The ambulance, which Henriette seldom left except to keep Jean company, had now become a frequent subject of conversation between them. He questioned her when she came in of an evening, learnt to know each of her charges, wished to be informed which of them were dying and which were getting well; and she, with her heart full of all these matters, did not cease speaking of them but recounted in great detail all that she did during the day. 'Ah!' she frequently repeated, 'the poor children, the poor children!'
This was not the ambulance of raging battle, the ambulance where fresh blood flowed, and where the flesh amputated by the surgeon was ruddy and healthy. It was the ambulance infected by hospital gangrene, reeking of fever and death, damp with the exhalations of the patients who were slowly attaining convalescence and of those who were dying by inches. Dr. Dalichamp had had the greatest difficulty in procuring the necessary beds, mattresses, and sheets; in order to provide for his patients, to supply them with bread, meat and dried vegetables, not to mention compresses, bandages and other appliances, he was forced to accomplish a fresh miracle every day. As the Prussians, now in possession of the military hospital of Sedan, refused him everything, even chloroform, he obtained all his supplies from Belgium. Yet he tended German as well as French wounded, and among others a dozen Bavarians who had been picked up at Bazeilles. The foes who had rushed so frantically at one another's throats were now lying side by side reconciled by their common sufferings. And what an abode of horror and wretchedness that ambulance was—established in two long rooms of the disused school-house, each containing some fifty beds over which streamed the broad pale light admitted by the lofty windows!
Ten days after the battle some more wounded men had been brought thither, forgotten ones who had been discovered in out-of-the-way corners. Four of them had remained since the fight in an empty house at Balan, without any medical attendance, living no one knew how, but probably by the charity of some neighbour; and their wounds were swarming with maggots, and they died poisoned by their filthy sores. A purulence which nothing could check was wafted hither and thither, emptying rows of beds. At the very door an odour of necrosis caught you at the throat. The wounds were suppurating, drop after drop of fœtid pus was exuding from the drainage-tubes. It was often necessary to open the healing flesh again in order to extract splinters of bone, the presence of which had not been previously suspected. Then an abscess would form, some flux which broke out in another part of the body. Exhausted and emaciated, ashen pale, the poor wretches endured every torture. Some of them, prostrate, scarce breathing, lay all day long upon their backs with their eyelids closed and blackened, like corpses already half-decomposed. Others, denied the boon of sleep, agitated by restless insomnia, bathed in sweat, grew wildly excited as though the catastrophe had struck them mad. But whether they were violent or calm, as soon as the shivering of the infectious fever seized them, they were doomed—the end came, the poison triumphed, flying from one to another and carrying them all off in the same stream, as it were, of victorious gangrene.
But there was especially one awful room, the infernal room as it was called, set apart for those whom dysentery, typhus, and variola had attacked. There were many who had the black pox, and these were restless, cried out in ceaseless delirium, and rose up erect in their beds looking like spectres. Others, wounded in the lungs, racked by frightful coughs, were dying of pneumonia. Others again, who howled, obtained no relief except from the refreshing cold water which was allowed to trickle on their wounds. And the hour when their wounds were dressed was the hour which they all waited for, the only time when a little calmness was restored, when the beds were aired, when the sufferers, stiffened by remaining so long without moving, were eased by a change of position. And this was also the dreaded hour, for not a day went by but the doctor, whilst examining the sores, was grieved to notice some bluey specks, the marks of invading gangrene on some poor devil's skin. The operation would take place on the morrow. Another bit of leg or arm was cut away. And sometimes the gangrene ascended yet higher, and amputation had to be repeated, until the whole limb had been lopped off. Then perhaps the sufferer's entire body was attacked, became covered with the livid spots of typhus, and he had to be removed, staggering, dizzy, and haggard, into the inferno where he succumbed, his flesh already dead, exhaling a corpse-like smell before he even began to agonise.
Every evening on her return home, Henriette answered Jean's questions in the same tremulous tone of emotion: 'Ah, the poor children, the poor children!'
And the particulars she gave were ever the same; each day brought similar torments in that inferno. An arm had been amputated at the shoulder, a foot had been cut off, the resection of a humerus had been performed; but would these means suffice to arrest gangrene or purulent infection? Another man, too, had been buried, more frequently a Frenchman, at times a German. Not a day went by but a coffin, formed of four planks hastily knocked together, left the school-house in the twilight, accompanied by a single ambulance attendant, and often by Henriette herself, unwilling as she was that a fellow-creature should be poked away under the ground like a dog. Two trenches had been dug in the little cemetery of Remilly; and they all slept there side by side, the Germans in the trench on the left, the French in that on the right, reconciled together under the sod.
Though he had never seen them, Jean had ended by becoming interested in some of the wounded and would ask for news of them: 'And how is "Poor child" getting on to-day?'
'Poor child' was a little infantryman, a soldier of the 5th of the Line, who had volunteered for the war and was not yet twenty years of age. The nickname of 'Poor child' had stuck to him because he incessantly employed it in referring to himself; and one day on being asked the reason of this, he had answered that his mother had always called him in that fashion. And indeed he was a poor child, for he was dying of pleurisy, brought on by a wound in the left side.
'Ah! the dear lad,' said Henriette, who felt quite a motherly affection for him: 'he's not at all well, he coughed all day. It pains my heart to hear him.'
'And your bear—your Gutmann?' resumed Jean with a faint smile. 'Is the doctor more hopeful?'