“Is it giving you pain?” he said from time to time.
And the patient replied:
“No; but I’m thirsty!”
“How is it,” I asked the doctor, “that he can’t feel the pain you are giving him?”
“It’s because he is in a state of shock,” replied the surgeon.
And I understood how the very extremity of pain sometimes obtains for its victims a truce which is, in a way, a foretaste of the sweets of death—the prelude to extinction.
At each end of the large marquees one of those small bell tents had been erected to which the soldiers had given the name of “mosques.” They served as death chambers. There were placed the men who were lost to human succour, in a loneliness that presaged the tomb. And some of them were aware of this. There was a soldier with a riddled abdomen who asked, on entering the tent, to be dressed in clean linen.
“Don’t let me die,” he pleaded, “in an unclean shirt. Give me something white. If you are too busy, I’ll put it on myself.”
Sometimes, unutterably wearied by so much suffering, I asked for work outside the camp, in order to sort out my ideas and renew the theme of my reflections. It was always with a sigh of comfort that I got away from the city of tents. I contemplated, from a distance, this sinister agglomeration, which certainly bore comparison with an itinerant fair. I tried to distinguish amid the white canvas and red crosses the tops of these little “mosques.” I gazed also at the cemetery where hundreds and hundreds of bodies had been buried; and, realising the sum of the misery, despair and rage accumulated on that spot of the earth, I thought of the people who, far away in the heart of France, were crowding the concert cafés, the drawing-rooms, the cinemas, the brothels, finding brazen enjoyment in themselves, in the world, in the weather; and, sheltered by this quivering rampart of the sacrificed, will not share in this universal anguish. I thought of these people with more shame than resentment.
The excursions in the open freshened me a little, and I found some comfort in the sight of healthy men spared by the battle.