“Let’s go there at once, Corporal!”
Two men were waiting for me outside with a stretcher. It was a glorious night, upon which the pale and flickering lights of the station hardly made an impression.
“It’s at La Folie,” said Bonardent: “it’s rather far from here.”
La Folie is a road-crossing, about a mile off. I asked a porter how to get there, and we started.
What is really amazing, in a large station, is that the organising imperative will which directs the rush of moving things lies hidden behind an apparent state of chaos and entanglement. We began to walk along lines of trucks that never ended. They seemed to have been left there and forgotten since the beginning of the war—rolling-stock that appeared to have had its day, with stiffened axles and couplings devoured by rust; but suddenly our lamp would light up an open door, and some soldiers were seen in a heap, sleeping on the straw, or there were cattle with stupefied looks. A few compartments had been turned into travelling offices, where clerks drudged through a mass of papers in a light reflected from a drawing-room lamp-shade; one felt that the terrible grasp of the administration had closed over the railways, just as its monstrous grip was in possession from the deep-dug trenches to the outfitting shops far away in the Pyrenees. Sometimes, crossing wide, dark spaces, we slipped between two trains that seemed petrified with eternal sleep; but all at once, though no one could be seen, the trains began to move towards each other, their ends clashing with a terrific clatter. Farther on we had to stop while hospital trains were passing. They afforded little comfort then, and there came to us, as the trains went by, a broadside of heart-rending coughs and puffs of the saturated chloride air with which the hospitals reeked. In addition, there were masses of fat mortars lashed on trucks, heaps of kitchens on wheels, and machinery whose uses one could not possibly guess, and all sorts of munitions of war, which night made fantastic. Heavy circular armour protected the cowering engines snorting in the pale light of the arc lamps. There were also, reminding one of former times, suburban trains that bore along drowsy passengers and express trains that swept over the intricate lines swift as a lash of the whip. In a word, a tumultuous roar, in which military movements clashed with the routine of civilian life.
At last we arrived at La Folie. It was an inextricable network of railways, discs, switches and metal cables. Three aged railway workers were living there in a shed. They were in shirt sleeves, and were turning the cranks, pulling the switches, directing with an orderly calm born of experience all the whirling forces which accumulated in that spot. They made me think of the foremen in past times who used to carry on when the managing directors were indulging in the pleasures of social life.
Above the rumbling noises a telegraph bell could be heard patiently ringing.
“We have come for the A.S.C. man,” said Bonardent.
“Oh! for that poor devil. He is there, under the sack and all around. My God!”
We entered the zone occupied by the corpse. I say “zone” deliberately, for the poor wretch had been cut up and scattered like a handful of grain at seed-time.