At Fresnières an enormous shell had just killed, in front of the door of the hospital, a medical officer, a nun, and four wounded men. The bodies were laid out side by side on the pavement, but the corpse of a Tirailleur, a great, dark-skinned giant whose arms, stretched out, spanned an extraordinary space, still lay in the cut-up roadway. The air was full of the distant whistling of shells. In the face of this menace which remained hanging over my head, now that I could no longer fight, I was seized with an instinctive and puerile feeling of revolt. I was no longer fair game.
In the yard outside the hospital, among the stretchers bearing wounded, blood-stained men, some hospital orderlies were laying the more severe cases on a large table covered with a flowery-patterned oil-cloth. Two medical officers were hurriedly dressing them.
One, a big, brown-haired man with gold-rimmed spectacles, beckoned to me. I went up to him.
"Well, what's wrong with you?"
"Shrapnel...."
"Let's have a look!"
He unwound the bandage, and, as soon as he took off the compress, the blood began to spurt like a fountain. He looked at the wound and made a grimace.
"H'm ... it bleeds badly...."
He called one of his subordinates, a bearded officer, who hurried up.
"Look ... we'd better take the thumb right off, hadn't we?"