REVAUD’S ROOM
One never got tired in Revaud’s room. The roar of the war, the rumbling of transport waggons, the spasmodic shocks of the gunfire, all the whistling and gasping sounds of the killing machine beat against the windows with a spent fury, as in the shelter of a creek resound the echoes of a storm raging in the open sea. But this noise was as familiar to the ear as the heart-beats of the miserable world, and one never got tired in Revaud’s room.
It was a long, narrow apartment where there were four beds and four men. It was, notwithstanding, called Revaud’s room, because the personality of Revaud filled it from wall to wall. It was just the size for Revaud, exactly fitting like a tailor-made coat. In the beginning of November there had been all kinds of nasty intrigues hatched by Corporal Têtard to get Revaud removed elsewhere; and, the intrigues succeeding, the poor man was taken up to another storey and placed in a large dormitory of twenty beds—a bewildering desert, no longer homely, but ravaged by a raw, cruel light. In three days, by an involuntary decision of his body and soul, Revaud had got worse to such an alarming extent that he had to be carried down with great haste and placed behind the door in his own room, where the winter light came filtering in, full of kindliness.
And thus things remained; whenever a seriously wounded man, an extraordinary case, was brought to the division, Mme. Baugan was asked to go and see Revaud at once and “sound him on the question.”
Revaud pretended to make things rather difficult at first, and ended by saying:
“Very well; I am quite willing. Put the man in my room....”
And Revaud’s room was always full. To be there, you had to have more than a mere bagatelle of a wound: a broken foot, or some trivial little amputation in the arm. It was necessary to have “some unusual and queer things”—a burst intestine, for example, or a displaced spinal cord, or yet cases in which “the skull has been bent in or the urine doesn’t come out where it used to before the war.”
“Here,” Revaud used to say with pride, “there are only very rare cases.”
There was Sandrap, “who had to have his needs satisfied through a hole in his side”—Sandrap, a little man from the north, with a round nose like a fresh apple, with beautiful eyes of a delicate grey colour of silk. He had been wounded three times, and used to say every morning: “They’d be surprised, the Boches, if they could see me now.”
There was Remusot, who had a large wound in the chest. It made a continual Faoo aoo ... Raoo aoo ... Faoo ... Raoo ...; and Revaud had been asking from the first day: