We roll onward again all day long. I am weary of looking at the rows of houses and trees that spin by before my eyes; then, too, I have the colic continually and I suffer. About four o’clock of the afternoon, the engine slackens its speed, and stops at a landing-stage where awaits us there an old general, around whom sports a flock of young men, with headgear of red képis, breached in red and shod with boots with yellow spurs. The general passes us in review and divides us into two squads; the one for the seminary, the other is directed toward the hospital. We are, it seems, at Arras. Francis and we form part of the first squad. They tumble us into carts stuffed with straw, and we arrive in front of a great building that settles and seems about to collapse into the street. We mount to the second story to a room that contains some thirty beds; each one of us unbuckles his knapsack, combs himself, and sits down. A doctor arrives.
“What is the trouble with you?” he asks of the first.
“A carbuncle.”
“Ah! and you?”
“Dysentery.”
“Ah! and you?”
“A bubo.”
“But in that case you have not been wounded during the war?”
“Not the least in the world.”
“Very well! You can take up your knapsacks again. The archbishop gives up the beds of his seminarists only to the wounded.”