It was night-time, and I could hear the hours striking, hours which would have been long if I had not beside me moaning and groaning, suffering to be consoled. We had had to wait for them for a fortnight, but there they were now, filling the great dormitories of a school which had been turned into a military hospital, where we had joined our post in the war. They suffer in silence, or when in the throes of a hideous nightmare, they scream and groan with the torture their mutilated bodies wrings from them.
I went up to a bed over which the lamp shed a subdued light. There lay a young fellow of about twenty, awakened by the intensity of his suffering. I had seen him but a short time before on his stretcher, a poor broken thing, his eyes staring, with the horrors of his dreadful journey still pictured in them.
What appalling scenes had I read in them. All the horrors of war had become present to me.
Stretched out motionless on his stretcher, he looked like a corpse, whose eyes had not been properly closed, indifferent to all around him. Then, when we had lifted him, and with such care, he began to scream and cry out. A doctor should have dressed his wounds at the front, but they had not been done for four days. On being lifted up, his shattered leg, cramped and asleep, gave him excruciating pain, and his whole body writhed as though it had been on the rack.
I had noticed this young Marseillais, with his child's face among all the other wounded men, and I had been attracted by his youth and his sufferings.
I went up to his bed. I leant over him, and said with the instinctive gentleness which compassion inspires one with: "You are suffering, my child?"
Without answering, he withdrew his burning hand from mine, and put his arm round my neck.
"Father," he said, in a weak voice, "Father, am I going to die?"
What answer could I make? I didn't know; besides, even when one is sure, one can't say it out brutally like that.
Then the poor boy guessed I had misunderstood him, and his proud, brave soul wished to keep the glory of the soldier, who has braved danger without flinching. Now he defied death and found strength to smile.