“Whose gun is this?”
“It is a French carbine, your Excellency; I brought it away. I wouldn’t have come away, but I had to lead that small soldier, who might fall down;” and he pointed to an infantryman who was walking some paces ahead of them leaning on his gun and dragging his left leg with difficulty.
Prince Galtzine was cruelly ashamed of his unjust suspicions, and conscious that he was blushing, turned around. Without questioning or looking after the wounded any more, he directed his steps towards the field-hospital. Making his way to the entrance with difficulty through soldiers, litters, stretcher-bearers who came in with the wounded and went out with the dead, Galtzine entered as far as the first room, took one look about him, recoiled involuntarily, and precipitately fled into the street. What he saw there was far too horrible!
VII.
The great, high, sombre hall, lighted only by four or five candles, where the surgeons moved about examining the wounded, was literally crammed with people. Stretcher-bearers continually brought new wounded and placed them side by side in rows on the ground. The crowd was so great that the wretches pushed against one another and bathed in their neighbors’ blood. Pools of stagnant gore stood in the empty places; from the feverish breath of several hundred men, the perspiration of the bearers, rose a heavy, thick, fetid atmosphere in which candles burned dimly in different parts of the hall. A confused murmur of groans, sighs, death-rattles, was interrupted by piercing cries. Sisters of Charity, whose calm faces did not express woman’s futile and tearful compassion, but an active and lively interest, glided here and there in the midst of bloody coats and shirts, sometimes striding over the wounded, carrying medicines, water, bandages, lint. Surgeons with their sleeves turned up, on their knees before the wounded, examined and probed the wounds by the flare of torches held by their assistants, in spite of the terrible cries and supplications of the patients. Seated at a little table beside the door a major wrote the number 532.
“Ivan Bogoïef, private in the third company of the regiment from C——, fractura femuris complicata!” shouted the surgeon, who was dressing a broken limb at the other end of the hall. “Turn him over.”
“Oh, oh, good fathers!” gasped the soldier, begging them to leave him in peace.
“Perforatio capites. Simon Neferdof, lieutenant-colonel of the infantry regiment from N——. Have a little patience, colonel. There is no way of—I shall be obliged to leave you there,” said a third, who was fumbling with a sort of hook in the head of the unfortunate officer.
“In Heaven’s name, get done quickly!”
“Perforatio pectoris. Sebastian Sereda, private—what regiment? But it is no use, don’t write it down. Moritur. Carry him off,” added the surgeon, leaving the dying man, who with upturned eyes was already gasping.