I went across to Number 29 and looked at him over the hoop.
He was lying with his eyes wide open. They are like the eyes of deer and oxen. He is a very big man, very ugly, with an old scar over half of his face. Such an ugly, funny face; the shadow of death has no right to be upon such a ridiculous face. His face was made for making people laugh. He always kept the whole ward laughing. He used to make me laugh in the midst of his horrible pansements. No matter what he suffered, he never used to make a sound. I almost cannot bear it when they suffer silently. If they scream, I really don't care much. He used to try to wink at me to make me laugh.
I knew this about him, that his people are woodcutters in the mountains between the valleys of the Maurienne and the Tarentaise. I do not know why he went away to strange new countries. He must be thirty-five years old. In wildernesses he heard of the war three months after it began. He was wounded seven months ago, and was sent from hospital to hospital, getting always worse. He is not the sort of creature to be in a hospital. He looks absurd in a bed. He used to tell me of throwing one's blanket over a heap of pine boughs and sweet fern. He had much fever, and he would tell me about the clear, cool, perfect water of a certain forest spring.
I thought, standing there, how he would be wanting to drag himself into some hole of rocks and great tree-trunks, where no one saw.
The clock was striking eight. They would not begin to operate before ten. He would have to think of it for two hours, lying there. He looked at me very steadily. I thought, "It is I who must tell him, it is I who must tell him." He tried to wink at me, and then he shut his eyes. I thought, "I will wait a little."
I went to the apparatus in the middle of the ward and began to get things ready for the panseuse.
I tried to talk to the men in the beds near, the 9, Barbet, whose fever had gone down nicely; and 10, the pepère, who has had his right hand amputated; and 6 and 7 opposite, who are both young and gay and getting well fast. But I could not talk.
He is only one of thousands and thousands. In the hospitals, in the dreadful fields, along the roads, they are dying.
Those of the men who could sit up and use their hands were folding compresses.