They came in like two parcels dispatched by the same post, two clumsy, squalid parcels, badly packed, and damaged in transit. Two human forms rolled up in linens and woollens, strapped into strange instruments, one of which enclosed the whole man, like a coffin of zinc and wire.
They seemed to be of no particular age; or rather, each might have been a thousand and more, the age of swaddled mummies in the depths of sarcophagi.
We washed, combed, and peeled them, and laid them very cautiously between clean sheets; then we found that one had the look of an old man, and that the other was still a boy.
Their beds face each other in the same grey room. All who enter it notice them at once; their infinite misery gives them an air of kinship. Compared with them, the other wounded seem well and happy. And in this abode of suffering, they are kings; their couches are encircled by the respect and silence due to majesty.
I approach the younger man and bend over him.
"What is your name?"
The answer is a murmur accompanied by an imploring look. What I hear sounds like: Mahihehondo. It is a sigh with modulations.
It takes me a week to discover that the boyish patient is called Marie Lerondeau.
The bed opposite is less confused. I see a little toothless head. From out the ragged beard comes a peasant voice, broken in tone, but touching and almost melodious. The man who lies there is called Carre.
They did not come from the same battlefield, but they were hit almost at the same time, and they have the same wound. Each has a fractured thigh. Chance brought them together in the same distant ambulance, where their wounds festered side by side. Since then they have kept together, till now they lie enfolded by the blue radiance of the Master's gaze.
He looks at both, and shakes his head silently; truly, a bad business! He can but ask himself which of the two will die first, so great are the odds against the survival of either.
The white-bearded man considers them in silence, turning in his hand the cunning knife.
We can know nothing till after this grave debate. The soul must withdraw, for this is not its hour. Now the knife must divide the flesh, and lay the ravage bare, and do its work completely.
So the two comrades go to sleep, in that dreadful slumber wherein each man resembles his own corpse. Henceforth we enter upon the struggle. We have laid our grasp upon these two bodies; we shall not let them be snatched from us easily.
The nausea of the awakening, the sharp agony of the first hours are over, and I begin to discover my new friends.
This requires time and patience. The dressing hour is propitious. The man lies naked on the table. One sees him as a whole, as also those great gaping wounds, the objects of so many hopes and fears.
The afternoon is no less favourable to communion, but that is another matter. Calm has come to them, and these two creatures have ceased to be nothing but a tortured leg and a screaming mouth.
Carre went ahead at once. He made a veritable bound. Whereas Lerondeau seemed still wrapped in a kind of plaintive stupor, Carre was already enfolding me in a deep affectionate gaze. He said:
"You must do all that is necessary."
Lerondeau can as yet only murmur a half articulate phrase:
"Mustn't hurt me."
As soon as I could distinguish and understand the boy's words, I called him by his Christian name. I would say:
"How are you, Marie?" or "I am pleased with you, Marie."
This familiarity suits him, as does my use of "thee" and "thou" in talking to him. He very soon guessed that I speak thus only to those who suffer most, and for whom I have a special tenderness. So I say to him: "Marie, the wound looks very well today." And every one in the hospital calls him Marie as I do.
When he is not behaving well, I say:
"Come, be sensible, Lerondeau."
His eyes fill with tears at once. One day I was obliged to try "Monsieur Lerondeau," and he was so hurt that I had to retract on the spot. However, he now refrains from grumbling at his orderly, and screaming too loudly during the dressing of his wound, for he knows that the day I say to him "Be quiet, Monsiuer"—just Monsiuer—our relations will be exceedingly strained.
From the first, Carre bore himself like a man. When I entered the dressing ward, I found the two lying side by side on stretchers which had been placed on the floor. Carre's emaciated arm emerged from under his blanket, and he began to lecture Marie on the subject of hope and courage.... I listened to the quavering voice, I looked at the toothless face, lit up by a smile, and I felt a curious choking in my throat, while Lerondeau blinked like a child who is being scolded. Then I went out of the room, because this was a matter between those two lying on the ground, and had nothing to do with me, a robust person, standing on my feet.
Since then, Carre has proved that he had a right to preach courage to young Lerondeau.
While the dressing is being prepared, he lies on the ground with the others, waiting his turn, and says very little. He looks gravely round him, and smiles when his eyes meet mine. He is not proud, but he is not one of those who are ready to chatter to every one. One does not come into this ward to talk, but to suffer, and Carre is bracing himself to suffer as decently as possible.
When he is not quite sure of himself, he warns me, saying:
"I am not as strong as usual to-day."
Nine times, out of ten, he is "as strong as usual," but he is so thin, so wasted, so reduced by his mighty task, that he is sometimes obliged to beat a retreat. He does it with honour, with dignity. He has just said: "My knee is terribly painful," and the sentence almost ends in a scream. Then, feeling that he is about to howl like the others, Carre begins to sing.
The first time this happened I did not quite understand what was going on. He repeated the one phrase again and again: "Oh, the pain in my knee!" And gradually I became aware that this lament was becoming a real melody, and for five long minutes Carre improvised a terrible, wonderful, heart-rending song on "the pain in his knee." Since then this has become a habit, and he begins to sing suddenly as soon as he feels that he can no longer keep silence.
Among his improvisations he will introduce old airs. I prefer not to look at his face when he begins: "Il n'est ni beau ni grand mon verre." Indeed, I have a good excuse for not looking at it, for I am very busy with his poor leg, which gives me much anxiety, and has to be handled with infinite precautions.
I do "all that is necessary," introducing the burning tincture of iodine several times. Carre feels the sting; and when, passing by his corner an hour later, I listen for a moment, I hear him slowly chanting in a trembling but melodious voice the theme: "He gave me tincture of iodine."
Carre is proud of showing courage.
This morning he seemed so weak that I tried to be as quick as possible and to keep my ears shut. But presently a stranger came into the ward. Carre turned his head slightly, saw the visitor, and frowning, began to sing:
"Il n'est ni beau ni grand mon verre."
The stranger looked at him with tears in his eyes but the more he looked, the more resolutely Carre smiled, clutching the edges of the table with his two quivering hands.
Lerondeau has good strong teeth. Carre has nothing but black stumps. This distresses me, for a man with a fractured thigh needs good teeth.
Lerondeau is still at death's door, but though moribund, he can eat. He attacks his meat with a well-armed jaw; he bites with animal energy, and seems to fasten upon anything substantial.
Carre, for his part, is well-inclined to eat; but what can he do with his old stumps?
"Besides," he says, "I was never very carnivorous."
Accordingly, he prefers to smoke. In view of lying perpetually upon his back, he arranged the cover of a cardboard box upon his chest; the cigarette ash falls into this, and Carre smokes without moving, in cleanly fashion.
I look at the ash, the smoke, the yellow, emaciated face, and reflect sadly that it is not enough to have the will to live; one must have teeth.
Not every one knows how to suffer, and even when we know, we must set about it the right way, if we are to come off with honour. As soon as he is on the table, Carre looks round him and asks:
"Isn't there any one to squeeze my head to-day?"
If there is no answer, he repeats anxiously:
"Who is going to squeeze my head to-day?"
Then a nurse approaches, takes his head between her hands and presses.... I can begin; as soon as some one is "squeezing his head" Carre is good.
Lerondeau's method is different. He wants some one to hold his hands. When there is no one to do this, he shrieks: "I shall fall."
It is no use to tell him that he is on a solid table, and that he need not be afraid. He gropes about for the helpful hands, and cries, the sweat breaking out on his brow: "I know I shall fall." Then I get some one to come and hold his hands, for suffering, at any rate, is a reality....
Each sufferer has his characteristic cry when the dressing is going on. The poor have only one, a simple cry that does service for them all. It makes one think of the women who, when they are bringing a child into the world, repeat, at every pain, the one complaint they have adopted.
Carre has a great many varied cries, and he does not say the same thing when the dressing is removed, and when the forceps are applied.
At the supreme moment he exclaims: "Oh, the pain in my knee!"
Then, when the anguish abates, he shakes his head and repeats:
"Oh, that wretched knee!"
When it is the turn of the thigh, he is exasperated.
"Now it's this thigh again!"
And he repeats this incessantly, from second to second. Then we go on to the wound under his heel, and Carre begins:
"Well, what is wrong with the poor heel?"
Finally, when he is tired of singing, he murmurs softly and regularly:
"They don't know how that wretched knee hurts me... they don't know how it hurts me."
Lerondeau, who is, and always will be, a little boy compared with Carre, is very poor in the matter of cries. But when he hears his complaints, he checks his own cries, Borrows them. Accordingly, I hear him beginning:
"Oh, my poor knee!... They don't know it hurts!"
One morning when he was shouting this at the top of his voice, I asked him gravely:
"Why do you make the same complaints as Carre?"
Marie is only a peasant, but he showed me a face that was really offended:
"It's not true. I don't say the same things."
I said no more, for there are no souls so rugged that they cannot feel certain stings.
Marie has told me the story of his life and of his campaign. As he is not very eloquent, It was for the most part a confused murmur with an ever-recurring protestation:
"I was a good one to work, you know, strong as a horse."
Yet I can hardly imagine that there was once a Marie Lerondeau who was a robust young fellow, standing firm and erect between the handles of a plough. I know him only as a man lying on his back, and I even find it difficult to picture to myself what his shape and aspect will be when we get him on his feet again.
Marie did his duty bravely under fire. "He stayed alone with the wagons and when he was wounded, the Germans kicked him with their heavy boots." These are the salient points of the interrogatory.
Now and again Lerondeau's babble ceases, and he looks up to the ceiling, for this takes the place of distance and horizon to those who lie upon their backs. After a long, light silence, he looks at me again, and repeats:
"I must have been pretty brave to stay alone with the wagons!"
True enough, Lerondeau was brave, and I take care to let people know it. When strangers come in during the dressings, I show them Marie, who is making ready to groan, and say:
"This is Marie—Marie Lerondeau, you know. He has a fractured thigh, but he is a very brave fellow. He stayed alone with the wagons."
The visitors nod their heads admiringly, and Marie controls himself. He blushes a little, and the muscles of his neck swell with pride. He makes a sign with his eyes as if to say: "Yes, indeed, alone, all alone with the wagons." And meanwhile, the dressing has been nearly finished.
The whole world must know that Marie stayed alone with the wagons. I intend to pin a report of this on the Government pension certificate.
Carre was only under fire once, and was hit almost immediately. He is much annoyed at this, for he had a good stock of courage, and now he has to waste it within the walls of a hospital.
He advanced through a huge beetroot field, and he ran with the others towards a fine white mist. All of a sudden, crack, he fell! His thigh was fractured. He fell among the thick leaves, on the waterlogged earth.
Shortly afterwards his sergeant passed again, and said to him:
"We are going back to our trench, they shall come and fetch you later."
Carre merely said:
"Put my haversack under my head."
Evening was coming on; he prepared, gravely, to spend the night among the beetroots. And there he spent it, alone with a cold drizzling rain, meditating seriously until morning.
It was fortunate that Carre brought such a stock of courage into hospital, for he needs it all. Successive operations and dressings make large drafts upon the most generous supplies.
They put Carre upon the table, and I note an almost joyful resolution in his look. To-day he has "all his strength, to the last ounce."
But just to-day, I have but little to do, not much suffering to inflict. He has scarcely knitted his brows, when I begin to fasten up the apparatus again.
Then Carre's haggard face breaks into a smile, and he exclaims:
"Finished already? Put some more ether on, make it sting a bit at least."
Carre knows that the courage of which there was no need to-day will not, perhaps, be available to-morrow.
And to-morrow, and for many days after, Carre will have to be constantly calling up those reserves of the soul which help the body to suffer while it waits for the good offices of Nature.
The swimmer adrift on the open seas measures his strength, and strives with all his muscles to keep himself afloat. But what is he to do when there is no land on the horizon, and none beyond it?
This leg, infected to the very marrow, seems to be slowly devouring the man to whom it belongs; we look at it anxiously, and the white-haired Master fixes two small light-blue eyes upon it, eyes accustomed to appraise the things of life, yet, for the moment, hesitant.
I speak to Carre in veiled words of the troublesome, gangrenous leg. He gives a toothless laugh, and settles the question at once.
"Well, if the wretched thing is a nuisance, we shall have to get rid of it."
After this consent, we shall no doubt make up our minds to do so.
Meanwhile Lerondeau is creeping steadily towards healing.
Lying on his back, bound up in bandages and a zinc trough, and imprisoned by cushions, he nevertheless looks like a ship which the tide will set afloat at dawn.
He is putting on flesh, yet, strange to say, he seems to get lighter and lighter. He is learning not to groan, not because his frail soul is gaining strength, but because the animal is better fed and more robust.
His ideas of strength of mind are indeed very elementary. As soon as I hear his first cry, in the warm room where his wound is dressed, I give him an encouraging look, and say:
"Be brave, Marie! Try to be strong!"
Then he knits his brows, makes a grimace, and asks:
"Ought I to say 'By God!'?"
The zinc trough in which Marie's shattered leg has been lying has lost its shape; it has become oxydised and is split at the edges; so I have decided to change it.
I take it away, look at it, and throw it into a corner. Marie follows my movements with a scared glance. While I am adjusting the new trough, a solid, comfortable one, but rather different in appearance, he casts an eloquent glance at the discarded one, and his eyes fill with copious tears.
This change is a small matter; but in the lives of the sick, there are no small things.
Lerondeau will weep for the old zinc fragment for two days, and it will be a long time before he ceases to look distrustfully at the new trough, and to criticise it in those minute and bitter terms which only a connoisseur can understand or invent.
Carre, on the other hand, cannot succeed in carrying along his body by the generous impulse of his soul. Everything about him save his eyes and his liquid voice foreshadow the corpse. Throughout the winter days and the long sleepless nights, he looks as if he were dragging along a derelict.
He strains at it... with his poignant songs and his brave words which falter now, and often die away in a moan.
I had to do his dressing in the presence of Marie. The amount of work to be got through, and the cramped quarters made this necessary. Marie was grave and attentive as if he were taking a lesson, and, indeed, it was a lesson in patience and courage. But all at once, the teacher broke down. In the middle of the dressing, Carre opened his lips, and in spite of himself, began to complain without restraint or measure, giving up the struggle in despair.
Lerondeau listened, anxious and uneasy; and Carre, knowing that Marie was listening, continued to lament, like one who has lost all sense of shame.
Lerondeau called me by a motion of his eyelids. He said:
"Carre!..."
And he added:
"I saw his slough. Lord! he is bad."
Lerondeau has a good memory for medical terms. Yes, he saw Carre's slough. He himself has the like on his posterior and on his heel; but the tear that trembles in the corner of his eye is certainly for Carre.
And then, he knows, he feels that HIS wounds are going to heal.
But it is bad for Marie to hear another complaining before his own turn.
He comes to the table very ill-disposed. His nerves have been shaken and are unusually irritable.
At the first movement, he begins with sighs and those "Poor devils!" which are his artless and habitual expressions of self-pity. And then, all at once, he begins to scream, as I had not heard him scream for a long time. He screams in a sort of frenzy, opening his mouth widely, and shrieking with all the strength of his lungs, and with all the strength of his face, it would seem, for it is flushed and bathed in sweat. He screams unreasonably at the lightest touch, in an incoherent and disorderly fashion.
Then, ceasing to exhort him to be calm with gentle and compassionate words, I raise my voice suddenly and order the boy to be quiet, in a severe tone that admits of no parleying...
Marie's agitation subsides at once, like a bubble at the touch of a finger. The ward still rings with my imperious order. A good lady who does not understand at once, stares at me in stupefaction.
But Marie, red and frightened, controls his unreasonable emotion. And as long as the dressing lasts, I dominate his soul strenuously to prevent him from suffering in vain, just as others hold and grasp his wrists.
Then, presently, it is all over. I give him a fraternal smile that relaxes the tension of his brow as a bow is unbent.
A lady, who is a duchess at the least, came to visit the wounded. She exhaled such a strong, sweet perfume that she cannot have distinguished the odour of suffering that pervades this place.
Carre was shown to her as one of the most interesting specimens of the house. She looked at him with a curious, faded smile, which, thanks to paint and powder, still had a certain beauty.
She made some patriotic remarks to Carre full of allusions to his conduct under fire. And Carre ceased staring out of the window to look at the lady with eyes full of respectful astonishment.
And then she asked Carre what she could send him that he would like, with a gesture that seemed to offer the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them.
Carre, in return, gave her a radiant smile; he considered for a moment and then said modestly:
"A little bit of veal with new potatoes."
The handsome lady thought it tactful to laugh. And I felt instinctively that her interest in Carre was suddenly quenched.
An old man sometimes comes to visit Carre. He stops before the bed, and with a stony face pronounces words full of an overflowing benevolence.
"Give him anything he asks for.... Send a telegram to his family."
Carre protests timidly: "Why a telegram? I have no one but my poor old mother; it would frighten her."
The little old gentleman emerges from his varnished boots like a variegated plant from a double vase.
Carre coughs—first, to keep himself in countenance, and, secondly, because his cruel bronchitis takes this opportunity to give him a shaking.
Then the old gentleman stoops, and all his medals hang out from his tunic like little dried-up breasts. He bends down, puffing and pouting, without removing his gold-trimmed KEPI, and lays a deaf ear on Carre's chest with an air of authority.
Carre's leg has been sacrificed. The whole limb has gone, leaving a huge and dreadful wound level with the trunk.
It is very surprising that the rest of Carre did not go with the leg.
He had a pretty hard day.
O life! O soul! How you cling to this battered carcase! O little gleam on the surface of the eye! Twenty times I saw it die down and kindle again. And it seemed too suffering, too weak, too despairing ever to reflect anything again save suffering, weakness, and despair.
During the long afternoon, I go and sit between two beds beside Lerondeau. I offer him cigarettes, and we talk. This means that we say nothing, or very little.... But it is not necessary to speak when one has a talk with Lerondeau.
Marie is very fond of cigarettes, but what he likes still better is that I should come and sit by him for a bit. When I pass through the ward, he taps coaxingly upon his sheet, as one taps upon a bench to invite a friend to a seat.
Since he told me about his life at home and his campaign, he has not found much to say to me. He takes the cakes with which his little shelf is laden, and crunches them with an air of enjoyment.
"As for me," he says, "I just eat all the time," and he laughs.
If he stops eating to smoke, he laughs again. Then there is an agreeable silence. Marie looks at me, and begins to laugh again. And when I get up to go, he says: "Oh, you are not in such a great hurry, we can chat a little longer!"
Lerondeau's leg was such a bad business that it is now permanently shorter than the other by a good twelve centimetres. So at least it seems to us, looking down on it from above.
But Lerondeau, who has only seen it from afar by raising his head a little above the table while his wounds are being dressed, has noticed only a very slight difference in length between his two legs.
He said philosophically:
"It is shorter, but with a good thick sole...."
When Marie was better, he raised himself on his elbow, and he understood the extent of his injury more clearly.
"I shall want a VERY thick sole," he remarked.
Now that Lerondeau can sit up, he, too, can estimate the extent of the damage from above; but he is happy to feel life welling up once more in him, and he concludes gaily:
"What I shall want is not a sole, but a little bench."
But Carre is ill, terribly ill.
That valiant soul of his seems destined to be left alone, for all else is failing.
He had one sound leg. Now it is stiff and swollen.
He had healthy, vigorous arms. Now one of them is covered with abscesses.
The joy of breathing no longer exists for Carre, for his cough shakes him savagely in his bed.
The back, by means of which we rest, has also betrayed him. Here and there it is ulcerated; for man was not meant to lie perpetually on his back, but only to lie and sleep on it after a day of toil.
For man was not really intended to suffer with his miserable, faithless body!
And his heart beats laboriously.
There was mischief in the bowel too. So much so, that one day Carre was unable to control himself, before a good many people who had come in.
In spite of our care, in spite of our friendly assurances, Carre was so ashamed that he wept. He who always said that a man ought not to cry, he who never shed a tear in the most atrocious suffering, sobbed with shame on account of this accident. And I could not console him.
He no longer listens to all we say to him. He no longer answers our questions. He has mysterious fits of absence.
He who was so dignified in his language, expresses himself and complains with the words of a child.
Sometimes he comes up out of the depths and speaks.
He talks of death with an imaginative lucidity which sounds like actual experience.
Sometimes he sees it... And as he gazes, his pupils suddenly distend.
But he will not, he cannot make up his mind....
He wants to suffer a little longer.
I draw near to his bed in the gathering darkness. His breathing is so light that suddenly, I stop and listen open-mouthed, full of anxiety.
Then Carre suddenly opens his eyes.
Will he sigh and groan? No. He smiles and says:
"What white teeth you have!"
Then he dreams, as if he were dying.
Could you have imagined such a martyrdom, my brother, when you were driving the plough into your little plot of brown earth?
Here you are, enduring a death-agony of five months swathed in these livid wrappings, without even the rewards that are given to others.
Your breast, your shroud must be bare of even the humblest of the rewards of valour, Carre.
It was written that you should suffer without purpose and without hope.
But I will not let all your sufferings be lost in the abyss. And so I record them thus at length.
Lerondeau has been brought down into the garden. I find him there, stretched out on a cane chair, with a little kepi pulled down over his eyes, to shade them from the first spring sunshine.
He talks a little, smokes a good deal, and laughs more.
I look at his leg, but he hardly ever looks at it himself; he no longer feels it.
He will forget it even more utterly after a while, and he will live as if it were natural enough for a man to live with a stiff, distorted limb.
Forget your leg, forget your sufferings, Lerondeau. But the world must not forget them.
And I leave Marie sitting in the sun, with a fine new pink colour in his freckled cheeks.
Carre died early this morning. Lerondeau leaves us to-morrow.
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