Chapter V: Part TWO: The Somme (1)

THE CITY IN THE DESERT

What is this city that sprawls in the shallow valley between the chalk hills? Why are its buildings all alike, gaunt wooden sheds with iron roofs? Why are there no trees, no gardens, no pleasant places? The sheds are placed on top of the muddy ground like boxes, row after row of them, with iron rails down the centre where the main street of the town should be. But there are no streets. There are only tracks in the mud and wooden walks laid across the mud from one shed to the other, and a railway line.

I see no children playing anywhere. The wind brings no sound of laughter from the place, or splendid shouting, no sound of any kind. Silent men in couples are carrying heavy bundles between them from one shed to the other, heads down to the wind. The small white figure of a solitary woman is crossing a wide open space. She is slipping in the mud. Her white dress is fluttering. The place is immense and empty, new and still and desolate. But the naked wet hills are throbbing. There’s a noise of distant booming as if the sea were breaking against their sides.

You tell me there is no sea over there. But the roar? Surely there are waves breaking, and this desert is wet as if a great wave had just receded, leaving the muddy bottom of the earth uncovered. A bare sea bottom, strewn with bits of iron, coils of wire, stones. No sign of life, no fish fossils, or rotting sea-weed, no plant of any kind, not a blade of green; a dead sea must have lain here.

Whoever built this city on this slippery waste, built it quick, at ebb tide, between tides, to serve some queer purpose between low and high tide. They put up these sheds in a hurry, covered them with sheets of corrugated iron, pinned them to the mud somehow, anyhow, knowing that a roaring surge would rise again, come rolling back over the hills to carry them away again. Then all these new buildings, all this timber and these sheets of iron will be broken up, and will rush down in a torrent.

Down where? How do I know. I’m lost. I’ve lost my way. The road was slippery. There were no landmarks. The village I used to know at the cross-roads was gone. Everything was sliding in the mud and all the villages that I knew here once on a time had slipped clean out of sight, and now all the men and horses in the world with wagons and motor lorries seem to be pouring after them into a gulf. The earth is a greased slide, tilted up and shaking. And the men who built this place knew evidently that there was danger of the face of the earth itself slipping--for look over there on that hill-side and that one--they’ve tied the earth down with wire. You see those intersecting bands of wire, looking like a field of tangled iron weeds and iron thistles? That is evidently to keep the mud from slipping away.

Queer, isn’t it? This new city where there once was a snug town huddled round a church with cafés, little tables under the trees, schoolboys in black pinafores playing on the church steps. The inn, I remember, was famous for its cuisine. What has become of the fat landlord who watched the plump succulent fowls turning on a spit and dripping? Now, there’s this place that looks like a mining town or a lumber camp, only it can’t be. There’s not a tree to be seen, north, south, east, or west, nothing but mud glistening. It’s very queer, I say. That flimsy gate there with a banner across it as if for a celebration, with H.O.E. 32 on it in big black letters, and a flag flying, and those red crosses painted on the iron roofs of the buildings. H.O.E. 32 must be the name of the place; but why such a name? What does it mean?

Perhaps there has been a new flood, since Noah, and you and I slept through it. Perhaps a new race of men has been hatched out of the mud, hatched like newts, slugs, larvæ of water beetles. But slugs who know horribly, acutely, that they have only a moment to live in between flood tides and so built this place quickly, a silly shelter against the wrath of God, and gave it a magic hieroglyphic name, and put the name on a banner and hoisted a flag, and then put those red crosses up there, tipped skywards. Everything showy in the place points skywards, is designed to catch an eye in the sky, a great angry eye.

Otherwise it seems a secret place, vast, spread out, bare but secret; and some strange industry, some dreadful trade is evidently being carried on here in the wet desert, where a flood has passed and another flood will come.

The workers have a curious apprehensive look with their big secretive bundles. They may be smugglers. Certainly some shameful merchandise is being smuggled in here from the shore that you say is not the shore of the sea. If the booming noise beyond the hills were the roar of waves breaking, one would say that these old men were gangs of beachcombers, bringing up bundles of wreckage; that they go out across the mud under cover of the night to hunt in the backwash. You can see from the way they move that the stuff is valuable and breakable. They come out of the sheds cautiously and go carefully along the narrow board walks, two by two, with the heavy brown bundles swinging between them. They are as careful as they can be. They seem to be old men. They stagger under the weight that swings from their arms and their old shoulders cower as if under the lash of an invisible whip; but they go up and down the long rows of sheds, patiently, carefully, gently, taking small careful steps.

You say that these bundles are the citizens of the town? What do you mean? Those heavy brown packages that are carried back and forth, up and down, from shed to shed, those inert lumps cannot be men. They are delivered to this place in closed vans and are unloaded like sacks and are laid out in rows on the ground and are sorted out by the labels pinned to their covers. They lie perfectly still while they are carried back and forth, up and down, shoved into sheds and pulled out again. What do you mean by telling me that they are men?

Why, if they are men, don’t they walk? Why don’t they talk? Why don’t they protest? They lie perfectly still. They make no sound. They are covered up. You do not expect me to believe that inside that roll there is a man, and in that one, and in that one?

Ah, dear God, it’s true! Look! Look through the window. The old men are undoing the bundles inside this shed. Look, there’s a face and there’s an arm hanging down crooked, and there I see a pair of boots sticking out at one end of a bundle.

But how queer they are! How strangely they lie there. They are not the usual shape. They only remind one of men. Some, to be sure, are wearing coats, and some have on iron hats, but all of them seem to be broken and tied together with white rags. And how dirty they are! The mud is crusted on them. Their boots are lumps of mud. Their faces are grey and wet as if modelled of pale mud. But what are those red, rusty stains on their dirty white rags? They have gone rusty lying out there in the mud, in the backwash. Ah, what a pity. Here is one without an arm, and another and another, and there, dear God, is one without a face! Oh! Oh! What are the old men doing to them? They are pulling off their clothes, uncovering the dreadful holes in their sides. Come away, come away from the window. I know now. There is no need to sneak up and stare at them.

They are lost men, wrecked men, survivors from that other world that was here before the flood passed this way, washed up against the shore of this world again by the great backwash. They thought that they had done with it, thought it was over and done with, thought they had left it for ever. But they’ve been brought here, brought back again to this city of refuge called H.O.E. 32, that sprawls under the angry Eye of God. Bundled into vans they were, all mangled and broken, carried back over the sliding mud through that flimsy gate where the flag is flapping, to be saved. To be hauled about and man-handled, to have their broken, bleeding nakedness uncovered, to have their bodies cut again with knives and their deep wounds probed with pincers, and to have the breath choked back in their sobbing lungs again, so that they may be saved for this world.

How strange it must look to them when they open their eyes! There are no trees anywhere. There is no shelter, except under the iron roofs. The place is new and still and desolate. But the wind is howling over the wet desert, and the old men who go carefully up and down with their heavy oblong bundles, stop and listen to the booming sound beyond the hills as if they heard the flood rising.

CONSPIRACY

It is all carefully arranged. Everything is arranged. It is arranged that men should be broken and that they should be mended. Just as you send your clothes to the laundry and mend them when they come back, so we send our men to the trenches and mend them when they come back again. You send your socks and your shirts again and again to the laundry, and you sew up the tears and clip the ravelled edges again and again just as many times as they will stand it. And then you throw them away. And we send our men to the war again and again, just as long as they will stand it; just until they are dead, and then we throw them into the ground.

It is all arranged. Ten kilometres from here along the road is the place where men are wounded. This is the place where they are mended. We have all the things here for mending, the tables and the needles, and the thread and the knives and the scissors, and many curious things that you never use for your clothes.

We bring our men up along the dusty road where the bushes grow on either side and the green trees. They come by in the mornings in companies, marching with strong legs, with firm steps. They carry their knapsacks easily. Their knapsacks and their guns and their greatcoats are not heavy for them. They wear their caps jauntily, tilted to one side. Their faces are ruddy and their eyes bright. They smile and call out with strong voices. They throw kisses to the girls in the fields.

We send our men up the broken road between bushes of barbed wire and they come back to us, one by one, two by two in ambulances, lying on stretchers. They lie on their backs on the stretchers and are pulled out of the ambulances as loaves of bread are pulled out of the oven. The stretchers slide out of the mouths of the ambulances with the men on them. The men cannot move. They are carried into a shed, unclean bundles, very heavy, covered with brown blankets.

We receive these bundles. We pull off a blanket. We observe that this is a man. He makes feeble whining sounds like an animal. He lies still; he smells bad; he smells like a corpse; he can only move his tongue; he tries to moisten his lips with his tongue.

This is the place where he is to be mended. We lift him on to a table. We peel off his clothes, his coat and his shirt and his trousers and his boots. We handle his clothes that are stiff with blood. We cut off his shirt with large scissors. We stare at the obscene sight of his innocent wounds. He allows us to do this. He is helpless to stop us. We wash off the dry blood round the edges of his wounds. He suffers us to do as we like with him. He says no word except that he is thirsty and we do not give him to drink.

We confer together over his body and he hears us. We discuss his different parts in terms that he does not understand, but he listens while we make calculations with his heart beats and the pumping breath of his lungs.

We conspire against his right to die. We experiment with his bones, his muscles, his sinews, his blood. We dig into the yawning mouths of his wounds. Helpless openings, they let us into the secret places of his body. We plunge deep into his body. We make discoveries within his body. To the shame of the havoc of his limbs we add the insult of our curiosity and the curse of our purpose, the purpose to remake him. We lay odds on his chances of escape, and we combat with death, his Saviour.

It is our business to do this. He knows and he allows us to do it. He finds himself in the operating room. He lays himself out. He bares himself to our knives. His mind is annihilated. He pours out his blood unconscious. His red blood is spilled and pours over the table on to the floor while he sleeps.

After this, while he is still asleep, we carry him into another place and put him to bed. He awakes bewildered as children do, expecting, perhaps, to find himself at home with his mother leaning over him, and he moans a little and then lies still again. He is helpless, so we do for him what he cannot do for himself, and he is grateful. He accepts his helplessness. He is obedient. We feed him, and he eats. We fatten him up, and he allows himself to be fattened. Day after day he lies there and we watch him. All day and all night he is watched. Every day his wounds are uncovered and cleaned, scraped and washed and bound up again. His body does not belong to him. It belongs to us for the moment, not for long. He knows why we tend it so carefully. He knows what we are fattening and cleaning it up for; and while we handle it, he smiles.

He is only one among thousands. They are all the same. They all let us do with them what we like. They all smile as if they were grateful. When we hurt them they try not to cry out, not wishing to hurt our feelings. And often they apologise for dying. They would not die and disappoint us if they could help it. Indeed, in their helplessness they do the best they can to help us get them ready to go back again.

It is only ten kilometres up the road, the place where they go to be torn again and mangled. Listen; you can hear how well it works. There is the sound of cannon and the sound of the ambulances bringing the wounded, and the sound of the tramp of strong men going along the road to fill the empty places.

Do you hear? Do you understand? It is all arranged just as it should be.

PARAPHERNALIA

What have all these queer things to do with the dying of this man?

Here are cotton things and rubber things and steel things and things made of glass, all manner of things. What have so many things to do with the final adventure of this spirit?

Here are blankets and pillows and tin boxes and needles and bottles and pots and basins and long rubber tubes and many little white squares of gauze. Here are bottles of all sizes filled with coloured liquids and basins of curious shapes and round shining boxes and square boxes marked with blue labels, and here you are busy among your things. You pile the blankets on his exhausted body. You fetch jugs of hot water and boil the long curling rubber tubes in saucepans. You keep corking and uncorking bottles.

Yes, I know that you understand all these things. You finger the glass syringes exquisitely and pick up the fine needles easily with slender pincers and with the glass beads poised neatly on your rosy finger tips you saw them with tiny saws. You flaunt your perfect movements in the face of his mysterious exhaustion. You show off the skilled movements of your hands beside the erratic jerkings of his terrible limbs.

Why do you rub his grey flesh with the stained scrap of cotton and stick the needle deep into his side? Why do you do it?

Death is inexorable and the place of death is void. You have crowded the room with all manner of things. Why do you crowd all these things up to the edge of the great emptiness?

You seem to have so much to do. Wait. Wait. A miracle is going to happen. Death is coming into the room. There is no time for all this business. There is only one moment between this man and eternity.

You still fuss about busily. You move your feet and rustle your petticoats. You are continually doing things with your hands. You keep on doing things. Why do you keep on doing things? Death is annoyed at you fussing.

The man’s spirit is invisible. Why do you light the lamp? You cannot see the God of Death with your splendid eyes. Does it please you to see the sweat on that forehead and the glaze on the eyeballs?

Hush, you are making a noise. Why do you make a noise? No, as you say, he cannot hear you, but cannot you hear? Eternity is soundless, but hush! Let us listen. Let us listen. Maybe we shall hear the stirring of wings or the sighing tremor of his soul passing.

Ah! What are you doing? Why do you move? You are filling the room with sound as you have filled it with objects. You are annoying death with your ridiculous things and the noise of your foolish business.

What do you say? He is dead? You say he is dead?

And here are all your things, your blankets and your bottles and your basins. The blankets weigh down upon his body. They hang down over the bed. Your syringes and your needles and your uncorked bottles are all about in confusion. You have stained your fingers. There is a spot on your white apron; but you are superb, and here are all your things about you, all your queer things, all the confusion of your precious things.

What have you and all your things to do with the dying of this man? Nothing. Take them away.

IN THE OPERATING ROOM

The operating room is the section of a wooden shed. Thin partitions separate it from the X-ray room on one side, and the sterilizing room on the other. Another door communicates with a corridor. There are three wounded men on three operating tables. Surgeons, nurses and orderlies are working over them. The doors keep opening and shutting. The boiler is pounding and bubbling in the sterilizing room. There is a noise of steam escaping, of feet hurrying down the corridor, of ambulances rolling past the windows, and behind all this, the rhythmic pounding of the guns bombarding at a distance of ten miles or so.

1st Patient: Mother of God! Mother of God!

2nd Patient: Softly. Softly. You hurt me. Ah! You are hurting me.

3rd Patient: I am thirsty.

1st Surgeon: Cut the dressing, Mademoiselle.

2nd Surgeon: What’s his ticket say? Show it to me. What’s the X-ray show?

3rd Surgeon: Abdomen. Bad pulse. I wonder now?

1st Patient: In the name of God be careful. I suffer. I suffer.

1st Surgeon: At what time were you wounded?

1st Patient: At five this morning.

1st Surgeon: Where?

1st Patient: In the arm.

1st Surgeon: Yes, yes, but in what sector?

1st Patient: In the trenches near Besanghe.

1st Surgeon: Shell or bullet?

1st Patient: Shell. Merciful God, what are you doing?

A nurse comes in from the corridor. Her apron is splashed with blood.

Nurse: There’s a lung just come in. Hæmorrhage. Can one of you take him?

1st Surgeon: In a few minutes. In five minutes. Now then, Mademoiselle, strap down that other arm tighter.

Nurse (in doorway) to 2nd Surgeon: There’s a knee for you, doctor, and three elbows. In five minutes I’ll send in the lung. (Exit.)

3rd Patient: I’m thirsty. A drink. Give me a drink.

3rd Surgeon: In a little while. You must wait a little.

2nd Patient: Mother of Jesus, not like that. Don’t turn my foot like that. Not that way. Take care. Great God, take care! I can’t bear it. I tell you, I can’t bear it!

2nd Surgeon: There, there, don’t excite yourself. You’ve got a nasty leg, very nasty. Smells bad. Mademoiselle, hold his leg up. It’s not pretty at all, this leg.

2nd Patient: Ah, doctor, doctor. What are you doing? Aiee----.

2nd Surgeon: Be quiet. Don’t move. Don’t touch the wound I tell you. Idiot! Hold his leg. Keep your hands off, you animal. Hold his leg higher. Strap his hands down.

3rd Patient (feebly): I am thirsty. I die of thirst. A drink! A drink!

2nd Patient (screaming): You’re killing me. Killing me! I’ll die of it! Aieeeee----.

3rd Patient (softly): I am thirsty. For pity a drink.

3rd Surgeon: Have you vomited blood, old man?

3rd Patient: I don’t know. A drink please, doctor.

3rd Surgeon: Does it hurt here?

3rd Patient: No, I don’t think so. A drink, sister, in pity’s name, a drink.

Nurse: I can’t give you a drink. It would hurt you. You are wounded in the stomach.

3rd Patient: So thirsty. Just a little drink. Just a drop. Sister for pity, just a drop.

3rd Surgeon: Moisten his lips. How long ago were you wounded?

3rd Patient: I don’t know. In the night. Some night.

3rd Surgeon: Last night?

3rd Patient: Perhaps last night. I don’t know. I lay in the mud a long time. Please sister a drink. Just a little drink.

1st Patient: What’s in that bottle? What are you doing to me?

1st Surgeon: Keep still I tell you.

1st Patient: It burns! It’s burning me! No more. No more! I beg of you, doctor; I can’t bear any more!

1st Surgeon: Nonsense. This won’t last a minute. There’s nothing the matter with you. Your wounds are nothing.

1st Patient: You say it’s nothing. My God, what are you doing now? Ai--ee!

1st Surgeon: It’s got to be cleaned out. There’s a piece of shell, bits of coat, all manner of dirt in it.

2nd Patient: Jeanne, petite Marie, Jean, where are you? Little Jean, where are you?

2nd Surgeon: Your leg is not at all pretty, my friend. We shall have to take it off.

2nd Patient: Oh, my poor wife! I have three children, doctor. If you take my leg off what will become of them and of the farm? Great God, to suffer like this!

2nd Surgeon to 1st Surgeon: Look here a moment. It smells bad. Gangrenous. What do you think?

1st Surgeon: No good waiting.

2nd Surgeon: Well, my friend, will you have it off?

2nd Patient: If you say so, doctor. Oh, my poor wife, my poor Jeanne. What will become of you? The children are too little to work in the fields.

2nd Surgeon (to nurse): Begin with the chloroform. We’re going to put you to sleep, old man. Breathe deep. Breathe through the mouth. Is my saw there? Where is my amputating saw? Who’s got my saw?

3rd Patient (softly): A drink, a drink. Give me a drink.

3rd Surgeon: I can do nothing with a pulse like that. Give him serum, five hundred c.c.s and camphorated oil and strychnine. Warm him up a bit.

Door opens, nurse enters, followed by two stretcher bearers.

Nurse: Here’s the lung. Are you ready for it?

1st Surgeon: In a minute. One minute. Leave him there.

The stretcher bearers put their stretcher on the floor and go out.

2nd Patient: (half under chloroform): Aha! Aha! Ahead there, you son of a ----. Forward! Forward! What a stink! I’ve got him! Now I’ve got you. Quick, quick! Let me go! Let me go! Jeannette, quick, quick, Jeannette! I’m coming. Marie? Little Jean, where are you?

2nd Surgeon: Tighten those straps. He’s strong, poor devil.

1st Patient: Is it finished?

1st Surgeon: Very nearly. Keep quite still. Now then, the dressings mademoiselle. There you are old man. Don’t bandage the arm too tight, mademoiselle. Get him out now. Hi, stretcher bearers, lift up that one from the floor, will you?

3rd Surgeon: It’s no use operating. Almost no pulse.

3rd Patient: For pity a drink!

3rd Surgeon: Give him a drink. It won’t matter. I can do nothing.

2nd Surgeon: I shall have to amputate above the knee. Is he under?

Nurse: Almost.

3rd Patient: For pity a drink.

Nurse: There, don’t lift your head; here is a drink. Drink this.

3rd Patient: It is good. Thank you, sister.

1st Surgeon: Take this man to Ward 3. Now then, mademoiselle, cut the dressings.

3rd Surgeon: I can do nothing here. Send me the next one.

3rd Patient: I cannot see. I cannot see any more. Sister, where are you?

1st Surgeon: How’s your spine case of yesterday?

3rd Surgeon: Just what you would expect--paralysed from the waist down.

1st Surgeon: They say the attack is for five in the morning.

3rd Surgeon: Orders are to evacuate every possible bed to-day.

3rd Patient: It is dark. Are you there, sister?

Nurse: Yes, old man, I’m here. Shall I send for a priest, doctor?

3rd Surgeon: Too late. Poor devil. It’s hopeless when they come in like that, after lying for hours in the mud. There, it’s finished. Call the stretcher bearers.

1st Surgeon: Quick, a basin! God! How the blood spouts. Quick, quick, quick! Three holes in this lung.

2nd Surgeon: Take that leg away, will you? There’s no room to move here.

3rd Surgeon: Take this dead man away, and bring the next abdomen. Wipe that table, mademoiselle, while I wash my hands. And you, there, mop up the floor a bit.

The doors open and shut. Stretcher bearers go out and come in. A nurse comes from the sterilizing room with a pile of nickel drums in her arms. Another nurse goes out with trays of knives and other instruments. The nurse from the corridor comes back. An officer appears at the window.

Nurse: Three knees have come in, two more abdomens, five heads.

Officer (through the window): The Médecin Inspecteur will be here in half an hour. The General is coming at two to decorate all amputés.

1st Surgeon: We’ll get no lunch to-day, and I’m hungry. There, I call that a very neat amputation.

2nd Surgeon: Three holes stopped in this lung in three minutes by the clock. Pretty quick, eh?

3rd Surgeon: Give me a light, some one. My experience is that if abdomens have to wait more than six hours it’s no good. You can’t do anything. I hope that chap got the oysters in Amiens! Oysters sound good to me.

BLIND

The door at the end of the baraque kept opening and shutting to let in the stretcher bearers. As soon as it opened a crack the wind scurried in and came hopping toward me across the bodies of the men that covered the floor, nosing under the blankets, lifting the flaps of heavy coats, and burrowing among the loose heaps of clothing and soiled bandages. Then the grizzled head of a stretcher bearer would appear, butting its way in, and he would emerge out of the black storm into the bright fog that seemed to fill the place, dragging the stretcher after him, and then the old one at the other end of the load would follow, and they would come slowly down the centre of the hut looking for a clear place on the floor.

The men were laid out in three rows on either side of the central alley way. It was a big hut, and there were about sixty stretchers in each row. There was space between the heads of one row and the feet of another row, but no space to pass between the stretchers in the same row; they touched. The old territorials who worked with me passed up and down between the heads and feet. I had a squad of thirty of these old orderlies and two sergeants and two priests, who were expert dressers. Wooden screens screened off the end of the hut opposite the entrance. Behind these were the two dressing tables where the priests dressed the wounds of the new arrivals and got them ready for the surgeons, after the old men had undressed them and washed their feet. In one corner was my kitchen where I kept all my syringes and hypodermic needles and stimulants.

It was just before midnight when the stretcher bearers brought in the blind man, and there was no space on the floor anywhere; so they stood waiting, not knowing what to do with him.

I said from the floor in the second row: “Just a minute, old ones. You can put him here in a minute.” So they waited with the blind man suspended in the bright, hot, misty air between them, like a pair of old horses in shafts with their heads down, while the little boy who had been crying for his mother died with his head on my breast. Perhaps he thought the arms holding him when he jerked back and died belonged to some woman I had never seen, some woman waiting somewhere for news of him in some village, somewhere in France. How many women, I wondered, were waiting out there in the distance for news of these men who were lying on the floor? But I stopped thinking about this the minute the boy was dead. It didn’t do to think. I didn’t as a rule, but the boy’s very young voice had startled me. It had come through to me as a real voice will sound sometimes through a dream, almost waking you, but now it had stopped, and the dream was thick round me again, and I laid him down, covered his face with the brown blanket, and called two other old ones.

“Put this one in the corridor to make more room here,” I said; and I saw them lift him up. When they had taken him away, the stretcher bearers who had been waiting brought the blind one and put him down in the cleared space. They had to come round to the end of the front row and down between the row of feet and row of heads; they had to be very careful where they stepped; they had to lower the stretcher cautiously so as not to jostle the men on either side (there was just room), but these paid no attention. None of the men lying packed together on the floor noticed each other in this curious dreamplace.

I had watched this out of the corner of my eye, busy with something that was not very like a man. The limbs seemed to be held together only by the strong stuff of the uniform. The head was unrecognisable. It was a monstrous thing, and a dreadful rattling sound came from it. I looked up and saw the chief surgeon standing over me. I don’t know how he got there. His small shrunken face was wet and white; his eyes were brilliant and feverish; his incredible hands that saved so many men so exquisitely, so quickly, were in the pockets of his white coat.

“Give him morphine,” he said, “a double dose. As much as you like.” He pulled a cigarette out of his pocket. “In cases like this, if I am not about, give morphine; enough, you understand.” Then he vanished like a ghost. He went back to his operating room, a small white figure with round shoulders, a magician, who performed miracles with knives. He went away through the dream.

I gave the morphine, then crawled over and looked at the blind man’s ticket. I did not know, of course, that he was blind until I read his ticket. A large round white helmet covered the top half of his head and face; only his nostrils and mouth and chin were uncovered. The surgeon in the dressing station behind the trenches had written on his ticket, “Shot through the eyes. Blind.”

Did he know? I asked myself. No, he couldn’t know yet. He would still be wondering, waiting, hoping, down there in that deep, dark silence of his, in his own dark personal world. He didn’t know he was blind; no one would have told him. I felt his pulse. It was strong and steady. He was a long, thin man, but his body was not very cold and the pale lower half of his clear-cut face was not very pale. There was something beautiful about him. In his case there was no hurry, no necessity to rush him through to the operating room. There was plenty of time. He would always be blind.

One of the orderlies was going up and down with hot tea in a bucket. I beckoned to him.

I said to the blind one: “Here is a drink.” He didn’t hear me, so I said it more loudly against the bandage, and helped him lift his head, and held the tin cup to his mouth below the thick edge of the bandage. I did not think then of what was hidden under the bandage. I think of it now. Another head case across the hut had thrown off his blanket and risen from his stretcher. He was standing stark naked except for his head bandage, in the middle of the hut, and was haranguing the crowd in a loud voice with the gestures of a political orator. But the crowd, lying on the floor, paid no attention to him. They did not notice him. I called to Gustave and Pierre to go to him.

The blind man said to me: “Thank you, sister, you are very kind. That is good. I thank you.” He had a beautiful voice. I noticed the great courtesy of his speech. But they were all courteous. Their courtesy when they died, their reluctance to cause me any trouble by dying or suffering, was one of the things it didn’t do to think about.

Then I left him, and presently forgot that he was there waiting in the second row of stretchers on the left side of the long crowded floor.

Gustave and Pierre had got the naked orator back on to his stretcher and were wrapping him up again in his blankets. I let them deal with him and went back to my kitchen at the other end of the hut, where my syringes and hypodermic needles were boiling in saucepans. I had received by post that same morning a dozen beautiful new platinum needles. I was very pleased with them. I said to one of the dressers as I fixed a needle on my syringe and held it up, squirting the liquid through it; “Look. I’ve some lovely new needles.” He said: “Come and help me a moment. Just cut this bandage, please.” I went over to his dressing-table. He darted off to a voice that was shrieking somewhere. There was a man stretched on the table. His brain came off in my hands when I lifted the bandage from his head.

When the dresser came back I said: “His brain came off on the bandage.”

“Where have you put it?”

“I put it in the pail under the table.”

“It’s only one half of his brain,” he said, looking into the man’s skull. “The rest is here.”

I left him to finish the dressing and went about my own business. I had much to do.

It was my business to sort out the wounded as they were brought in from the ambulances and to keep them from dying before they got to the operating rooms: it was my business to sort out the nearly dying from the dying. I was there to sort them out and tell how fast life was ebbing in them. Life was leaking away from all of them; but with some there was no hurry, with others it was a case of minutes. It was my business to create a counter-wave of life, to create the flow against the ebb. It was like a tug of war with the tide. The ebb of life was cold. When life was ebbing the man was cold; when it began to flow back, he grew warm. It was all, you see, like a dream. The dying men on the floor were drowned men cast up on the beach, and there was the ebb of life pouring away over them, sucking them away, an invisible tide; and my old orderlies, like old sea-salts out of a lifeboat, were working to save them. I had to watch, to see if they were slipping, being dragged away. If a man were slipping quickly, being sucked down rapidly, I sent runners to the operating rooms. There were six operating rooms on either side of my hut. Medical students in white coats hurried back and forth along the covered corridors between us. It was my business to know which of the wounded could wait and which could not. I had to decide for myself. There was no one to tell me. If I made any mistakes, some would die on their stretchers on the floor under my eyes who need not have died. I didn’t worry. I didn’t think. I was too busy, too absorbed in what I was doing. I had to judge from what was written on their tickets and from the way they looked and the way they felt to my hand. My hand could tell of itself one kind of cold from another. They were all half-frozen when they arrived, but the chill of their icy flesh wasn’t the same as the cold inside them when life was almost ebbed away. My hands could instantly tell the difference between the cold of the harsh bitter night and the stealthy cold of death. Then there was another thing, a small fluttering thing. I didn’t think about it or count it. My fingers felt it. I was in a dream, led this way and that by my cute eyes and hands that did many things, and seemed to know what to do.

Sometimes there was no time to read the ticket or touch the pulse. The door kept opening and shutting to let in the stretcher-bearers whatever I was doing. I could not watch when I was giving piqures; but, standing by my table filling a syringe, I could look down over the rough forms that covered the floor and pick out at a distance this one and that one. I had been doing this for two years, and had learned to read the signs. I could tell from the way they twitched, from the peculiar shade of a pallid face, from the look of tight pinched-in nostrils, and in other ways which I could not have explained, that this or that one was slipping over the edge of the beach of life. Then I would go quickly with my long saline needles, or short thick camphor oil needles, and send one of the old ones hurrying along the corridor to the operating rooms. But sometimes there was no need to hurry; sometimes I was too late; with some there was no longer any question of the ebb and flow of life and death; there was nothing to do.

The hospital throbbed and hummed that night like a dynamo. The operating rooms were ablaze; twelve surgical équipes were at work; boilers steamed and whistled; nurses hurried in and out of the sterilizing rooms carrying big shining metal boxes and enamelled trays; feet were running, slower feet shuffling. The hospital was going full steam ahead. I had a sense of great power, exhilaration and excitement. A loud wind was howling. It was throwing itself like a pack of wolves against the flimsy wooden walls, and the guns were growling. Their voices were dying away. I thought of them as a pack of beaten dogs, slinking away across the dark waste where the dead were lying and the wounded who had not yet been picked up, their only cover the windy blanket of the bitter November night.

And I was happy. It seemed to me that the crazy crowded bright hot shelter was a beautiful place. I thought, “This is the second battlefield. The battle now is going on over the helpless bodies of these men. It is we who are doing the fighting now, with their real enemies.” And I thought of the chief surgeon, the wizard working like lightning through the night, and all the others wielding their flashing knives against the invisible enemy. The wounded had begun to arrive at noon. It was now past midnight, and the door kept opening and shutting to let in the stretcher-bearers, and the ambulances kept lurching in at the gate. Lanterns were moving through the windy dark from shed to shed. The nurses were out there in the scattered huts, putting the men to bed when they came over the dark ground, asleep, from the operating rooms. They would wake up in clean warm beds--those who did wake up.

“We will send you the dying, the desperate, the moribund,” the Inspector-General had said. “You must expect a thirty per cent. mortality.” So we had got ready for it; we had organised to dispute that figure.

We had built brick ovens, four of them, down the centre of the hut, and on top of these, galvanised iron cauldrons of boiling water were steaming. We had driven nails all the way down the wooden posts that held up the roof and festooned the posts with red rubber hot-water bottles. In the corner near to my kitchen we had partitioned off a cubicle, where we built a light bed, a rough wooden frame lined with electric light bulbs, where a man could be cooked back to life again. My own kitchen was an arrangement of shelves for saucepans and syringes and needles of different sizes, and cardboard boxes full of ampoules of camphor oil and strychnine and caffeine and morphine, and large ampoules of sterilized salt and water, and dozens of beautiful sharp shining needles were always on the boil.

It wasn’t much to look at, this reception hut. It was about as attractive as a goods yard in a railway station, but we were very proud of it, my old ones and I. We had got it ready, and it was good enough for us. We could revive the cold dead there; snatch back the men who were slipping over the edge; hoist them out of the dark abyss into life again. And because our mortality at the end of three months was only nineteen per cent, not thirty, well it was the most beautiful place in the world to me and my old grizzled Pépères, Gaston and Pierre and Leroux and the others were to me like shining archangels. But I didn’t think about this. I think of it now. I only knew it then, and was happy. Yes, I was happy there.

Looking back, I do not understand that woman--myself--standing in that confused goods yard filled with bundles of broken human flesh. The place by one o’clock in the morning was a shambles. The air was thick with steaming sweat, with the effluvia of mud, dirt, blood. The men lay in their stiff uniforms that were caked with mud and dried blood, their great boots on their feet; stained bandages showing where a trouser leg or a sleeve had been cut away. Their faces gleamed faintly, with a faint phosphorescence. Some who could not breathe lying down were propped up on their stretchers against the wall, but most were prone on their backs, staring at the steep iron roof.

The old orderlies moved from one stretcher to another, carefully, among the piles of clothing, boots and blood-soaked bandages--careful not to step on a hand or a sprawling twisted foot. They carried zinc pails of hot water and slabs of yellow soap and scrubbing brushes. They gathered up the heaps of clothing, and made little bundles of the small things out of pockets, or knelt humbly, washing the big yellow stinking feet that protruded from under the brown blankets. It was the business of these old ones to undress the wounded, wash them, wrap them in blankets, and put hot-water bottles at their feet and sides. It was a difficult business peeling the stiff uniform from a man whose hip or shoulder was fractured, but the old ones were careful. Their big peasant hands were gentle--very, very gentle and careful. They handled the wounded men as if they were children. Now, looking back, I see their rough powerful visages, their shaggy eye-brows, their big clumsy, gentle hands. I see them go down on their stiff knees; I hear their shuffling feet and their soft gruff voices answering the voices of the wounded, who are calling to them for drinks, or to God for mercy.

The old ones had orders from the commandant not to cut the good cloth of the uniforms if they could help it, but they had orders from me not to hurt the men, and they obeyed me. They slit up the heavy trousers and slashed across the stiff tunics with long scissors, and pulled very slowly, very carefully at the heavy boots, and the wounded men did not groan or cry out very much. They were mostly very quiet. When they did cry out they usually apologised for the annoyance of their agony. Only now and then a wind of pain would sweep over the floor, tossing the legs and arms, then subside again.

I think that woman, myself, must have been in a trance, or under some horrid spell. Her feet are lumps of fire, her face is clammy, her apron is splashed with blood; but she moves ceaselessly about with bright burning eyes and handles the dreadful wreckage of men as if in a dream. She does not seem to notice the wounds or the blood. Her eyes seem to be watching something that comes and goes and darts in and out among the prone bodies. Her eyes and her hands and her ears are alert, intent on the unseen thing that scurries and hides and jumps out of the corner on to the face of a man when she’s not looking. But quick, something makes her turn. Quick, she is over there, on her knees fighting the thing off, driving it away, and now it’s got another victim. It’s like a dreadful game of hide and seek among the wounded. All her faculties are intent on it. The other things that are going on, she deals with automatically.

There is a constant coming and going. Medical students run in and out.

“What have you got ready?”

“I’ve got three knees, two spines, five abdomens, twelve heads. Here’s a lung case--hæmorrhage. He can’t wait.” She is binding the man’s chest; she doesn’t look up.

“Send him along.”

“Pierre! Gaston! Call the stretcher-bearers to take the lung to Monsieur D----.” She fastens the tight bandage, tucks the blanket quickly round the thin shoulders. The old men lift him. She hurries back to her saucepans to get a new needle.

A surgeon appears.

“Where’s that knee of mine? I left it in the saucepan on the window ledge. I had boiled it up for an experiment.”

“One of the orderlies must have taken it,” she says, putting her old needle on to boil.

“Good God! Did he mistake it?”

“Jean, did you take a saucepan you found on the windowsill?”

“Yes, sister, I took it. I thought it was for the casse crôute; it looked like a ragout of mouton. I have it here.”

“Well, it was lucky he didn’t eat it. It was a knee I had cut out, you know.”

It is time for the old ones “casse crôute.” It is after one o’clock. At one o’clock the orderlies have cups of coffee and chunks of bread and meat. They eat their supper gathered round the stoves where the iron cauldrons are boiling. The surgeons and the sisters attached to the operating rooms are drinking coffee too in the sterilizing rooms. I do not want any supper. I am not hungry. I am not tired. I am busy. My eyes are busy and my fingers. I am conscious of nothing about myself but my eyes, hands and feet. My feet are a nuisance, they are swollen, hurting lumps, but my fingers are perfectly satisfactory. They are expert in the handling of frail glass ampoules and syringes and needles. I go from one man to another jabbing the sharp needles into their sides, rubbing their skins with iodine, and each time I pick my way back across their bodies to fetch a fresh needle I scan the surface of the floor where the men are spread like a carpet, for signs, for my special secret signals of death.

“Aha! I’ll catch you out again.” Quick, to that one. That jerking! That sudden livid hue spreading over his form. “Quick, Emile! Pierre!” I have lifted the blanket. The blood is pouring out on the floor under the stretcher. “Get the tourniquet. Hold his leg up. Now then, tight--tighter. Now call the stretcher bearers.”

Someone near is having a fit. Is it epilepsy? I don’t know. His mouth is frothy. His eyes are rolling. He tries to fling himself on the floor. He falls with a thud across his neighbour, who does not notice. The man just beyond propped up against the wall, watches as if from a great distance. He has a gentle patient face; this spectacle does not concern him.

The door keeps opening and shutting to let in the stretcher-bearers. The wounded are carried in at the end door and are carried out to the operating rooms at either side. The sergeant is counting the treasures out of a dead man’s pockets. He is tying his little things, his letters and briquet, etc., up in a handkerchief. Some of the old ones are munching their bread and meat in the centre of the hut under the electric light. The others are busy with their pails and scissors. They shuffle about, kneeling, scrubbing, filling hotwater bottles. I see it all through a mist. It is misty but eternal. It is a scene in eternity, in some strange dream-hell where I am glad to be employed, where I belong, where I am happy. How crowded together we are here. How close we are in this nightmare. The wounded are packed into this place like sardines, and we are so close to them, my old ones and I. I’ve never been so close before to human beings. We are locked together, the old ones and I, and the wounded men; we are bound together. We all feel it. We all know it. The same thing is throbbing in us, the single thing, the one life. We are one body, suffering and bleeding. It is a kind of bliss to me to feel this. I am a little delirious, but my head is cool enough, it seems to me.

“No, not that one. He can wait. Take the next one to Monsieur D----, and this one to Monsieur Guy, and this one to Monsieur Robert. We will put this one on the electric light bed; he has no pulse. More hot-water bottles here, Gaston.

“Do you feel cold, mon vieux?”

“Yes, I think so, but pray do not trouble.”

I go with him into the little cubicle, turn on the light bulbs, leave him to cook there; and as I come out again to face the strange heaving dream, I suddenly hear a voice calling me, a new far-away hollow voice.

“Sister! My sister! Where are you?”

I am startled. It sounds so far away, so hollow and so sweet. It sounds like a bell high up in the mountains. I do not know where it comes from. I look down over the rows of men lying on their backs, one close to the other, packed together on the floor, and I cannot tell where the voice comes from. Then I hear it again.

“Sister! Oh, my sister, where are you?”