Books: The New Book Of Martyrs
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Georges Duhamel >> The New Book Of Martyrs
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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.
MEMORIES OF THE MARTYRS
I
Were modesty banished from the rest of the earth, it would no
doubt find a refuge in Mouchon's heart.
I see him still as he arrived, on a stretcher full of little
pebbles, with his mud be-plastered coat, and his handsome, honest
face, like that of a well-behaved child.
"You must excuse me," he said; "we can't keep ourselves very
clean."
"Have you any lice?" asks the orderly, as he undresses him.
Mouchon flushes and looks uneasy.
"Well, if I have, they don't really belong to me."
He has none, but he has a broken leg, "due to a torpedo."
The orderly cuts open his trouser, and I tell him to take off the
boot. Mouchon puts out his hand, and says diffidently:
"Never mind the boot."
"But, my good fellow, we can't dress your leg without taking off
your boot."
Then Mouchon, red and confused, objects:
"But if you take off the boot, I'm afraid my foot will smell...."
I have often thought of this answer. And believe me, Mouchon, I
have not yet met the prince who is worthy to take off your boots
and wash your humble feet.
II
With his forceps the doctor lays hold carefully of a mass of
bloody dressings, and draws them gently out of a gaping wound in
the abdomen. A ray of sunshine lights him at his work, and the
whole of the frail shed trembles to the roar of the cannon.
"I am a big china-dealer," murmurs the patient. "You come from
Paris, and I do, too. Save me, and you shall see.... I'll give you
a fine piece of china."
The plugs are coming out by degrees; the forceps glitter, and the
ray of sunshine seems to tremble under the cannonade, as do the
floor, the walls, the light roof, the whole earth, the whole
universe, drunk with fatigue.
Suddenly, from the depths of space, a whining sound arises,
swells, rends the air above the shed, and the shell bursts a few
yards off, with the sound of a cracked object breaking.
The thin walls seem to quiver under the pressure of the air. The
doctor makes a slight movement of his head, as if to see, after
all, where the thing fell.
Then the china-dealer, who noted the movement, says in a quiet
voice:
"Don't take any notice of those small things, they don't do any
harm. Only save me, and I will give you a beautiful piece of china
or earthenware, whichever you like."
III
The root of the evil is not so much the shattered leg, as the
little wound in the arm, from which so much good blood was lost.
With his livid lips, no longer distinguishable from the rest of
his face, and the immense black pupils of his eyes, the man shows
a countenance irradiated by a steadfast soul, which will not give
in till the last moment. He contemplates the ravages of his body
almost severely, and without illusion, and watching the surgeons
as they scrub their hands, he says in a grave voice:
"Tell my wife that my last thoughts were of her and our children."
Ah! it was not a veiled question, for, without a moment's
hesitation, he allows us to put the mask over his face.
The solemn words seem still to echo through the ward:
"Tell my wife..."
That manly face is not the face of one who could be deceived by
soft words and consoling phrases. The white blouse turns away. The
surgeon's eyes grow dim behind his spectacles, and in solemn tones
he replies:
"We will not fail to do so, friend."
The patient's eyelids flutter--as one waves a handkerchief from
the deck of a departing steamer--then, breathing in the ether
steadily, he falls into a dark slumber.
He never wakes, and we keep our promise to him.
IV
A few days before the death of Tricot, a very annoying thing
happened to him; a small excrescence, a kind of pimpel, appeared
on the side of his nose.
Tricot had suffered greatly; only some fragments of his hands
remained; but, above all, he had a great opening in his side, a
kind of fetid mouth, through which the will to live seemed to
evaporate.
Coughing, spitting, looking about with wide, agonised eyes in
search of elusive breath, having no hands to scratch oneself with,
being unable to eat unaided, and further, never having the
smallest desire to eat--could this be called living? And yet
Tricot never gave in. He waged his own war with the divine
patience of a man who had waged the great world war, and who knows
that victory will not come right away.
But Tricot had neither allies nor reserves; he was all alone, so
wasted and so exhausted that the day came when he passed almost
imperceptibly from the state of a wounded to that of a dying man.
And it was just at this moment that the pimple appeared.
Tricot had borne the greatest sufferings courageously; but he
seemed to have no strength to bear this slight addition to his
woes.
"Monsieur," stammered the orderly who had charge of him, utterly
dejected, "I tell you, that pimple is the spark that makes the cup
overflow."
And in truth the cup overflowed. This misfortune was too much.
Tricot began to complain, and from that moment I felt that he was
doomed.
I asked him several times a day, thinking of all his wounds: "How
are you, old fellow?" And he, thinking of nothing but the pimple,
answered always:
"Very bad, very bad! The pimple is getting bigger."
It was true. The pimple had come to a head, and I wanted to prick
it.
Tricot, who had allowed us to cut into his chest without an
anaesthetic, exclaimed with tears:
"No, no more operations! I won't have any more operations."
All day long he lamented about his pimple, and the following night
he died.
"It was a bad pimple," said the orderly; "it was that which killed
him."
Alas! It was not a very "bad pimple," but no doubt it killed him.
V
Mehay was nearly killed, but he did not die; so no great harm was
done.
The bullet went through his helmet, and only touched the bone. The
brain is all right. So much the better.
No sooner had Mehay come to, and hiccoughed a little in memory of
the chloroform, than he began to look round with interest at all
that was happening about him.
Three days after the operation, Mehay got up. It would have been
useless to forbid this proceeding. Mehay would have disobeyed
orders for the first time in his life. We could not even think of
taking away his clothes. The brave man never lacks clothes.
Mehay accordingly got up, and his illness was a thing of the past.
Every morning, Mehay rises before day-break and seizes a broom.
Rapidly and thoroughly, he makes the ward as dean as his own
heart. He never forgets any corner, and he manages to pass the
brush gently under the beds without waking his sleeping comrades,
and without disturbing those who are in pain. Sometimes Mehay
hands basins or towels, and he is as gentle as a woman when he
helps to dress Vossaert, whose limbs are numb and painful.
At eight o'clock, the ward is in perfect order, and as the
dressings are about to begin, Mehay suddenly appears in a fine
clean apron. He watches my hands carefully as they come and go,
and he is always in the right place to hand the dressing to the
forceps, to pour out the spirit, or to lend a hand with a bandage,
for he very soon learned to bandage skilfully.
He does not say a word; he just looks. The bit of his forehead
that shows under his own bandages is wrinkled with the earnestness
of his attention--and he has those blue marks by which we
recognise the miner.
Sometimes it is his turn to have a dressing. But scarcely is it
completed when he is up again with his apron before him, silently
busy.
At eleven o'clock, Mehay disappears. He has gone, perhaps, to get
a breath of fresh air? Oh, no! Here he is back again with a
trayful of bowls. And he hands round the soup.
In the evening he hands the thermometer. He helps the orderlies so
much that he leaves them very little to do.
All this time the bones of his skull are at work under his
bandages, and the red flesh is growing. But we are not to trouble
about that: it will manage all alone. The man, however, cannot be
idle. He works, and trusts to his blood, "which is healthy."
In the evening, when the ward is lighted by a night-light, and I
come in on tiptoe to give a last look round, I hear a voice
laboriously spelling: "B-O, Bo; B-I, Bi; N-E, Ne, Bobine." It is
Mehay, learning to read before going to bed.
VI
A lamp has been left alight, because the men are not asleep yet,
and they are allowed to smoke for a while. It would be no fun to
smoke, unless one could see the smoke.
The former bedroom of the mistress of the house makes a very
light, very clean ward. Under the draperies which have been
fastened up to the ceiling and covered with sheets, old Louarn
lies motionless, waiting for his three shattered limbs to mend. He
is smoking a cigarette, the ash from which falls upon his breast.
Apologising for the little heaps of dirt that make his bed the
despair of the orderlies, he says to me:
"You know, a Breton ought to be a bit dirty."
I touch the weight attached to his thigh, and he exclaims:
"Ma doue! Ma doue! Caste! Caste!"
These are oaths of a kind, of his own coining, which make every
one laugh, and himself the first. He adds, as he does every day:
"Doctor, you never hurt me so much before as you have done this
time."
Then he laughs again.
Lens is not asleep yet, but he is as silent as usual. He has
scarcely uttered twenty words in three weeks.
In a corner, Mehay patiently repeats: "P-A, Pa," and the orderly
who is teaching him to read presses his forefinger on the soiled
page.
I make my way towards Croin, Octave. I sit down by the bed in
silence.
Croin turns a face half hidden by bandages to me, and puts a leg
damp with sweat out from under the blankets, for fever runs high
just at this time. He too, is silent; he knows as well as I do
that he is not going on well; but all the same, he hopes I shall
go away without speaking to him.
No. I must tell him. I bend over him and murmur certain things.
He listens, and his chin begins to tremble, his boyish chin, which
is covered with a soft, fair down.
Then, with the accent of his province, he says in a tearful,
hesitating voice:
"I have already given an eye, must I give a hand too?"
His one remaining eye fills with tears. And seeing the sound hand,
I press it gently before I go.
VII
When I put my fingers near his injured eye, Croin recoils a
little.
"Don't be afraid," I say to him.
"Oh, I'm not afraid!"
And he adds proudly:
"When a chap has lived on Hill 108, he can't ever be afraid of
anything again."
"Then why do you wince?"
"It's just my head moving back of its own accord. I never think of
it."
And it is true; the man is not afraid, but his flesh recoils.
When the bandage is properly adjusted, what remains visible of
Groin's face is young, agreeable, charming. I note this with
satisfaction, and say to him:
"There's not much damage done on this side. We'll patch you up so
well that you will still be able to make conquests."
He smiles, touches his bandage, looks at his mutilated arm, seems
to lose himself for a while in memories, and murmurs:
"May be. But the girls will never come after me again as they used
to..."
VIII
"The skin is beginning to form over the new flesh. A few weeks
more, and then a wooden leg. You will run along like a rabbit."
Plaquet essays a little dry laugh which means neither yes nor no,
but which reveals a great timidity, and something else, a great
anxiety.
"For Sundays, you can have an artificial leg. You put a boot on
it. The trouser hides it all. It won't show a bit."
The wounded man shakes his head slightly, and listens with a
gentle, incredulous smile.
"With an artificial leg, Plaquet, you will, of course, be able to
go out. It will be almost as it was before."
Plaquet shakes his head again, and says in a low voice:
"Oh, I shall never go out!"
"But with a good artificial leg, Plaquet, you will be able to walk
almost as well as before. Why shouldn't you go out?"
Plaquet hesitates and remains silent.
"Why?"
Then in an almost inaudible voice he replies:
"I will never go out. I should be ashamed."
Plaquet will wear a medal on his breast. He is a brave soldier,
and by no means a fool. But there are very complex feelings which
we must not judge too hastily.
IX
In the corner of the ward there is a little plank bed which is
like all the other little beds. But buried between its sheets
there is the smile of Mathouillet, which is like no other smile.
Mathouillet, after throwing a good many bombs, at last got one
himself. In this disastrous adventure, he lost part of his thigh,
received several wounds, and gradually became deaf. Such is the
fate of bombardier-grenadier Mathouillet.
The bombardier-grenadier has a gentle, beardless face, which for
many weeks must have expressed great suffering, and, which is now
beginning to show a little satisfaction.
But Mathouillet hears so badly that when one speaks to him he only
smiles in answer.
If I come into the ward, Mathouillet's smile awaits and welcomes
me. When the dressing is over, Mathouillet thanks me with a smile.
If I look at the temperature chart, Mathouillet's smile follows
me, but not questioningly; Mathouillet has faith in me, but his
smile says a number of unspoken things that I understand
perfectly. Conversation is difficult, on account of this
unfortunate deafness--that is to say, conversation as usually
carried on. But we two, happily, have no need of words. For some
time past, certain smiles have been enough for us. And Mathouillet
smiles, not only with his eyes or with his lips, but with his
nose, his beardless chin, his broad, smooth forehead, crowned by
the pale hair of the North, with all his gentle, boyish face.
Now that Mathouillet can get up, he eats at the table, with his
comrades. To call him to meals, Baraffe utters a piercing cry,
which reaches the ear of the bombardier-grenadier.
He arrives, shuffling his slippers along the floor, and examines
all the laughing faces. As he cannot hear, he hesitates to sit
down, and this time his smile betrays embarrassment and confusion.
Coming very close to him, I say loudly:
"Your comrades are calling you to dinner, my boy."
"Yes, yes," he replies, "but because they know I am deaf, they
sometimes try to play tricks on me."
His cheeks flush warmly as he makes this impromptu confidence.
Then he makes up his mind to sit down, after interrogating me with
his most affectionate smile.
X
Once upon a time, Paga would have been called un type; now he is
un numero. This means that he is an original, that his ways of
considering and practising life are unusual; and as life here is
reduced entirely to terms of suffering, it means that his manner
of suffering differs from that of other people.
From the very beginning, during those hard moments when the
wounded man lies plunged in stupor and self-forgetfulness, Paga
distinguished himself by some remarkable eccentricities.
Left leg broken, right foot injured, such was the report on Paga's
hospital sheet.
Now the leg was not doing at all well. Every morning, the good
head doctor stared at the swollen flesh with his little round
discoloured eyes and said: "Come, we must just wait till to-
morrow." But Paga did not want to wait.
Flushed with fever, his hands trembling, his southern accent
exaggerated by approaching delirium, he said, as soon as we came
to see him.
"My wish, my wish! You know my wish, doctor."
Then, lower, with a kind of passion:
"I want you to cut it off, you know. I want you to cut this leg.
Oh! I shan't be happy till it is done. Doctor, cut it, cut it
off."
We didn't cut it at all, and Paga's business was very successfully
arranged. I even feel sure that this leg became quite a
respectable limb again.
I am bound to say Paga understood that he had meddled with things
which did not concern him. He nevertheless continued to offer
imperative advice as to the manner in which he wished to be
nursed.
"Don't pull off the dressings! I won't have it. Do you hear,
doctor? Don't pull. I won't have it."
Then he would begin to tremble nervously all over his body and to
say:
"I am quite calm! Oh, I am really calm. See, Michelet, see,
Brugneau, I am calm. Doctor, see, I am quite calm."
Meantime the dressings were gradually loosening under a trickle of
water, and Paga muttered between his teeth:
"He's pulling, he's pulling. ... Oh, the cruel man! I won't have
it, I won't have it."
Then suddenly, with flaming cheeks:
"That's right. That's right! See, Michelet, see, Brugneau: the
dressings have come away. Sergeant, Sergeant, the dressings are
loosened."
He clapped his hands, possessed by a furtive joy; then he suddenly
became conscious, and with a deep furrow between his brows, he
began to give orders again.
"Not any tincture of iodine to-day, doctor. Take away those
forceps, doctor, take them away."
Meanwhile the implacable forceps did their work, the tincture of
iodine performed its chilly function; then Paga yelled:
"Quickly, quickly. Kiss me, kiss me."
With his arms thrown out like tentacles, he beat upon the air, and
seized haphazard upon the first blouse that passed. Then he would
embrace it frantically.
Thus it happened that he once showered kisses on Michelet's hands,
objects by no means suitable for such a demonstration. Michelet
said, laughing:
"Come, stop it; my hands are dirty."
And then poor Paga began to kiss Michelet's bare, hairy arms,
saying distractedly:
"If your hands are dirty, your arms are all right."
Alas, what has become of all those who, during days and nights of
patient labour, I saw gradually shaking off the dark empire of the
night and coming back again to joy? What has become of the
smouldering faggot which an ardent breath finally kindled into
flame?
What became of you, precious lives, poor wonderful souls, for whom
I fought so many obscure great battles, and who went off again
into the realm of adventure?
You, Paga, little fellow, where are you? Do you remember the time
when I used to dress your two wounds alternately, and when you
said to me with great severity:
"The leg to-day, only the leg. It's not the day for the foot."
XI
Sergeant Lecolle is distinguished by a huge black beard, which
fails to give a ferocious expression to the gentlest face in the
world.
He arrived the day little Delporte died, and scarcely had he
emerged from the dark sleep when, opening his eyes, he saw
Delporte die.
I went to speak to him several times. He looked so exhausted, his
black beard was so mournful that I kept on telling him: "Sergeant,
your wound is not serious."
Each time he shook his head as if to say that he took but little
interest in the matter, and tried to close his eyes.
Lecolle is too nervous; he was not able to close his eyes, and he
saw Delporte dead, and he had been obliged to witness all
Delporte's death agony; for when one has a wound in the right
shoulder, one can only lie upon the left shoulder.
The ward was full, I could not change the sergeant's place, and
yet I should have liked to let him be alone all day with his own
pain.
Now Lecolle is better; he feels better without much exuberance,
with a seriousness which knows and foresees the bufferings of
Fate.
Lecolle was a stenographer "in life." We are no longer "in life,"
but the good stenographer retains his principles. When his wounds
are dressed, he looks carefully at the little watch on his wrist.
He moans at intervals, and stops suddenly to say:
"It has taken fifty seconds to-day to loosen the dressings.
Yesterday, you took sixty-two seconds."
His first words after the operation were:
"Will you please tell me how many minutes I was unconscious?"
XII
I first saw Derancourt in the room adjoining the chapel. A band of
crippled men, returning from Germany after a long captivity, had
just been brought in there.
There were some fifty of them, all looking with delighted eyes at
the walls, the benches, the telephone, all the modest objects in
this waiting-room, objects which are so much more attractive under
the light of France than in harsh exile.
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.
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