"Excuse me, major, but here is an order to escort twelve wagons of wounded as far as Lutzen. Is it here that we are to receive them?" '"Yes, it is here," replied the surgeon.
The peasants and the ambulance-drivers, after giving us a last draught of wine, began carrying us to the wagons. As one was filled, it departed, and another advanced. They had given us our great-coats; but despite them and the sun, which was shining brightly, we shivered with cold. No one spoke; each was too much occupied thinking of himself.
At moments I was terribly cold; then flashes of heat would dart through me, and flush me as in fever; and indeed it was the beginning of the fever. But as we left Kaya, I was yet well; I saw everything clearly, and it was not till we neared Leipsic that I felt indeed sick. The hussars rode beside us, smoking and chatting, paying no attention to us.
In passing through Kaya, I saw all the horrors of war. The village was but a mass of cinders; the roofs had fallen, and the walls alone remained standing; the rafters were broken; we could see the remnants of rooms, stairs, and doors heaped within. The poor villagers, women, children, and old men, came and went with sorrowful faces. We could see them going up and down in their houses; and in one we saw a mirror yet hanging unbroken, showing where dwelt a young girl in time of peace.
Ah! who of them could foresee that their happiness would so soon be destroyed, not by the fury of the winds or the wrath of heaven, but by the rage of man!
Even the cattle and pigeons seemed seeking their lost homes among the ruins; the oxen and the goats scattered through the streets, lowed and bleated plaintively. At the last house an old man, with flowing white hair, sat at the threshold of what had been his cottage, with a child upon his knees, glaring on us as we passed. His furrowed brow and stony eyes spoke of despair. How many years of labor, of patient economy, had he passed to make sure a quiet old age! Now all was crushed, ruined; the child and he had no longer a roof to cover their heads.
And those great trenches—fully a mile of them—at which the country people were working in such haste, to keep the plague from completing the work war began! I saw them, too, from the top of the hill of Kaya, and turned away my eyes, horror-stricken. Russians, French, Prussians were there heaped pell-mell, as if God had made them to love each other before the invention of arms and uniforms, which divide them for the profit of those who rule them. There they lay, side by side; and those of them who could not die knew no more of war, but cursed the crimes that had for centuries kept them apart.
But what was sadder yet, was the long line of ambulances, bearing the agonized wounded—those of whom they speak so much in the bulletins to make the loss seem less, and who die by thousands in the hospitals, far from all they love; while at their homes cannon are firing, and church-bells are ringing with joyous chimes of victory.
At length we reached Lutzen, but it was so full of wounded that we were obliged to continue on to Leipsic. Fatigue and weariness overpowered me, and I fell asleep, and only awoke when I felt myself lifted from the ambulance. It was night, the sky seemed covered with stars, and innumerable lights shone from an immense edifice before us. It was the hospital of the market-place at Leipsic.
The two men who were carrying me ascended a spiral stairway which led to an immense hall, where beds were laid together in three lines, so close that they touched each other. On one of these beds I was placed, in the midst of oaths, cries for pity, and muttered complaints from hundreds of fever-stricken wounded. The windows were open, and the flames of the lanterns flickered in the gusts of wind. Surgeons, assistants, and nurses came and went, while the groans from the halls below, and the rolling of ambulances, cracking of whips and neighing of horses without, seemed to pierce my very brain. While they were undressing me, they handled me roughly, and my wound pained me so horribly that I could not avoid shrieking. A surgeon came up at once, and scolded them for not being more careful. That is all I remember that night; for I became delirious, and raved constantly of Catharine, Monsieur Goulden, and Aunt Grédel, as my neighbor, an old artilleryman, whom my cries prevented from sleeping, afterward told me. I awoke the next morning at about eight o'clock, and then learned that I had the bone of my left shoulder broken. I lay in the middle of a dozen surgeons; one of them a stout, dark man, whom they called Monsieur the Baron, was opening my bandages, while an assistant at the foot of the bed held a basin of warm water. The baron examined my wound; all the others bent forward to hear what he might say. He spoke a few moments, but all that I could understand was, that the ball had struck from below, breaking the bone and passing out behind. The surgeon, passing to another bed, cried: