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The military hospital, banished to the north of the little town, is a melancholy plastered building, whose windows are ranged in rows with military regularity. The invalids, wrapped in a gray cloak too large for them, climb one by one the naked slope, and seat themselves among the stones; they bask whole hours in the sun, and look straight before them with a resigned air. An invalid’s days are so long! These wasted faces resume an air of gayety when a comrade passes; they exchange a jest: even in a hospital, at Bareges even, a Frenchman remains a Frenchman.
You meet poor old men on crutches, invalids, climbing the steep street. Those visages reddened by the inclement air, those pitiful bent or twisted limbs, the swollen or enfeebled flesh, the dull eyes, already dead, are painful to behold. At their age, habituated to misery, they ought to feel only the suffering of the moment, not to trouble themselves about the past, and no longer to care for the future. You need to think that their torpid soul lives on like a machine. They are the ruins of man alongside those of the soil.
The aspect of the west is still more sombre. An enormous mass of blackish and snowy peaks girdles the horizon. They are hung over the valley like an eternal threat. Those spines so rugged, so manifold, so angular, give to the eye the sensation of an invincible hardness. There comes from them a cold wind, that drives heavy clouds towards Bareges; nothing is gay but the two jewelled streamlets which border the street and prattle noisily over the blue pebbles.
