Tanquerelle is no company: he is a calamity, a scourge, a breed apart, so to speak. When he is hungry, he never speaks; but he never is hungry. Usually he indulges in small talk—the comments of a drunkard, painful to hear in the presence of these corpses.
We are told, sir, that dead bodies mean very little to one after a time, and that when you habitually live with them they become nothing more than stones to you. Well, that’s not my experience. Every one of these corpses, with which I pass my days, ends in being a companion to me.
I get to like some of them, and I am almost sorry to see them taken away. Sometimes, when I carelessly hit up against them with my elbow, it is with an effort that I do not say, “I beg your pardon, my friend.” I look at them, with their blistered hands, and their feet covered with corns after long trudging over the roads, and my heart understands and is touched.
I note a flighty ring on a finger, a birthmark on the skin, an old scar, sometimes even tattoes, and finally one of the things which man does not leave behind him: his poor grey hair, the lines of his face, the relic of a smile around his eyes, more often traces of terror. And all that sets my mind thinking. From their bodies I can read their history: I imagined how much they had worked with those arms, the many things they had seen with their eyes, how they had kissed with those lips, how proud they must have been of their moustache and their beard, on which now the lice were crawling, away from the cold, dead flesh. I think of these things as I sew up the corpses in the sacking; and the emotion I feel rather startles me, because mingled with my misery is a feeling of pleasure.
But I am wandering off into philosophy. Not being a philosopher, I haven’t the right to bore you.
I think I was speaking to you about Cuirassier Cuvelier. Well, let me return to the story.
It takes us back to the May offensives. I assure you, I wasn’t idle in those days. What numbers of dead passed through my hands! The poor unfortunate widows and mothers need have no anxiety: in my way, I did my duty. All of them were taken away with their mouths tightly closed with a chin-cloth, arms crossed on their bodies—that is, of course, if they still possessed mouths and arms—and I carefully wrapped them in the sacking. I do not mention their eyes: it was beyond my power to close them. It is too late, you know, by the time they arrive at the mortuary. Oh, I took good care of my dead!
One day they brought me one with no identification mark at all. His face was crushed in; bandages everywhere on his limbs, but no ticket, no disc on his wrist, nothing at all.
I placed him on one side, and the doctor was informed.
In a moment the door opened and M. Poisson came in.