The visit began in the rooms which had been packed with the wounded from the Marne front. There young men were lying who had been face to face with War, and who had calmly recognised it as the old Devil of the Species. From that time they spoke of it just as they always will, now that three years of blood, suffering and torture have decimated, maimed and broken them.
But nobody bothered about their thoughts. Sheets were drawn back, bandages were undone, wounds were left open to the air. It was now a question of “cases” and of lesions.
A scientific discussion was commencing, to which I listened with an eager curiosity. As I have said, doctors were present who were princes in their profession. They came on the scene with minds, I thought, which were profoundly independent—even aggressive. And I looked forward to an interesting controversy.
M. Dufrêne was closely examining some one’s thigh, in which a dark, quivering hole had been made by a shell.
“What do you put in it, Proby?” he said.
Professor Proby began a detailed explanation of the way in which such wounds ought to be treated.
“It has been my habit,” he said, “for thirty years to put in some cotton wool—I lectured to the Academy of Medicine—what! And nothing gives me such good results, because——”
At that point the Medical Inspector-General struck the sick man’s little table drily with his pencil.
“Hurry up, Proby,” he said, in a calm, cutting voice.
Proby started a little, and mumbled again: