"Your doctors ..." the little officer repeated dreamily. "Very well...." But he continued with us. "I've had contusion," he said. "At M——. Yes.... And now I don't quite know where I am. I'm very depressed and unhappy. What do you advise?"
"There are our doctors," Molozov repeated rather irritably. "You'll find them ... behind there."
"Yes, I suppose so," the melancholy little figure repeated and disappeared.
In some way this figure affected Trenchard very dismally and drove all his English common sense away. We were moving now slowly through clouds of dust, and peasants who watched us from their doorways with a cold indifference that was worse than exultation.
When we arrived, at two or three in the morning, at X——, our destination, the spirits of all of us were heavily weighted. Tired, cross, dirty, driven and pursued, and always with us that harassing fear that we had now no ground upon which we might rest our feet, that nothing in the world belonged to us, that we were fugitives and vagabonds by the will of God.
As our carriage stopped before the door of the large white building in X—— that seemed just like the large white building in O——, the little officer was again at our side.
"I've got contusion ..." he said. "I'm very unhappy, and I don't know where to go."
Trenchard felt now as though in another moment he would tumble back again into his nightmare of yesterday. The house at X—— indeed was fantastic enough. I feel that I am in danger of giving too many descriptions of our various halting-places. For the most part they largely resembled one another, large deserted country houses with broken windows, bare walls and floors, a tangled garden and a tattered collection of books in the Polish language. But this building at X—— was like no other of our asylums.
It was a huge place, a strange combination of the local town-hall and the local theatre. It was the theatre that at that early hour in the morning seemed to our weary eyes so fantastic. As we peered into it it was a huge place, already filled with wounded and lighted only by candles, stuck here and there in bottles. I could see, dimly, the stage at the back of the room, and still hanging, tattered and restless in the draught, a forgotten backcloth of some old play. I could see that it was a picture of a gay scene in an impossibly highly coloured town—high marble stairs down which flower-girls with swollen legs came tripping into a market-place filled with soldiers and their lovers—"Carmen" perhaps. It seemed absurd enough there in the uncertain candlelight with the wounded groaning and crying in front of it. There was already in the air that familiar smell of blood and iodine, the familiar cries of: "Oh, Sestritza—Oh, Sestritza!" the familiar patient faces of the soldiers, sitting up, waiting for their turn, the familiar sharp voice of the sanitar: "What Division? What regiment? bullet or shrapnel?"
I remember that some wounded man, in high fever, was singing, and that no one could stop him.