REVAUD’S ROOM
One never got tired in Revaud’s room. The roar of the war, the rumbling of transport waggons, the spasmodic shocks of the gunfire, all the whistling and gasping sounds of the killing machine beat against the windows with a spent fury, as in the shelter of a creek resound the echoes of a storm raging in the open sea. But this noise was as familiar to the ear as the heart-beats of the miserable world, and one never got tired in Revaud’s room.
It was a long, narrow apartment where there were four beds and four men. It was, notwithstanding, called Revaud’s room, because the personality of Revaud filled it from wall to wall. It was just the size for Revaud, exactly fitting like a tailor-made coat. In the beginning of November there had been all kinds of nasty intrigues hatched by Corporal Têtard to get Revaud removed elsewhere; and, the intrigues succeeding, the poor man was taken up to another storey and placed in a large dormitory of twenty beds—a bewildering desert, no longer homely, but ravaged by a raw, cruel light. In three days, by an involuntary decision of his body and soul, Revaud had got worse to such an alarming extent that he had to be carried down with great haste and placed behind the door in his own room, where the winter light came filtering in, full of kindliness.
And thus things remained; whenever a seriously wounded man, an extraordinary case, was brought to the division, Mme. Baugan was asked to go and see Revaud at once and “sound him on the question.”
Revaud pretended to make things rather difficult at first, and ended by saying:
“Very well; I am quite willing. Put the man in my room....”
And Revaud’s room was always full. To be there, you had to have more than a mere bagatelle of a wound: a broken foot, or some trivial little amputation in the arm. It was necessary to have “some unusual and queer things”—a burst intestine, for example, or a displaced spinal cord, or yet cases in which “the skull has been bent in or the urine doesn’t come out where it used to before the war.”
“Here,” Revaud used to say with pride, “there are only very rare cases.”
There was Sandrap, “who had to have his needs satisfied through a hole in his side”—Sandrap, a little man from the north, with a round nose like a fresh apple, with beautiful eyes of a delicate grey colour of silk. He had been wounded three times, and used to say every morning: “They’d be surprised, the Boches, if they could see me now.”
There was Remusot, who had a large wound in the chest. It made a continual Faoo aoo ... Raoo aoo ... Faoo ... Raoo ...; and Revaud had been asking from the first day:
“What a funny noise you’re making! D’you do it with your mouth?”
In a hoarse voice he wheezed:
“It is my breath escaping between my ribs.”
And lastly there was Mery, whose spine had been broken by an aerial torpedo, and who “no longer felt the lower part of his body, as if it didn’t belong to him.”
All this little world was living on its back, each in his place, in a promiscuous atmosphere of smells, of sounds, and sometimes of thought. The men recognised each other by their voices rather than by their faces; and there was one great week when Sandrap was seen by Revaud as he was being carried to the dressing-room in a stretcher on a level with the bed, and the latter exclaimed suddenly:
“Hallo! is that you, Sandrap? What a funny head you have got! And your hair is even funnier.”
Mme. Baugan came at eight o’clock, and at once she began scolding:
“There’s a nasty smell about. Oh! Oh! my poor Revaud, I’m sure you have again——”
Revaud avoided the question:
“Very fine, thanks. I’ve slept very well. Nothing more to report. I’ve slept quite well.”
Then Mme. Baugan drew back the sheets, and, overcome by the sad and ignoble smell, she muttered:
“Oh! Revaud! you are unreasonable. Will you never be able to control yourself!”
Revaud could no longer dissemble. He confessed phlegmatically: “Ah, it’s true enough! But whatever you say, nurse, I can’t help myself.”
Mme. Baugan came and went, looking for fresh linen and water. She began to wash him and dress him as if he were a child.
But suddenly overcome with shame and a kind of despair, he moaned:
“Madame Baugan, don’t be cross with me. I wasn’t like that in civil life.”
Mme. Baugan began to laugh, and Revaud without more ado laughed too, for all the lines of his face and his whole soul were made for laughing, and he loved to laugh even in the midst of the most acute pain.
This reply having pleased him, he trotted it out often, and, when confessing to his little infirmity, he used to tell everyone “I wasn’t like that, you know, before I joined up.”
One morning, in making Mery’s bed, Mme. Baugan startled the room with an exclamation. The paralytic lad had not been able to restrain himself.
“What! Mery! You, too, my poor friend!”
Mery, once a handsome country lad with a splendid body, looked at his dead limbs and sighed:
“It is quite possible, Madame. I can’t feel what’s going on.”
But Revaud was delighted. All the morning he cried, “It isn’t only me! It isn’t only me!” And no one grudged him his joy, for when you are in the depths of despair you are glad to have companions in your misery.
The most happy phrases have only a short-lived success. Revaud, who had a sense of humour, soon felt the moment coming when he would no longer find comfort in the remark that “he wasn’t like that before he joined up.” It was then he received a letter from his father. It came unexpectedly one morning. Revaud’s face had just been washed, and his great Gallic moustache had been cut—from caprice—according to the American pattern. All the hospital filed past at the corner of the door in order to see Revaud who looked like a very sick “English gentleman.”
He turned the letter over with his fingers that were deformed by misery and toil; then he said uneasily, “What does the letter mean? Do they still want to kick up a row?”
Revaud was a married man; but during the six months in which he had remained without news from his wife he had got used to his loneliness. He was in his room, behind the door, and sought no quarrels with anyone. Then why had a letter been sent to him?
“It must be they want to make a row,” he repeated; and he handed the letter to Mme. Baugan, for her to read.
The letter came from Revaud’s father. In ten lines written in a painstaking hand, with thick downstrokes and fine upstrokes, with flourishes and a dashing signature, the old man announced that he was going to visit him one day in the near future.
Laughter came back again to Revaud, and with laughter a final justification for living. All day he toyed with the letter, and used gladly to show it and say:
“We are going to have a visit. My father is coming to see us.”
Then he began to be rather confiding.
“My father, you know, is a fine fellow, but he has had some hard knocks. You will see my father—he’s a fellow that’s up to a few tricks, and, what’s worse, he wears a shirt collar.”
Finally he ended by restricting his comments on his father’s character to this statement:
“My father!—you’ll see—he wears a shirt collar.”
The days passed, and Revaud spoke so often of his father that in the end he no longer knew whether the visitor had come or was yet to come. Thus, by a special providence, Revaud never knew that his father did not come to see him; and afterwards, when wanting to make allusion to this remarkable period, he had recourse to a very ample phrase, and used to say:
“It was the time of my father’s visit.”
Revaud was spoiled: he never lacked cigarettes or company, and he used to confess so contentedly: “I’m the pet of this hospital.”
Besides, Revaud was not difficult. Tarrissant had only to appear between his crutches for the dying man to exclaim, “Here’s another who’s come to see me. I told you I was the pet here.”
Tarrissant had undergone the same operation as Revaud. It was a complicated business, taking place in the knee. Only, in the case of Tarrissant the operation had been more or less a complete success, and in the case of Revaud, more or less a failure, because “it depends on one’s blood.”
From the operation itself Revaud thought he had learned a new word: “His knee had been ‘dezected.’” He used to look at Tarrissant, and, comparing himself with the convalescing young man, he came to the simple conclusion:
“We are both ‘dezected’ men, except that my old woman has left me; and, too, I have been overworked.”
It was the only allusion that Revaud ever made to his conjugal misfortune and to his toiling past.
But really, why think of all these things? Hasn’t man enough to do with a troublesome leg, or this perpetual need which he cannot control?
Every evening each one prepared to face the long night with little preparations, as if they were about to set out on a journey. Remusot was pricked in the thigh, and at once he was in a dreamland bathed in sweat, in which the fever brought before his eyes things he never would describe to anyone. Mery had a large mug of some decoction or other prepared for him, and he had only to stretch out his arm to get it. Sandrap smoked his last cigarette, and Revaud asked for his cushion. It was a little cotton pillow, which was placed against his side. Only when this was done was Revaud willing to say, “That’s it, boys! That’ll do.”
And from that moment they went off into a sleep that was horrible and teeming like a forest waylaid with snares, and each of them wandered in the pursuit of his dreams.
While the mind was beating its wings, the four bodies remained still. A little night-light relieved the darkness. Then, in slippered footfalls, a night attendant came and put his head through the door and heard the four tortured respiratory movements, and occasionally surprised the open but absent look of Remusot; in contemplating these patched-up human remains, he suddenly thought of a raft of shipwrecked men—of a raft tossed by the waves of the sea, with four bodies in distress.
The window-panes continued to vibrate plaintively with the echoes of the war. Sometimes, in the course of the long night, the war seemed to stop, as a woodcutter pauses to take breath between two blows of his axe.
It was then that, in the deep and sudden silence, they awoke with queer painful sensations; and they thought of all the things that happen in battle—they thought of these things when not a sound could be heard.
Dawn broke reluctantly, those days of winter. The orderlies scrubbed the floor. They blew out the spluttering night-light which stank of burnt fat. Then there were the morning ablutions, and all the pains and screams of wound-dressing.
Sometimes, in the middle of the trivial duties of the day, the door was solemnly opened and a general entered, followed by the officers of the staff. He paused at first on the threshold, overcome by the unwholesome air, then he made a few steps into the room and asked who were these men. The doctor used to whisper in his ear, and the general replied quite simply:
“Ah, good! Excellent!”
When he had gone, Revaud always used to assure us:
“The general wouldn’t think of coming here without seeing me. He’s an old pal.”
After that, there was something to talk about the whole day.
Many officers used to come as well—of the highest rank. They read the papers pinned on the wall. “Frankly,” they said, “it’s a very fine result.”
One of them began one day to examine Mery. He was a doctor, with a white-bearded chin, very large and corpulent, his breast decorated with crosses and his neck pink with good living. He seemed a decent fellow and disposed to show sympathy. He said, in fact:
“Poor devil! Ah, but you see the same sort of thing might happen to me.”
More often than not, nobody came, absolutely no one, and the day was endured only by being taken in small mouthfuls, like their meat at dinner.
Once a great event happened. Mery was taken out and placed under the X-rays. He came back, well content, remarking:
“At least, it isn’t painful.”
Another time Revaud’s leg was amputated. He had murmured when giving his consent: “I’d done my best to keep it, this old leg of mine! Well! well! So much the worse, so get on with it. Poor old thing!”
He burst out laughing once again; and no one has laughed, and no one will laugh again, as Revaud did that day.
His leg then was to be amputated. The noblest blood in France flowed once more. But it took place between four walls, in a little room white-washed like a dairy, and no one heard of it.
Revaud was put back to bed behind the door. He awoke, and like a child said:
“They’ve set me back quite warm and ‘comfy’ with this leg.”
Revaud had rather a good night, and when, on the next day, Mme. Baugan came into the room, he said to her, as he now was in the habit of saying:
“Fine, Madame Baugan. I’ve had a good night.”
With this, his head dropped on one side, his mouth opened little by little, and, without further remark or movement, he was dead.
“Poor Revaud!” exclaimed Mme. Baugan. “Oh! he is dead.”
She kissed his brow, and at once began to lay him out, for a long day faced her and she could not afford to waste time.
As Mme. Baugan dressed Revaud, she grumbled and scolded good-naturedly because the corpse was difficult to manage.
Sandrap, Mery and Remusot said nothing. The rain streamed down the panes, which never stopped rattling because of the gunfire.