As a matter of fact, a large number of coffins had been already completed. They filled the tent where the corpses were to be unceremoniously laid out. Outside in the open, a large gang of joiners were engaged in cutting up planks of pinewood. They were whistling and singing innocently, as is usual with those who work with their hands.
I realised once again how a man’s opinion of great events is determined by his vocation and aptitudes. There was a sergeant there whose views of Armageddon varied with the quality of the wood which he had to use. When the wood was bad he used to say, “This war is damned rot.” But when the wood was clear of knots his view was: “We’ll get them licked.”
The heavy and responsible task of running the hospital was entrusted to a nervy and excitable young man. He appeared at every moment, his fingers clutching bundles of papers, which he passed from one hand to the other. I had few opportunities of hearing him speak, but, when I did, each time I caught the same words: “That’s not my business—I am getting crazy with it all. I have enough worries of that sort.”
I knew then that he had to think of many things. Almost all day a procession of motor cars, heavily laden with a groaning mass of wounded, came along the winding road which was being hastily metalled, looking like the ravenous gullet of this vast organism. On the top of the bend the lorries were unloaded under a porch decorated with flags, bearing no small resemblance to the festooned arch which on wedding days is erected at church doors.
From the first day I was ordered on night duty to deal with the ambulance cars as they arrived. A dozen of us were grouped under the porch for this purpose.
Up to that time it was only in the trenches that I had seen my comrades, wounded beside me, starting out on a long and mysterious journey of which little was known to us. The man who was hit appeared to be spirited away—he vanished from the battlefield. I was going to know all the stages of the suffering existence he was then only beginning.
The night I went on duty there had been a scrap towards Maurepas or Le Forest. Happening between two days of tremendous fighting, it was one of those incidents which seldom call for a single line in the communiqués. Yet the wounded streamed in all night. As soon as they were lowered from the cars, we got them into a large tent. It was an immense canvas hall lit with electricity. It had been pitched on ground covered with stubble, and its rough soil was bristling with anæmic grass and badly pressed clods. Those among the wounded who could walk were directed along a passage railed off on both sides, as is done at theatre entrances to make the crowd line up into a queue. They seemed dazed and exhausted. We took away their arms, knives and grenades. They let you do anything to them: they were like children overcome with sleep. The massacre of Europe cannot proceed without organisation. All the acts of the play are based on the most detailed calculation. As these men filed past, they were counted and labelled; clerks verified their identity with the unconcerned accuracy of customs officials. They, on their part, replied with the patience of the eternal public at government inquiry offices. Sometimes they even ventured to make a remark.
“Your name is Menu,” one cavalryman was asked. “Isn’t it?”
And the cavalryman replied in a heart-rending tone:
“Alas! it is, unfortunately.”