The New Book of Martyrs Part 14

The night was spent on straw, to the stentorian snores of fifty men overcome by fatigue. Then reveille, and again, liquid mud over the ankles. As the main road was forbidden to our ambulances there was an excited discussion as a result of which we separated: the vehicles to go in search of a by-way, and we, the pedestrians, to skirt the roads on which long lines of motor-lorries, coming and going, pa.s.sed each other in haste like the carriages of an immense train.

We had known since midnight where we were to take up our quarters; the suburb of G----was only an hour's march further on. In the fields, right and left, were bivouacs of colonial troops with muddy helmets; they had come back from the firing line, and seemed strangely quiet. In front of us lay the town, half hidden, full of crackling sounds and echoes.

Beyond, the hills of the Meuse, on which we could distinguish the houses of the villages, and the continuous rain of machine-gun bullets. We skirted a meadow strewn with forsaken furniture, beds, chests, a whole fortune which looked like the litter of a hospital. At last we arrived at the first houses, and we were shown the place where we were expected.

There were two brick buildings of several storeys, connected by a glazed corridor; the rest of the enclosure was occupied by wooden sheds. Behind lay orchards and gardens, the first houses of the suburb. In front, the wall of a park, a meadow, a railway track, and La Route, the wonderful and terrible road that enters the town at this very point.

Groups of lightly wounded men were hobbling towards the hospital; the incessant rush of motors kept up the feverish circulation of a demolished ant-hill.

As we approached the buildings, a doctor came out to meet us.

"Come, come. There's work enough for a month."

It was true. The effluvium and the moans of several hundreds of wounded men greeted us. Ambulance No----, which we had come to relieve, had been hard at it since the night before, without having made much visible progress. Doctors and orderlies, their faces haggard from a night of frantic toil, came and went, choosing among the heaps of wounded, and tended two while twenty more poured in.

While waiting for our material, we went over the buildings. But a few days before, contagious diseases had been treated here. A hasty disinfection had left the wards reeking with formaline which rasped the throat without disguising the sickly stench of the crowded sufferers.

They were huddled round the stoves in the rooms, lying upon the beds of the dormitories, or crouching on the flags of the pa.s.sages.

In each ward of the lower storey there were thirty or forty men of every branch of the service, moaning and going out from time to time to crawl to the latrines, or, mug in hand, to fetch something to drink.

As we explored further, the scene became more terrible; in the back rooms and in the upper building a number of severely wounded men had been placed, who began to howl as soon as we entered. Many of them had been there for several days. The brutality of circ.u.mstances, the relief of units, the enormous sum of work, all combined to create one of those situations which dislocate and overwhelm the most willing service.

We opened a door, and the men who were lying within began to scream at the top of their voices. Some, lying on their stretchers on the floor, seized us by the legs as we pa.s.sed, imploring us to attend to them. A few bewildered orderlies hurried hither and thither, powerless to meet the needs of this ma.s.s of suffering. Every moment I felt my coat seized, and heard a voice saying:

"I have been here four days. Dress my wounds, for G.o.d's sake."

And when I answered that I would come back again immediately, the poor fellow began to cry.

"They all say they will come back, but they never do."

Occasionally a man in delirium talked to us incoherently as we moved along. Sometimes we went round a quiet bed to see the face of the sufferer, and found only a corpse.

Each ward we inspected revealed the same distress, exhaled the same odour of antiseptics and excrements, for the orderlies could not always get to the patient in time, and many of the men relieved themselves apparently unconcerned.

I remember a little deserted room in disorder, on the table a bowl of coffee with bread floating in it; a woman's slippers on the floor, and in a corner, toilet articles and some strands of fair hair.... I remember a corner where a wounded man suffering from meningitis, called out unceasingly: 27, 28, 29... 27, 28, 29... a prey to a strange obsession of numbers. I see a kitchen where a soldier was plucking a white fowl... I see an Algerian non-commissioned officer pacing the corridor....

Towards noon, the head doctor arrived followed by my comrades, and our vehicles. With him I made the round of the buildings again while they were unpacking our stores. I had got hold of a syringe, while waiting for a knife, and I set to work distributing morphia. The task before us seemed immense, and every minute it increased. We began to divide it hastily, to a.s.sign to each his part. The cries of the sufferers m.u.f.fled the sound of a formidable cannonade. An a.s.sistant at my side, whom I knew to be energetic and resolute, muttered between his teeth: "No! no!

Anything rather than war!"

But we had first to introduce some order into our Inferno.

In a few hours this order appeared and reigned. We were exhausted by days of marching and nights of broken sleep, but men put off their packs and set to work with a silent courage that seemed to exalt even the least generous natures. Our first spell lasted for thirty-six hours, during which each one gave to the full measure of his powers, without a thought of self.

Four operation-wards had been arranged. The wounded were brought in unceasingly, and a grave and prudent mind p.r.o.nounced upon the state of each, upon his fate, his future.... Confronted by the overwhelming flood of work to be done, the surgeon, before seizing the knife, had to meditate deeply, and make a decision as to the sacrifice which would ensure life, or give some hope of life. In a moment of effective thought, he had to perceive and weigh a man's whole existence, then act, with method and audacity.

As soon as one wounded man left the ward, another was brought in; while the preparations for the operation were being made, we went to choose among and cla.s.sify the patients beforehand, for many needed nothing more; they had pa.s.sed beyond human aid, and awaited, numb and unconscious, the crowning mercy of death.

The word "untransportable" once p.r.o.nounced, directed all our work. The wounded capable of waiting a few hours longer for attention, and of going elsewhere for it were removed. But when the buzz of the motors was heard, every one wanted to go, and men begging to be taken away entered upon their death agony as they a.s.sured us they felt quite strong enough to travel....

Some told us their histories; the majority were silent. They wanted to go elsewhere... and above all, to sleep, to drink. Natural wants dominated, and made them forget the anguish of their wounds....

I remember one poor fellow who was asked if he wanted anything. ... He had a terrible wound in the chest, and was waiting to be examined. He replied timidly that he wanted the urinal, and when the orderly hurried to him bringing it, he was dead.

The pressure of urgent duty had made us quite unmindful of the battle close by, and of the deafening cannonade. However, towards evening, the buildings trembled under the fury of the detonations. A little armoured train had taken up its position near us. The muzzle of a naval gun protruded from it, and from moment to moment thrust out a broad tongue of flame with a catastrophic roar.

The work was accelerated at the very height of the uproar. Rivers of water had run along the corridors, was.h.i.+ng down the mud, the blood and the refuse of the operation-wards. The men who had been operated on were carried to beds on which clean sheets had been spread. The open windows let in the pure, keen air, and night fell on the hillsides of the Meuse, where the tumult raged and lightnings flashed.

Sometimes a wounded man brought us the latest news of the battle.

Between his groans, he described the incredible bombardment, the obstinate resistance, the counter-attacks at the height of the hurly-burly.

All these simple fellows ended their story with the same words, surprising words at such a moment of suffering:

"They can't get through now...."

Then they began to moan again.

During the terrible weeks of the battle, it was from the lips of these tortured men that we heard the most amazing words of hope and confidence, uttered between two cries of anguish.

The first night pa.s.sed under this stress and pressure. The morning found us face to face with labours still vast, but cla.s.sified, divided, and half determined.

A superior officer came to visit us. He seemed anxious.

"They have spotted you," he said. "I hope you mayn't have to work upon each other. You will certainly be bombarded at noon."

We had forgotten this prophecy by the time it was fulfilled.

About noon, the air was rent by a screeching whistle, and some dozen sh.e.l.ls fell within the hospital enclosure, piercing one of the buildings, but sparing the men. This was the beginning of an irregular but almost continuous bombardment, which was not specially directed against us, no doubt, but which threatened us incessantly.

No cellars. Nothing but thin walls. The work went on.

On the third day a lull enabled us to complete our organisation. The enemy was bombarding the town and the lines persistently. Our artillery replied, sh.e.l.l for sh.e.l.l, in furious salvos; a sort of thunderous wall rose around us which seemed to us like a rampart. ... The afflux of wounded had diminished. We had just received men who had been fighting in the open country, as in the first days of the war, but under a hail of projectiles. .h.i.therto reserved for the destruction of fortresses. Our comrade D----arrived from the battlefield on foot, livid, supporting his shattered elbow. He stammered out a tragic story: his regiment had held its ground under a surging tide of fire; thousands of huge sh.e.l.ls had fallen in a narrow ravine, and he had seen limbs hanging in the thicket, a savage dispersal of human bodies. The men had held their ground, and then had fought....

A quarter of an hour after his arrival D----, refreshed and strengthened, was contemplating the big wound in his arm on the operating table, and talking calmly of his ruined future....

Towards the evening of this day, we were able to go out of the building, and breathe the unpolluted air for a few minutes.

The noise reigned supreme, as silence reigns elsewhere. We were impregnated, almost intoxicated with it....

A dozen of those captive balloons which the soldiers call "sausages"

formed an aerial semi-circle and kept watch.

On the other side of the hills the German balloons also watched in the purple mist to the East.

Night came, and the balloons remained faithfully at their posts. We were in the centre of a circus of fire, woven by all the lightnings of the cannonade. To the south-west, however, a black breach opened, and one divined a free pa.s.sage there towards the interior of the country and towards silence. A few hundred feet from us, a cross-road continually sh.e.l.led by the enemy echoed to the shock of projectiles battering the ground like hammers on an anvil. We often found at our feet fragments of steel still hot, which in the gloom seemed slightly phosph.o.r.escent.

From this day forth, a skilful combination of our hours and our means enabled us to take short spells of rest in turn. However, for a hundred reasons sleep was impossible to me, and for several weeks I forgot what it was to slumber.

I used to retire, then, from time to time to the room set apart for my friend V----and myself, and lie down on a bed, overcome by a fatigue that verged on stupefaction; but the perpetual clatter of sabots and shoes in the pa.s.sage kept the mind alert and the eyes open. The chorus of the wounded rose in gusts; there were always in the adjoining wards some dozen men wounded in the head, and suffering from meningitis, which provoked a kind of monotonous howling; there were men wounded in the abdomen, and crying out for the drink that was denied them; there were the men wounded in the chest, and racked by a low cough choked with blood... and all the rest who lay moaning, hoping for an impossible repose....