him to-day at three o’clock.”

Second Lieutenant David remained for some time without moving. A nervous twitch began to work one side of his face. He looked stunned, and wiped his temples, that suddenly began to sweat profusely. We showed our respect for this evident pain. In a moment or two he got up, saluted, and was about to take leave of us.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said, “he was my best friend....”

In an absent way he gave each of us his plump clammy hand to shake, and he was going out, when he stopped on the doorstep.

“One word more, Doctor. My friend Limberg was a Jew--I am too--I thought it was better to tell you....”

He was gone. A short silence intervened, then M. Gilbert began to strike the table with the handle of his knife--a succession of rapid knocks.

“What did he say? Limberg a Jew? It’s really too much! Call Bénezech.”

M. Gilbert was a stubborn, explosive man, given to violent reactions. He seemed to forget the heat, his exhaustion, and his digestion. He began to throw little pellets of bread-crumbs wildly all over the room. He had the intense, expectant air of a cartridge the fuse of which has been set alight. Bénezech came to an abrupt stop at the door, overwhelmed by the might of the doctor’s vocal organs, which left no one in doubt as to what he felt.

“Ah! it’s you, is it? A fine mess you were going to get me in!”

“Doctor!”

“Listen! Lieutenant Limberg was a Jew, and you were going to give him a Catholic funeral.”

“A Jew!”

“Yes; I say a Jew!”

The priest smiled, supremely incredulous.

“He was not a Jew, Doctor, because I administered the sacrament to him yesterday again.”

M. Gilbert stopped short, like a horse who shies at a wheelbarrow. Then he whispered absently:

“Then you don’t believe a word I say!”

“Oh, Doctor!” protested the priest, and he raised his hands, the palms outwards, with an unction that was surprising in a soldier who arranged his putties so dapperly in corkscrew fashion from his ankles.

“Yes, you may quite well have given him the sacrament,” said M. Gilbert; “but what did he have to say in the matter?”

“I’m sure I don’t know what he could say,” interrupted Augustus, “when, as you know, for the last ten days he has been quite delirious.”

“That’s true,” remarked M. Gilbert. “What have you got to say to that, Bénezech?”

“I don’t know what to think, Doctor; but I can’t believe that a young man as well educated as Lieutenant Limberg was not a Catholic. He took the sacrament twice with me.”

“That may be; but did he tell you he was a Catholic?”

“But, Doctor, how could I insult him by asking him, especially when he was in such a sad state. Besides, he came here wearing crosses on his neck. I gave him several myself, which he willingly took.”

“Evidently there is something wrong,” said M. Gilbert. “You tell me that Limberg was a Catholic; well, we have just been told that he was Jewish. You had better send first for the rabbi of the division. Then, to make sure, send me a despatch-rider from Limberg’s battalion. We shall find out from them.”

Bénezech went out, raising his hands several times, his fingers spread apart, looking perplexed.

“Let’s go to the mortuary tent,” said M. Gilbert, getting up from the table.

It was a disused tent where coffins were placed on biers ready for burial services.

Wrapped in an old flag, Limberg’s coffin had been placed on two boxes. A ray of sunlight broke obliquely across the shadow, revealing a glittering swarm of mosquitos. Some hens were pecking at the fine gravel. This place of death seemed like a haven of rest on the edge of the tempest of war.

An orderly came in, placed two candles on the table, lit them, and stood a crucifix between them.

“Damn!” muttered M. Gilbert between his teeth; “it’s very tiresome, all this fuss.”

As we were coming out of the place, we saw Bénezech and the despatch-rider. Bénezech’s beard seemed to bristle with triumph. With his fingers on his _képi_, he saluted as if he were pronouncing the benediction, and he said in a celestial voice:

“Information from the battalion, Doctor: Lieutenant Limberg was a Catholic.”

“Confound it all!” cried the doctor. “Have you a written note?”

“No,” replied the cyclist. “The officers only discussed the matter among themselves, and they said he was a Catholic. You will see them yourself presently: they are coming to the funeral with the infantry platoon.”

M. Gilbert stamped on the ground. He was very red, and the unruly movements of his nose showed that a decision was about to be made.

“Can I get ready for the service?” asked Bénezech, with the innocent and measured tone of a man who does not press home his victory.

“What!” said M. Gilbert. “The service? As you please--get ready as much as you like. I have my own idea now.”

Our devoted Augustus, who had left us for a few minutes, came back with a packet of envelopes.

“I have been looking into the private correspondence of the lieutenant. I find nothing conclusive, except perhaps this postcard, signed by a Mr. Blumenthal, who calls Lieutenant Limberg ‘his cousin.’ Blumenthal--that’s a Jewish name.”

“Perhaps so,” said M. Gilbert; “but I don’t mind now. I have my own idea.”

“It is true,” said Augustus hesitatingly, “that you could still--have the coffin opened.”

“No! you mustn’t think of it!” M. Gilbert firmly replied; “and I repeat, I have my own idea. Let’s go back to our work.”

We returned then to work; and that lasted about two and a half hours. Then the orderly reappeared.

“Monsieur, the Jewish chaplain wants to see you.”

“I’m coming,” he said.

He put on his four-striped _képi_, took off his overalls, and disappeared.

Looking through the window, I saw the rabbi of the division arriving. He got out of a pedlar’s cart drawn by a crook-kneed mule. With his black skull-cap, his flowing beard, his long coat, his cross-hilted stick, his tall bent figure in the distance, he seemed to me like the Polish Jews one reads of in popular novels. He appeared a man of mature age, and got off the step with the dignity of a patriarch.

My curiosity was aroused, and I went out to see what was going to happen. Twenty steps from the cart, in the bend of an avenue, I again saw the rabbi, without at first recognising him: his beard was black, rather frizzly, he had a very slight tendency to corpulence, his smile was that of an Assyrian god, and there was something in his looks of the Eastern calm of the Mediterranean Sea.

I skirted a shed and found myself face to face with the doctor and the Jewish chaplain. I saw at once that I had been twice mistaken. He was a man of the world, not old at all, wearing pince-nez, with a studious, attentive appearance, aloof and erudite--the “distinguished” air of a university graduate. He spoke the rather cosmopolitan French of a man who knows six or seven languages, but who has not perfectly mastered the correct accent of any of them.

“Really, Doctor,” he was saying, “we have many Limbergs in the East. I know several families.”

“I’m sure you do,” replied M. Gilbert courteously. “But I have finally decided what to do. Will you come along now, sir?”

We walked slowly to the tent. As we got near, the ground vibrated with the rapid tread of a small company on the march, and the infantry platoon appeared. Some officers followed, a little distance off.

Everybody stopped before the tent, and we saw Bénezech coming out. Over his jacket he had thrown an ancient surplice, which seemed to have seen service not only in the present war, but in every war of the past century.

“Gentlemen,” said the doctor rather emphatically, “an unfortunate thing has happened. We cannot tell with certainty what was Lieutenant Limberg’s religion. The information you have sent us would tend to show he was Catholic.”

“A practising Catholic,” added Bénezech, taking advantage of a pause.

“May I ask you,” continued the doctor, “on what you base your judgment?”

The officers looked at one another, as if they had been caught unawares.

“Why!” said one of them, “he never told us he was a Jew.”

“But----”

“Oh! I have definite evidence,” said a captain: “he went to Mass several times with me.”

“But, hang it!” said M. Gilbert to this obtuse soldier, “that proves nothing. Why! I go myself to Mass sometimes.... It’s true,” he added, “I’m not a Jew. As for Limberg: to-day I saw one of his intimate friends, who informed me that the lieutenant held the Jewish faith.”

Another pause intervened. The soldiers had piled arms in the avenue. All present seemed perplexed and hesitating. The two priests had not looked at one another yet, and seemed to be examining the uniform of the officers with the greatest care.

At that moment two stretcher-bearers came out of the tent carrying the coffin draped with the French colours. They took three paces forward, and the priest and the rabbi found themselves suddenly one on each side of the corpse.

“Gentlemen,” said the doctor, in a voice a prophet would use when thinking of Solomon--“gentlemen, because of the uncertainty, I have decided that Lieutenant Limberg shall be buried according to the rites both of the Roman Catholic and of the Hebrew Church. There will then be no possibility of a mistake being made; at most, one superfluous service. We know that God recognises his own. These gentlemen will proceed in turn. I believe I am doing a wise and just thing.”