Books: The New Book Of Martyrs
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Georges Duhamel >> The New Book Of Martyrs
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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 passage there towards the
interior of the country and towards silence. A few hundred feet
from us, a cross-road continually shelled 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 phosphorescent.
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 passage 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. ...
Then I would get up and go back to work, haunted by the terrible
fear that excess of fatigue might have made my eye less keen, my
hand less steady than imperious duty required.
At night more especially, the bombardment was renewed, in
hurricane gusts.
The air, rent by projectiles, mewed like a furious cat; the
detonations came closer, then retired methodically, like the
footsteps of a giant on guard around us, above us, upon us.
Every morning the orderlies took advantage of a moment of respite
to run and inspect the new craters, and unearth the fuses of
shells. ... I thought of the delightful phrase of assistant-
surgeon M----whom we had attended for a wound on the head, and
who said to me as I was taking him back to bed, and we heard the
explosions close by:
"Oh, the marmites (big shells) always fall short of one."
But to a great many of the wounded, the perpetual uproar was
intolerable. They implored us with tears to send them somewhere
else; those we kept were, as a fact, unable to bear removal; we
had to soothe them and keep them, in spite of everything. Some,
overcome by fatigue, slept all day; others showed extraordinary
indifference, perhaps due to a touch of delirium, like the man
with a wound in the abdomen which I was dressing one morning, and
who when he saw me turn my head at the sound of an explosion which
ploughed up a neighbouring field, assured me quietly that "those
things weren't dangerous."
One night a policeman ran in with his face covered with blood.
He was waving a lantern which he used to regulate the wheeled
traffic, and he maintained that the enemy had spotted his lamp and
had peppered him with bullets. As a fact, he had only some slight
scratches. He went off, washed and bandaged, but only to come back
to us the next day dead. A large fragment of iron had penetrated
his eye.
There was an entrance ward, where we sorted the cases. Ten times a
day we thought we had emptied this reservoir of misery; but we
always found it full again, paved with muddy stretchers on which
men lay, panting and waiting.
Opposite to this ante-room was a clearing ward; it seemed less
dismal than the other, though it was just as bare, and not any
lighter; but the wounded there were clean; they had been operated
on, they wore white bandages, they had been comforted with hot
drinks and with all sorts of hopes, for they had already escaped
the first summons of Death.
Between these two rooms, a clerk lived in the draught, the victim
of an accumulation of indispensable and stupefying documents.
In the beginning, the same man sat for three days and three nights
chained to this ungrateful task until at last we saw him, his face
convulsed, almost mad after unremittingly labelling all this
suffering with names and figures.
The first days of March were chilly, with alternations of snow and
sunshine. When the air was pure, we heard it vibrate with the life
of aeroplanes and echo to their contests. The dry throb of
machine-guns, the incessant scream of shrapnel formed a kind of
crackling dome over our heads. The German aeroplanes overwhelmed
the environs with bombs which gave a prolonged whistle before
tearing up the soil or gutting a house. One fell a few paces from
the ward where I was operating on a man who had been wounded in
the head. I remember the brief glance I cast outwards and the
screams and headlong flight of the men standing under the windows.
One morning I saw an airship which was cruising over the hills of
the Meuse suddenly begin to trail after it, comet-wise, a thick
tail of black smoke, and then rush to the earth, irradiated by a
burst of flame, brilliant even in the daylight. And I thought of
the two men who were experiencing this fall.
The military situation improved daily, but the battle was no less
strenuous. The guns used by the enemy for the destruction of men
produced horrible wounds, certainly more severe on the whole than
those we had tended during the first twenty months of a war that
has been pitiless from its inception. All doctors must have noted
the hideous success achieved in a very short time, in perfecting
means of laceration. And we marvelled bitterly that man could
adventure his frail organism through the deflagrations of a
chemistry hardly disciplined as yet, which attains and surpasses
the brutality of the blind forces of Nature. We marvelled more
especially that flesh so delicate, the product and the producer of
harmony, could endure such shocks and such dilapidations without
instant disintegration.
Many men came to us with one or several limbs torn off completely,
yet they came still living .... Some had thirty or forty wounds,
and even more. We examined each body systematically, passing from
one sad discovery to another. They reminded us of those derelict
vessels which let in the water everywhere. And just because these
wrecks seemed irredeemably condemned to disaster, we clung to them
in the obstinate hope of bringing them into port and perhaps
floating them again.
When the pressure was greatest, it was impossible to undress the
men and get them washed properly before bringing them into the
operating-ward. The problem was in these cases to isolate the work
of the knife as far as possible from the surrounding mud, dirt and
vermin: I have seen soldiers so covered with lice that the
different parts of the dressings were invaded by them, and even
the wounds. The poor creatures apologised, as if they were in some
way to blame....
At such moments patients succeeded each other so rapidly that we
knew nothing of them beyond their wounds: the man was carried
away, still plunged in sleep; we had made all the necessary
decisions for him without having heard his voice or considered his
face.
We avoided overcrowding by at once evacuating all those on whom we
had operated as soon as they were no longer in danger of
complications. We loaded them up on the ambulances which followed
one upon the other before the door. Some of the patients came back
a few minutes later, riddled with fragments of shell; the driver
had not succeeded in dodging the shells, and he was often wounded
himself. In like manner the stretcher-bearers as they passed along
the road were often hit themselves, and were brought in on their
own hand-carts.
One evening there was a "gas warning." Some gusts of wind arrived,
bearing along an acrid odour. All the wounded were given masks and
spectacles as a precaution. We hung them even on the heads of the
beds where dying men lay ... and then we waited. Happily, the wave
spent itself before it reached us.
A wounded man was brought in that evening with several injuries
caused by a gas-shell. His eyes had quite disappeared under his
swollen lids. His clothing was so impregnated with the poison that
we all began to cough and weep, and a penetrating odour of garlic
and citric acid hung about the ward for some time.
Many things we had perforce to leave to chance, and I thought,
during this alarm, of men just operated on, and plunged in the
stupor of the chloroform, whom we should have to allow to wake,
and then mask them immediately, or ...
Ah, well! ... in the midst of all this unimaginable tragedy,
laughter was not quite quenched. This phenomenon is perhaps one of
the characteristics, one of the greatnesses of our race--and in a
more general way, no doubt, it is an imperative need of humanity
at large.
Certain of the wounded took a pride in cracking jokes, and they
did so in words to which circumstances lent a poignant
picturesqueness. These jests drew a laugh from us which was often
closely akin to tears.
One morning, in the sorting room, I noticed a big, curly-haired
fellow who had lost a foot, and had all sorts of wounds and
fractures in both legs. All these had been hastily bound up,
clothing and all, in the hollow of the stretcher, which was stiff
with blood. When I called the stretcher-bearers and contemplated
this picture, the big man raised himself on his elbow and said:
"Please give me a cigarette."
Then he began to smoke, smiling cheerfully and telling absurd
stories. We took off one of his legs up to the thigh, and as soon
as he recovered consciousness, he asked for another cigarette, and
set all the orderlies laughing.
When, on leaving him, I asked this extraordinary man what his
calling was, he replied modestly:
"I am one of the employees of the Vichy Company."
The orderlies in particular, nearly all simple folks, had a desire
to laugh, even when they were worn out with fatigue, which made a
pretext of the slightest thing, and notably of danger. One of
them, called Tailleur, a buffoon with the airs of an executioner's
assistant, would call out at the first explosions of a hurricane
of shells:
"Number your arms and legs! Look out for your nuts! The winkles
are tumbling about!"
All my little band would begin to laugh. And I had not the heart
to check them, for their faces were drawn with fatigue, and this
moment of doleful merriment at least prevented them from falling
asleep as they stood.
When the explosions came very close, this same Tailleur could not
help exclaiming:
"I am not going to be killed by a brick! I am going outside."
I would look at him with a smile, and he would repeat: "As for me,
I'm off," carefully rolling a bandage the while, which he did with
great dexterity.
His mixture of terror and swagger was a perpetual entertainment to
us. One night, a hand-grenade fell out of the pocket of one of the
wounded. In defiance of orders, Tailleur, who knew nothing at all
about the handling of such things, turned it over and examined it
for some time, with comic curiosity and distrust.
One day a pig intended for our consumption was killed in the pig-
sty by fragments of shell. We ate it, and the finding by one of
the orderlies of some bits of metal in his portion of meat gave
occasion for a great many jests.
For a fortnight we were unable to go beyond the hospital
enclosure. Our longest expedition was to the piece of waste ground
which had been allotted to us for a burial ground, a domain the
shells were always threatening to plough up. This graveyard
increased considerably. As it takes a man eight hours to dig a
grave for his brother man, one had to set a numerous gang to work
all day, to ensure a place for each corpse.
Sometimes we went into the wooden shed which served as our
mortuary. Pere Duval, the oldest of our orderlies, sewed there all
day, making shrouds of coarse linen for "his dead."
They were laid in the earth carefully, side by side, their feet
together, their hands crossed on their breasts, when indeed they
still possessed hands and feet. ... Duval also looked after the
human debris, and gave it decent sepulture.
Thus our function was not only to tend the living, but also to
honour the dead. The care of what was magniloquently termed their
"estate" fell to our manager, S----. It was he who put into a
little canvas bag all the papers and small possessions found on
the victims. He devoted days and nights to a kind of funereal
bureaucracy, inevitable even under the fire of the enemy. His
occupation, moreover, was not exempt from moral difficulties. Thus
he found in the pocket of one dead man a woman's card which it was
impossible to send on to his family, and in another case, a
collection of songs of such a nature that after due deliberation
it was decided to burn them.
Let us purify the memories of our martyrs!
We had several German wounded to attend. One of these, whose leg I
had to take off, overwhelmed me with thanks in his native tongue;
he had lain for six days on ground over which artillery played
unceasingly, and contemplated his return to life and the care
bestowed on him with a kind of stupefaction.
Another, who had a shattered arm, gave us a good deal of trouble
by his amazing uncleanliness. Before giving him the anaesthetic,
the orderly took from his mouth a set of false teeth, which he
confessed he had not removed for several months, and which exhaled
an unimaginable stench.
I remember, too, a little fair-haired chap of rather chilly
demeanour, who suddenly said "Good-bye" to me with lips that
quivered like those of a child about to cry.
The interpreter from Headquarters, my friend C----, came to see
them all as soon as they had got over their stupor, and
interrogated them with placid patience, comparing all their
statements in order to glean some trustworthy indication.
Thus days and nights passed by in ceaseless toil, under a
perpetual menace, in the midst of an ever-growing fatigue which
gave things the substance and aspects they take on in a nightmare.
The very monotony of this existence was made up of a thousand
dramatic details, each of which would have been an event in normal
life. I still see, as through the mists of a dream, the orderly of
a dying captain sobbing at his bedside and covering his hands with
kisses. I still hear the little lad whose life blood had ebbed
away, saying to me in imploring tones: "Save me, Doctor! Save me
for my mother!" ... and I think a man must have heard such words
in such a place to understand them aright, I think that every day
this man must gain a stricter, a more precise, a more pathetic
idea of suffering and of death.
One Sunday evening, the bombardment was renewed with extraordinary
violence. We had just sent off General S----, who was smoking on
his stretcher, and chatting calmly and cheerfully; I was operating
on an infantryman who had deep wounds in his arms and thighs.
Suddenly there was a great commotion. A hurricane of shells fell
upon the hospital. I heard a crash which shook the ground and the
walls violently, then hurried footsteps and cries in the passage.
I looked at the man sleeping and breathing heavily, and I almost
envied his forgetfulness of all things, the dissolution of his
being in a darkness so akin to liberating death. My task
completed, I went out to view the damage.
A shell had fallen on an angle of the building, blowing in the
windows of three wards, scattering stones in all directions, and
riddling walls and ceilings with large fragments of metal. The
wounded were moaning, shrouded in acrid smoke. They were lying so
close to the ground that they had been struck only by plaster and
splinters of glass; but the shock had been so great that nearly
all of them died within the following hour.
The next day it was decided that we should change our domicile,
and we made ready to carry off our wounded and remove our hospital
to a point rather more distant. It was a very clear day. In front
of us, the main road was covered with men, whom motor vehicles
were depositing in groups every minute. We were finishing our
final operations and looking out occasionally at these men
gathered in the sun, on the slopes and in the ditches. At about
one o'clock in the afternoon the air was rent by the shriek of
high explosives and some shells fell in the midst of the groups.
We saw them disperse through the yellowish smoke, and go to lie
down a little farther off in the fields. Some did not even stir.
Stretcher-bearers came up at once, running across the meadow, and
brought us two dead men, and nine wounded, who were laid on the
operating-table.
As we tended them during the following hour we looked anxiously at
the knots of men who remained in the open, and gradually
increased, and we asked whether they would not soon go. But there
they stayed, and again we heard the dull growl of the discharge,
then the whistling overhead, and the explosions of some dozen
shells falling upon the men. Crowding to the window, we watched
the massacre, and waited to receive the victims. My colleague M----
drew my attention to a soldier who was running up the grassy
slope on the other side of the road, and whom the shells seemed to
be pursuing.
These were the last wounded we received in the suburb of G----.
Three hours afterwards, we took up the same life and the same
labours again, some way off, for many weeks more. ...
Thus things went on, until the day when we, in our turn, were
carried off by the automobiles of the Grand' Route, and landed on
the banks of a fair river in a village where there were trees in
blossom, and where the next morning we were awakened by the sound
of bells and the voices of women.
THE SACRIFICE
We had had all the windows opened. From their beds, the wounded
could see, through the dancing waves of heat, the heights of Berru
and Nogent l'Abbesse, the towers of the Cathedral, still crouching
like a dying lion in the middle of the plain of Reims, and the
chalky lines of the trenches intersecting the landscape.
A kind of torpor seemed to hang over the battle-field. Sometimes,
a perpendicular column of smoke rose up, in the motionless
distance, and the detonation reached us a little while afterwards,
as if astray, and ashamed of outraging the radiant silence.
It was one of the fine days of the summer of 1915, one of those
days when the supreme indifference of Nature makes one feel the
burden of war more cruelly, when the beauty of the sky seems to
proclaim its remoteness from the anguish of the human heart.
We had finished our morning round when an ambulance drew up at the
entrance.
"Doctor on duty!"
I went down the steps. The chauffeur explained:
"There are three slightly wounded men. I am going to take on
further, and then there are some severely wounded ..."
He opened the back of his car. On one side three soldiers were
seated, dozing. On the other, there were stretchers, and I saw the
feet of the men lying upon them. Then, from the depths of the
vehicle came a low, grave, uncertain voice which said:
"I am one of the severely wounded, Monsieur."
He was a lad rather than a man. He had a little soft down on his
chin, a well-cut aquiline nose, dark eyes to which extreme
weakness gave an appearance of exaggerated size, and the grey
pallor of those who have lost much blood.
"Oh! how tired I am!" he said.
He held on to the stretcher with both hands as he was carried up
the steps. He raised his head a little, gave a glance full of
astonishment, distress, and lassitude at the green trees, the
smiling hills, the glowing horizon, and then he found himself
inside the house.
Here begins the story of Gaston Leglise. It is a modest story and
a very sad story; but indeed, are there any stories now in the
world that are not sad?
I will tell it day by day, as we lived it, as it is graven in my
memory, and as it is graven in your memory and in your flesh, my
friend Leglise.
Leglise only had a whiff of chloroform, and he fell at once into a
sleep closely akin to death.
"Let us make haste," said the head doctor. "We shall have the poor
boy dying on the table."
Then he shook his head, adding:
"Both knees! Both knees! What a future!"
The burden of experience is a sorrowful one. It is always
sorrowful to have sufficient memory to discern the future.
Small splinters from a grenade make very little wounds in a man's
legs; but great disorders may enter by way of those little wounds,
and the knee is such a complicated, delicate marvel!
Corporal Leglise is in bed now. He breathes with difficulty, and
catches his breath now and again like a person who has been
sobbing. He looks about him languidly, and hardly seems to have
made up his mind to live. He contemplates the bottle of serum, the
tubes, the needles, all the apparatus set in motion to revive his
fluttering heart, and he seems bowed down by grief. He wants
something to drink, but he must not have anything yet; he wants to
sleep, but we have to deny sleep to those who need it most; he
wants to die perhaps, and we will not let him.
He sees again the listening post where he spent the night, in
advance of all his comrades. He sees again the narrow doorway
bordered by sandbags through which he came out at dawn to breathe
the cold air and look at the sky from the bottom of the
communication-trench. All was quiet, and the early summer morning
was sweet even in the depths of the trench. But some one was
watching and listening for the faint sound of his footsteps. An
invisible hand hurled a bomb. He rushed back to the door; but his
pack was on his back, and he was caught in the aperture like a rat
in a trap. The air was rent by the detonation, and his legs were
rent, like the pure air, like the summer morning, like the lovely
silence.
The days pass, and once more, the coursing blood begins to make
the vessels of the neck throb, to tinge the lips, and give depth
and brilliance to the eye.
Death, which had overrun the whole body like an invader, retired,
yielding ground by degrees; but it has halted now, and makes a
stand at the legs; these it will not relinquish; it demands
something by way of spoil; it will not be baulked of its prey
entirely.
We fight for the portion Death has chosen. The wounded Corporal
looks on at our labours and our efforts, like a poor man who has
placed his cause in the hands of a knight, and who can only be a
spectator of the combat, can only pray and wait.
We shall have to give the monster a share; one of the legs must
go. Now another struggle begins with the man himself. Several
times a day I go and sit by his bed. All our attempts at
conversation break down one by one. We always end in the same
silence and anxiety. To-day Leglise said to me:
"Oh! I know quite well what you're thinking about!"
As I made no answer, he intreated:
"Perhaps we could wait a little longer? Perhaps to-morrow I may be
better ..."
Then suddenly, in great confusion:
"Forgive me. I do trust you all. I know what you do is necessary.
But perhaps it will not be too late in two or three days. ..."
Two or three days! We will see to-morrow.
The nights are terribly hot; I suffer for his sake.
I come to see him in the evening for the last time, and encourage
him to sleep. But his eyes are wide open in the night and I feel
that they are anxiously fixed on mine.
Fever makes his voice tremble.
"How can I sleep with all the things I am thinking about?"
Then he adds faintly:
"Must you? Must you?"
The darkness gives me courage, and I nod my head: "Yes!"
As I finish his dressings, I speak from the depths of my heart:
"Leglise, we will put you to sleep to-morrow. We will make an
examination without letting you suffer, and we will do what is
necessary."
"I know quite well that you will take it off."
"We shall do what we must do."
I divine that the corners of his mouth are drawn down a little,
and that his lips are quivering. He thinks aloud:
"If only the other leg was all right!"
I have been thinking of that too, but I pretend not to have heard.
Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
I spend part of the afternoon sewing pieces of waterproof stuff
together. He asks me:
"What are you doing?"
"I am making you a mask, to give you ether."
"Thank you; I can't bear the smell of chloroform."
I answer "Yes, that's why." The real reason is that we are not
sure he could bear the brutal chloroform, in his present state.
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