Sometimes we went into the wooden shed which served as our mortuary. Pere Duval, the oldest of our orderlies, sewed there all day, making shrouds of coarse linen for "his dead."
They were laid in the earth carefully, side by side, their feet together, their hands crossed on their breasts, when indeed they still possessed hands and feet.... Duval also looked after the human debris, and gave it decent sepulture.
Thus our function was not only to tend the living, but also to honour the dead. The care of what was magniloquently termed their "estate" fell to our manager, S——. It was he who put into a little canvas bag all the papers and small possessions found on the victims. He devoted days and nights to a kind of funereal bureaucracy, inevitable even under the fire of the enemy. His occupation, moreover, was not exempt from moral difficulties. Thus he found in the pocket of one dead man a woman's card which it was impossible to send on to his family, and in another case, a collection of songs of such a nature that after due deliberation it was decided to burn them.
Let us purify the memories of our martyrs!
We had several German wounded to attend. One of these, whose leg I had to take off, overwhelmed me with thanks in his native tongue; he had lain for six days on ground over which artillery played unceasingly, and contemplated his return to life and the care bestowed on him with a kind of stupefaction.
Another, who had a shattered arm, gave us a good deal of trouble by his amazing uncleanliness. Before giving him the anaesthetic, the orderly took from his mouth a set of false teeth, which he confessed he had not removed for several months, and which exhaled an unimaginable stench.
I remember, too, a little fair-haired chap of rather chilly demeanour, who suddenly said "Good-bye" to me with lips that quivered like those of a child about to cry.
The interpreter from Headquarters, my friend C——, came to see them all as soon as they had got over their stupor, and interrogated them with placid patience, comparing all their statements in order to glean some trustworthy indication.
Thus days and nights passed by in ceaseless toil, under a perpetual menace, in the midst of an ever-growing fatigue which gave things the substance and aspects they take on in a nightmare.
The very monotony of this existence was made up of a thousand dramatic details, each of which would have been an event in normal life. I still see, as through the mists of a dream, the orderly of a dying captain sobbing at his bedside and covering his hands with kisses. I still hear the little lad whose life blood had ebbed away, saying to me in imploring tones: "Save me, Doctor! Save me for my mother!"... and I think a man must have heard such words in such a place to understand them aright, I think that every day this man must gain a stricter, a more precise, a more pathetic idea of suffering and of death.