"Very good!"
He dressed the wounds, and went to the next, saying,
"You will soon be well."
The old artilleryman's heart seemed overflowing with joy; and, as I concluded from his name that he came from Alsace, I spoke to him in our language, at which he was still more rejoiced. He called me Josephel, and said:
"Josephel, be careful how you swallow the medicines they give you, only take what you know. All that does not taste well is good for nothing. If they would give us a bottle of Rikevir every day, we would soon be well."
When I told him I was afraid of dying of the fever, he laughed long and loud, and said:
"Josephel, you are a fool. Do you think that such tall fellows as you and I were born to die in a hospital? No, no; drive the idea from your head."
But he spoke in vain, for every morning the surgeons, making their rounds, found seven or eight dead. Some died in fevers, some in a deadly chill; so that heat or cold might be the presage of death.
Zunnier said that all this proceeded from the evil drugs which the doctors invented. "Do you see that tall, thin fellow?" he asked. "Well, that man can boast of having killed more men than a field-piece; he is always primed, with his match lighted; and that little brown fellow—I would send him instead of the emperor to the Russians and Prussians; he would kill more of them than a corps d'armée."
He would have made me laugh with his jokes if the litters were not constantly passing.