When they leave his hands, some of the wounded are swallowed up by the black hole of the Refuge; others are sent back to the bigger clearing-station contrived in the trench on the Bethune road.
In this confined cavity formed by the crossing of the ditches, in the bottom of a sort of robbers' den, we waited two hours, buffeted, squeezed, choked and blinded, climbing over each other like cattle, in an odor of blood and butchery. There are faces that become more distorted and emaciated from minute to minute. One of the patients can no longer hold back his tears; they come in floods, and as he shakes his head he sprinkles his neighbors. Another, bleeding like a fountain, shouts, "Hey, there! have a look at me!" A young man with burning eyes yells like a soul in hell, "I'm on fire!" and he roars and blows like a furnace.
Joseph is bandaged. He thrusts a way through to me and holds out his hand: "It isn't serious, it seems; good-by," he says.
At once we are separated in the mob. With my last glance I see his wasted face and the vacant absorption in his trouble as he is meekly led away by a Divisional stretcher-bearer whose hand is on his shoulder; and suddenly I see him no more. In war, life separates us just as death does, without our having even the time to think about it.
They tell me not to stay there, but to go down into the Refuge to rest before returning. There are two entries, very low and very narrow, on the level of the ground. This one is flush with the mouth of a sloping gallery, narrow as the conduit of a sewer. In order to penetrate the Refuge, one must first turn round and work backwards with bent body into the shrunken pipe, and here the feet discover steps. Every three paces there is a deep step.
Once inside you have a first impression of being trapped—that there is not room enough either to descend or climb out. As you go on burying yourself in the gulf, the nightmare of suffocation continues that you progressively endured as you advanced along the bowels of the trenches before foundering in here. On all sides you bump and scrape yourself, you are clutched by the tightness of the passage, you are wedged and stuck. I have to change the position of my cartridge pouches by sliding them round the belt and to take my bags in my arms against my chest. At the fourth step the suffocation increases still more and one has a moment of agony; little as one may lift his knee for the rearward step, his back strikes the roof. In this spot it is necessary to go on all fours, still backwards. As you go down into the depth, a pestilent atmosphere and heavy as earth buries you. Your hands touch only the cold, sticky and sepulchral clay of the wall, which bears you down on all sides and enshrouds you in a dismal solitude; its blind and moldy breath touches your face. On the last steps, reached after long labor, one is assailed by a hot, unearthly clamor that rises from the hole as from a sort of kitchen.
When you reach at last the bottom of this laddered sap that elbows and compresses you at every step, the evil dream is not ended, for you find yourself in a lone but very narrow cavern where gloom reigns, a mere corridor not more than five feet high. If you cease to stoop and to walk with bended knees, your head violently strikes the planks that roof the Refuge, and the newcomers are heard to growl—more or less forcefully, according to their temper and condition—"Ah, lucky I've got my tin hat on:"
One makes out the gesture of some one who is squatting in an angle. It is an ambulance man on guard, whose monotone says to each arrival, "Take the mud off your boots before going in." So you stumble into an accumulating pile of mud; it entangles you at the foot of the steps on this threshold of hell.
In the hubbub of lamentation and groaning, in the strong smell of a countless concentration of wounds, in this blinking cavern of confused and unintelligible life, I try first to get my bearings. Some weak candle flames are shining along the Refuge, but they only relieve the darkness in the spots where they pierce it. At the farthest end faint daylight appears, as it might to a dungeon prisoner at the bottom of an oubliette. This obscure vent-hole allows one to make out some big objects ranged along the corridor; they are low stretchers, like coffins. Around and above them one then dimly discerns the movement of broken and drooping shadows, and the stirring of ranks and groups of specters against the walls.