The waiting-room seemed to have been transformed into a museum of misery: there were blind men, legless and armless men, paralysed men, their faces ravaged by fire and powder.

A big fellow said, lifting his deformed arm with an effort:

"I tricked them; they thought to the end that I was really paralysed.

I look well, but that's because they sent us to Constance for the last week, to fatten us up."

A dark, thin man was walking to and fro, towing his useless foot after him by the help of a string which ran down his trouser leg; and he laughed:

"I walk more with my fist than with my foot. Gentlemen, gentlemen, who would like to pull Punch's string?"

All wore strange costumes, made up of military clothing and patched civilian garments.

On a bench sat fifteen or twenty men with about a dozen legs between them. It was among these that I saw Derancourt. He was holding his crutches in one hand and looking round him, stroking his long fair moustache absently.

Derancourt became my friend.

His leg had been cut off at the thigh, and this had not yet healed; he had, further, a number of other wounds which had closed more or less during his captivity.

Derancourt never talked of himself, much less of his misfortune. I knew from his comrades that he had fought near Longwy, his native town, and that he had lain grievously wounded for nine days on the battlefield.

He had seen his father, who had come to succour him, killed at his side; then he had lain beside the corpse, tortured by a delirious dream in which nine days and nine nights had followed one upon the other, like a dizziness of alternate darkness and dazzling light. In the mornings, he sucked the wet gra.s.s he clutched when he stretched out his hands.

Afterwards he had suffered in Germany, and finally he had come back to France, mutilated, covered with wounds, and knowing that his wife and children were left without help and without resources in the invaded territory.

Of all this Derancourt said not a word. He apparently did not know how to complain, and he contemplated the surrounding wretchedness with a grave look, full of experience, which would have seemed a little cold but for the tremulous mobility of his features.

Derancourt never played, never laughed. He sought solitude, and spent hours, turning his head slowly from side to side, contemplating the walls and the ceiling like one who sees things within himself.

The day came when we had to operate on Derancourt, to make his stump of a thigh serviceable.

He was laid on the table. He remained calm and self-controlled as always, looking at the preparations for the operation with a kind of indifference.

We put the chloroform pad under his nose; he drew two or three deep breaths, and then a strange thing happened: Derancourt began to sob in a terrible manner, and to talk of all those things he had never mentioned.

The grief he had suppressed for months overflowed, or rather, rushed out in desperate, heartrending lamentations.

It was not the disorderly intoxication, the muscular, animal rebellion of those who are thrown into this artificial sleep. It was the sudden break-up of an overstrained will under a slight shock. For months Derancourt had braced himself against despair, and now, all of a sudden, he gave way, and abandoned himself to poignant words and tears. The flood withdrew suddenly, leaving the horrible, chaotic depths beneath the sea visible.

We ceased scrubbing our hands, and stood aghast and deeply moved, full of sadness and respect.

Then some one exclaimed:

"Quick! quick! More chloroform! Stupefy him outright, let him sleep."

XIII

"But a man can't be paralysed by a little hole in his back! I tell you it was only a bullet. You must take it out, doctor. Take it out, and I shall be all right."

Thus said a Zouave, who had been lying helpless for three days on his bed.

"If you knew how strong I am! Look at my arms! No one could unhook a bag like me, and heave it over my shoulder--tock! A hundred kilos--with one jerk!"

The doctor looked at the muscular torso, and his face expressed pity, regret, embarra.s.sment, and, perhaps, a certain wish to go away.

"But this wretched bullet prevents me from moving my legs. You must take it out, doctor, you must take it out!"

The doctor glances at the paralysed legs, and the swollen belly, already lifeless. He knows that the bullet broke the spine, and cut through the marrow which sent law and order into all this now inanimate flesh.

"Operate, doctor. Look you, a healthy chap like me would soon get well."

The doctor stammers vague sentences: the operation would be too serious for the present... better wait....

"No, no. Never fear. My health is first-rate. Don't be afraid, the operation is bound to be a success."

His rugged face is contracted by his fixed idea. His voice softens; blind confidence and supplication give it an unusual tone. His heavy eyebrows meet and mingle under the stress of his indomitable will; his soul makes such an effort that the immobility of his legs seems suddenly intolerable. Heavens! Can a man WILL so intensely, and yet be powerless to control his own body?

"Oh, operate, operate! You will see how pleased I shall be!"

The doctor twists the sheet round his forefinger; then, hearing a wounded man groaning in the next ward, he gets up, says he will come back presently, and escapes.

XIV

The colloquy between the rival G.o.ds took place at the foot of the great staircase.

The Arab soldier had just died. It was the Arab one used to see under a shed, seated gravely on the ground in the midst of other magnificent Arabs. In those days they had boots of crimson leather, and majestic red mantles. They used to sit in a circle, contemplating from under their turbans the vast expanse of mud watered by the skies of Artois. To-day, they wear the ochre helmet, and show the profiles of Saracen warriors.

The Algerian has just been killed, kicked in the belly by his beautiful white horse.

In the ambulance there was a Mussulman orderly, a well-to-do tradesman, who had volunteered for the work. He, on the other hand, was extremely European, nay, Parisian; but a plump, malicious smile showed itself in the midst of his crisp grey beard, and he had the look in the eyes peculiar to those who come from the other side of the Mediterranean.

Rashid "behaved very well." He had found native words when tending the dying man, and had lavished on him the consolations necessary to those of his country.

When the Algerian was dead, he arranged the winding-sheet himself, in his own fashion; then he lighted a cigarette, and set out in search of Monet and Renaud.

For lack of s.p.a.ce, we had no mortuary at the time in the ambulance.

Corpses were placed in the chapel of the cemetery while awaiting burial.

The military burial-ground had been established within the precincts of the church, close by the civilian cemetery, and in a few weeks it had invaded it like a cancer and threatened to devour it.

Rashid had thought of everything, and this was why he went in search of Monet and Renaud, Catholic priests and ambulance orderlies of the second cla.s.s.

The meeting took place at the foot of the great staircase. Leaning over the bal.u.s.trade, I listened, and watched the colloquy of the rival G.o.ds.

Monet was thirty years old; he had fine, sombre eyes, and a stiff beard, from which a pipe emerged. Renaud carried the thin face of a seminarist a little on one side.

Monet and Renaud listened gravely, as became people who were deciding in the Name of the Father. Rashid was pleading for his dead Arab with supple eloquence, wrapped in a cloud of tobacco-smoke: