"You had better get in!" cried the doctor, but he did not answer.
These were the first that we found, and they horrified us. But later on we came upon them oftener and oftener along the rails or near them, and the whole field, lit up by the motionless red flare of the conflagrations, began stirring as if it were alive, breaking out into loud cries, wails, curses and groans. All those dark mounds stirred and crawled about like half-dead lobsters let out of a basket, with outspread legs, scarcely resembling men in their broken, unconscious movements and ponderous immobility. Some were mute and obedient, others groaned, wailed, swore and showed such a passionate hate towards us that were saving them, as if we had brought about that bloodly, indifferent night, and been the cause of all those terrible wounds and their loneliness amidst the night and dead bodies.
The train was full, and our clothes were saturated with blood, as if we had stood for a long time under a rain of blood, while the wounded were still being brought in, and the field, come to life, was stirring wildly as before.
Some of the wounded crawled up themselves, some walked up tottering and falling. One soldier almost ran up to us. His face was smashed, and only one eye remained, burning wildly and terribly, and he was almost naked, as if he had come from the bath-room. Pushing me aside, he caught sight of the doctor, and rapidly seized him by the chest with his left hand.
"I'll smash your snout!" he cried, shaking the doctor, and added slowly and mordantly a coarse oath. "I'll smash your snouts! you rabble!"
The doctor broke away from the soldier, and advancing towards him, cried chokingly,—
"I will have you court-martialled, you scoundrel! To prison with you! You're hindering my work! Scoundrel! Brute!"
We pulled them apart, but the soldier kept on crying out for a long time: "Rabble! I'll smash your snout!"
I was beginning to get exhausted, and went a little way off to have a smoke and rest a bit. The blood, dried to my hands, covered them like a pair of black gloves, making it difficult for me to bend my fingers, so that I kept dropping my cigarettes and matches. And when I succeeded in lighting my cigarette, the tobacco smoke struck me as novel and strange, with quite a peculiar taste, the like of which I never experienced before or after. Just then the ambulance student with whom I had travelled came up to me, and it seemed to me as if I had met with him several years back, but where I could not remember. His tread was firm as if he were marching, and he was staring through me at something farther on and higher up.
"And they are sleeping," said he, as it seemed, quite calmly.