The Boy with Almond Eyes
They tell me that when they suffer I make little growling noises in my throat. They laugh and say, "Now the little Madame is angry!"
I am angry, I am furious. I am furious against suffering. I hate suffering.
If they scream I do not mind so much, but when they suffer silently, it is terrible.
Once the ward doctor thought I was going to cry.
I was holding the stump of a boy's leg while they dressed it. The leg had been cut off at the Front, hurriedly, anyhow, and the nerves left exposed.
The boy shuddered and quivered all over, and would not make a sound, and grew rigid with pain, stiff, and quite cold, and never made a sound.
The doctor, with the probe in his rubber-gloved hands, looked at me, and said, "You are going to cry! You must not cry before the wounded, it unnerves them."
And then I heard myself growling, with dreadful big words of the patronne's smothered under the growls.
And the little boy laughed out, through everything, just like a mischievous bad little boy.