The doctor repeated, “We are in a mess,” and added, “Now, you there! Come along with me.”
M. Poisson bustled off again in all directions, to the left and to the right. I followed him, my head lowered, having been gradually seized by the fever that tortured him. He stopped all the officers.
“I’m fed up with this job! Go and see if the body wasn’t sent out from your huts.”
He entered the operating theatres and asked the surgeons:
“You didn’t send me an unidentified dead body?”
And every time he took out his rumpled piece of paper and added a cross, a number, with his pencil.
Towards evening he fixed me with another look. There were red patches underneath his eyes as highly coloured as raw ham.
“You!—go back to the mortuary! You’ll hear more of me yet!”
I went back, and sat down, feeling very wretched. Three fresh corpses had been brought in. Tanquerelle was hoisting them into coffins with the help of the carpenter.
On the table, temporarily shrouded in tent material, the unknown dead man was waiting his fate. Tanquerelle was completely drunk and was singing “The Missouri,”—not exactly the thing to do in the midst of corpses. I went and drew aside the shroud and looked at the ice-cold body. His smashed face was covered with linen bandages. A few locks of fair hair could be seen. As for the rest, just an ordinary body, like yours or mine, sir.