Hjerrild, who was a physician in the hospital, had him put into a small room where there were only four beds. One of the men in there had been shot in the spine and lay quite still. Another was wounded in the breast and lay talking deliriously for hours at a time in quick, abrupt phrases. The third, who lay nearest Niels, was a great, strong peasant lad with fat, round cheeks; he had been struck in the brain by a fragment of a shell, and incessantly, hour after hour, about every half minute, he would lift his right arm and his right leg simultaneously and then let them fall again, accompanying his movements with a loud but dull and hollow “Hah-ho!” always in the same measure, always exactly the same, “Hah” when he lifted his limbs, “ho” when he let them fall.
There Niels Lyhne lay. The bullet had entered his right lung and had not come out again. In war not much circumlocution can be used, and he was told he had but little chance of life.
He was surprised; for he did not feel as though he were dying, and his wound did not pain him much. But soon a faintness came over him and warned him that the doctor was right.
So this was the end. He thought of Gerda, he thought of her constantly the first day, but he was always disturbed by the strange, cool look in her eyes the last time he had taken her in his arms. How beautiful it would have been, how poignantly beautiful, if she had clung to him to the very last and had sought his eye till her own was glazed in death; if she had been content to breathe out her life upon the heart that loved her so well instead of turning away from him at the last moment to save herself over into more life and yet more life!
On the second day in the hospital, Niels felt more and more oppressed by the heavy atmosphere in the room, and his longing for fresh air was strangely intertwined in his mind with the desire to live. After all, there had been so much in life that was beautiful, he thought, as he remembered the fresh breeze along the shore at home, the cool soughing of the wind in the beech forests of Sjaelland, the pure mountain air of Clarens, and the evening zephyrs of Lake Garda. But when he began to think of human beings, his soul sickened again. He summoned them in review before him, one by one, and they all passed and left him alone, and not one stayed with him. But how far had he held fast to them? Had he been true? He had only been slower in letting go, that was all. No, it was not that. It was the dreary truth that a soul is always alone. Every belief in the fusing of soul with soul was a lie. Not your mother who took you on her lap, nor your friend, nor yet the wife who slept on your heart....
Toward evening, inflammation set in, and the pain of his wound increased.
Hjerrild came and sat by him for a few minutes in the evening, and at midnight he returned and stayed a long time. Niels was suffering intensely and moaned with pain.
“A word in all seriousness, Lyhne,” said Hjerrild. “Do you want to see a clergyman?”
“I have no more to do with clergymen than you have,” Niels whispered angrily.
“Never mind me! I am alive and well. Don’t lie there and torture yourself with your opinions. People who are about to die have no opinions, and those they have don’t matter. Opinions are only to live by—in life they can do some good, but what does it matter whether you die with one opinion or another? See here, we all have bright, tender memories from our childhood; I have seen scores of people die, and it always comforts them to bring back those memories. Let us be honest! No matter what we call ourselves, we can never quite get that God out of heaven; our brain has fancied Him up there too often, the picture has been rung into it and sung into it from the time we were little children.”