"For God's sake walk slowly!"
In spite of all our efforts we could not avoid the shaking which caused him so much pain, and he continued to murmur, his voice getting fainter and fainter:
"Walk, walk ... slowly!..."
His lips silently repeated "walk" until a fresh jolt made him cry out.
In front of the field-hospital some medical officers had improvised an operating-table in a shady part of the road. The wounded were laid out in rows on the edge of the ditch. A fat doctor with four stripes on his arm ran hither and thither, shouting.
Carried on stretchers or limping on foot, either alone or with the aid of their comrades, the wounded arrived. One man's chin was no more than a bloody jelly; one of his eyes was shut and the other wide open.
The veterinary surgeon's horse, shot through by a shell splinter, had followed the wounded as far as the ambulance, but as soon as he stopped he sank to his knees by the side of the road. The eyes of the animal were full of a suffering almost human, and as he turned his head towards me I fired my revolver in his ear. With a dull, heavy thud like that of an axe as it sinks deep in a tree-trunk, the animal fell on his flank, and from the top of the slope skirting the road rolled over twice into the field below.
We had at once to return to the scene of slaughter, where we were badly needed. As soon as I left the fresh air and sunshine and re-entered the woods I felt almost paralysed by the thought of what I was going to see, and the shadows of the trees, growing darker as the daylight waned, helped to intensify my fear.
"Come on!..."
Two saddle-horses with bleeding wounds were walking away from the shambles by instinct. With faltering steps they slowly descended the road towards the sun. The dead horses had been unharnessed and dragged to one side of the way, but two artillerymen had been left lying in the middle of the road, and some one, either out of force of habit or out of pity for the dead, had broken two branches off one of the beeches and had covered their faces with leaves.