It had been partitioned off into several rooms. The one I suddenly stepped into made a bulge in the side of the building. It was as hot as a puddling-oven. Men were cleaning, scrubbing, and polishing, with scrupulous care, a mass of shining instruments, while others were stoking fires which gave out the white heat of soldering lamps. With never a pause, orderlies were coming and going, carrying trays held out rather stiffly at arm’s length, like hotel-keepers devoted to the ceremonious rites of the table.
“It’s warm here,” I murmured, in order to say something.
“Come over here: you’ll find it all right,” said a grinning little chap as hairy as a kobold.
I lifted a lid, feeling I was opening the breast of some monster. In front of me steps led to a kind of throne on which, seated like a king, the heart of the thing was to be found. It was a steriliser—an immense pot in which a calf could easily have been cooked whole. It lay on its stomach and emitted a jet of steam that stupefied one, and its weary monotony made one hardly conscious of time and space. But suddenly the infernal noise stopped, and it was like the end of eternity. On the back of the machine a load of kettles continued to spit and gurgle. A man looking like a ship’s pilot was turning a large heavy wheel, and the lid of the cauldron, suddenly unbolted, rose, exposing to view its red-hot bowels, from which all sorts of boxes and packages were taken out. The heat of the furnace had given way to the damp, crushing atmosphere of a drying-stove.
“But where do they operate on the wounded?” I asked a boy who was washing a pair of rubber gloves in a big copper tub.
“Over there, in the operating-room, of course. But don’t go in that way.”
I went out again into the freshness of the night, and proceeded to the waiting-room to find my stretcher-bearers.
At that moment it was the turn of the cuirassiers to be brought in. A division of “foot cavalry” had been fighting since morning. Hundreds of the finest men in France had fallen, and they waited there like broken statues which are still beautiful in their ruins. Their limbs were so strong, and their chests so solid, that they could not believe in death, and as they felt their rich healthy blood dripping from their wounds, they held at bay, with curses and laughter, the weakness of their broken flesh.
“They can do what they like with this flesh of mine,” said one of the two; “but to make me unconscious, damn me! I’m not having any.”
“Yes, whatever they like,” said another, “but not amputation! I want my paw; even done to the world, I want it!”