A kindly man at bottom, Delaherche was shuddering with pity when his attention was caught by a landau coming through the gateway. Presumably this grand carriage was all they had managed to find, and it was piled with wounded, eight of them one on top of the other. Delaherche uttered a cry of astonishment and horror when he saw that the last one to be carried out was Captain Beaudoin.
‘Oh, poor fellow!… Just a minute, I’ll call my mother and my wife.’
They rushed up, leaving the bandage-rolling to two maids. The orderlies who had seized the captain were carrying him into the shed and were about to lay him on a heap of straw when Delaherche noticed on a mattress a soldier motionless, with ashen face and staring eyes.
‘But look, that one’s dead!’
‘Oh yes, so he is,’ murmured an orderly. ‘No use having him cluttering up the place.’
And he and a comrade took the corpse and carried it off to the charnel-house they had made behind the laburnums. There were already a dozen or so dead put out there just as they had stiffened at the end, some with feet thrust out as though they had been on the rack with pain, others all deformed and twisted in horrible postures. Some were grinning, with white eyes and teeth showing between turned-back lips, and many of them, with drawn and terribly sad faces, were still weeping bitterly. One very young fellow, short and thin with half his head gone, was still convulsively clasping on his heart with both hands a woman’s photo, one of those dim photos from a suburban shop, and it was splashed with blood. And at the feet of the dead were the heaps of arms and legs, and in fact anything cut out or hacked off on the operating tables, the sweepings of a butcher’s shop when he had swept the refuse of flesh and bones into a corner.
When she saw Captain Beaudoin Gilberte had shuddered. Oh God, how pale he looked as he lay on that mattress, with his face quite white under the dirt that soiled it! The thought that only a few hours ago he had held her in his arms and was so full of life and smelt so sweet, froze her with horror. She knelt down.
‘How dreadful, my dear! But it isn’t anything, is it?’
She automatically took out her handkerchief and dabbed his face, finding him unbearable in that state, filthy with sweat, earth and powder. She felt she was relieving his pain by cleaning him up a little.
‘It isn’t anything, is it? It’s only your leg!’
The captain, who was in a sort of drowsy sleep, opened his eyes with difficulty. He recognized his friends and was trying to smile at them.
‘Yes, only my leg… I didn’t even feel it happen, I thought I had stumbled and was falling…’
But he was finding it difficult to speak.
‘Oh I’m thirsty, I’m thirsty.’
Then Madame Delaherche, who had been leaning over the other side of the mattress, got busy. She ran off for a glass and a flask of water with a few drops of brandy in it. When the captain had greedily drunk off a glass she had to share out the rest between the other wounded near-by – every hand was stretched out and urgent voices were imploring. A Zouave, for whom there was none left, burst into tears.
Meanwhile Delaherche was trying to speak to the major so as to get some favourable treatment for the captain. Bouroche had just come into the shed with his bloodstained apron and heavy face sweating, looking as if it was on fire under his leonine mane, and as he went by men raised themselves up and tried to stop him, all anxious to be seen to at once, to be helped and to know: ‘Come to me, doctor, me!’ He was pursued by incoherent prayers and clutching fingers touched his clothes. But he was entirely wrapped up in his job, puffing wearily as he went on organizing the work without listening to anybody. He talked aloud to himself, counted the cases on his fingers, giving them numbers and classifications: this one, that one, then the other, one, two, three, a jaw, an arm, a leg, while the assistant with him listened hard so as to try to remember.
‘Major,’ said Delaherche, ‘there’s a captain here, Captain Beaudoin…’
Bouroche cut him short.
‘What! Beaudoin here? Oh, poor bugger!’
He went and stood in front of the wounded man. But he must have seen at a glance how serious the case was, for he went straight on, without even stooping to examine the injured leg.
‘All right, they’ll bring him to me straight away, as soon as I have done the operation now being got ready.’
He went back to the operating shed, followed by Delaherche, determined not to let him go for fear he might forget his promise.
This time it was the disarticulation of a shoulder by the Lisfranc method, what surgeons call a nice operation, a neat and quick job, scarcely forty seconds in all. They were already chloroforming the patient, and an assistant seized his shoulder with both hands, four fingers of each under the armpit and the thumb on top. Then Bouroche, armed with his long knife, shouted: ‘Sit him up,’ grasped the deltoid, cut into the arm and through the muscle; then stepping back he detached the joint in one go and the arm was off, amputated in three movements. The assistant had moved his thumbs along to stop the blood from the humeral artery. ‘Lay him down again!’ Bouroche couldn’t help chuckling as he went on to the ligature, for he had done the job in thirty-five seconds. All that had to be done now was to pull the bit of loose flesh down over the wound, like a flat epaulette. It was a nice, tricky business because of the danger, as a man could empty out all his blood in three minutes through the humeral artery, to say nothing of the risk of death every time you sit a patient up when he is under chloroform.
Delaherche was frozen with horror and would have liked to run away. But there was no time, the arm being already on the table. The soldier who had had his arm amputated, a recruit, a hefty peasant, was regaining consciousness and caught sight of the arm being taken by an orderly to the place behind the laburnums. He glanced at his shoulder and saw it cut and bleeding. He flew into a furious rage.
‘Oh Christ, what a bloody silly trick you’ve done!’
Bouroche was too tired to answer at once. Then with man-to-man heartiness:
‘I did it for the best, I didn’t want you to peg out, my boy… Anyhow, I did consult you, and you said yes!’
‘I said yes! I said yes! How could I know what I was saying?’
His anger vanished and he began to cry bitterly.
‘What’s the fucking good of me now?’
He was carried back to the straw, the American cloth and table were vigorously swabbed, and once again the pails of red water were thrown over the lawn and bloodied the whole bed of daisies.
Delaherche was amazed that he could still hear the guns. Why hadn’t they stopped? Surely Rose’s tableloth must now be hoisted above the citadel. It seemed, on the contrary, that the Prussians’ fire was growing in intensity. The ear-splitting din shook even the least nervous from head to foot in growing distress. It could hardly be good for operators or patients, for these explosions pulled your insides out. The whole ambulance station was upset by them and being strained to breaking-point.
‘It was over, what are they going on for?’ cried Delaherche, straining his ears all the time, thinking that each shot he heard was the last.
Then as he was making for Bouroche to remind him about the captain, he was astonished to find him on a bale of straw on the ground, lying on his front with both arms bare to the shoulders and thrust into two buckets of ice-cold water. At the end of his moral and physical resources, the major was trying to relax like this, for he was stunned and knocked out by immense sadness and despair – at one of those moments when a practitioner is in agony over his own apparent powerlessness. Yet he was a strong man, thick-skinned and stout-hearted. But he had been struck by the ‘what’s the use?’ and the feeling that he would never do it all, could never do it all, had suddenly paralysed him. What was the use? Death would always come out the strongest!
Two orderlies brought Captain Beaudoin up on a stretcher.
‘Major,’ Delaherche ventured to say, ‘here’s the captain.’
Bouroche opened his eyes, took his ar
ms out of the pails, gave them a shake and wiped them on the straw. Then getting up on to his knees:
‘Oh yes, fuck it, another of them!… Oh well, come on, the day’s not over yet!’
Already he was on his feet and refreshed, shaking his leonine head with its tawny mane, having got himself back to normal by professional habit and ruthless self-discipline.
Gilberte and Madame Delaherche had followed the stretcher and they remained standing at a little distance when the captain had been laid on the mattress with the American cloth over it.
‘Right, it’s above the right ankle,’ Bouroche was saying, for he always talked a lot to take the patient’s mind off it. ‘Not too bad in that place, you get over it quite well… Let’s have a look at it.’
But it was clear that he was worried about the torpor of Beaudoin’s condition. He looked at the emergency dressing, which was just a simple band, tightened and held over the trouser-leg by a bayonet sheath. He muttered between his teeth, wondering what sort of silly clot had done that. But then he suddenly went quiet for he understood – it must have happened on the journey, in the landau full of wounded, that the bandage had come loose and slipped down, no longer pressing on the wound, and that had caused a severe haemorrhage.
Bouroche took it out violently on an orderly who was helping him.
‘You clumsy sod, cut it away, quick!’
The orderly cut away the trouser leg and pants underneath, also the sock and boot. The leg and the foot could now be seen, colourless bare flesh flecked with blood. Above the ankle there was a terrible hole into which the fragment of shell had driven a piece of red cloth. A lump of jagged flesh and muscle was sticking out of the wound in a mass of pulp.
Gilberte had to support herself against one of the posts of the shed. Oh that flesh, such white flesh, and now bloody and mangled! For all her horror she could not take her eyes off it.
‘Gosh!’ declared Bouroche. ‘They’ve made a fine old job of you!’
He touched the foot, which was cold, and he could feel no pulse. His face became very grave, with a puckering of the lip that he always had over desperate cases.
‘Gosh!’ he said again. ‘That’s a bad foot!’
The captain, whose anxiety woke him out of his daze, watched him and waited, and at length he said:
‘You think so, major?’
Bouroche’s tactics were never to ask a wounded man directly for the usual permission when an amputation was clearly necessary. He preferred the patient to come round to it himself.
‘Bad foot!’ he murmured as though thinking aloud. ‘We shan’t be able to save it.’
Nervously Beaudoin went on:
‘Look here, it’s got to be faced, major. What do you think?’
‘I think you are a brave man, captain, and that you’re going to let me do what’s necessary.’
Beaudoin’s eyes lost their lustre and seemed to cloud over with a sort of reddish mist. He had understood. But in spite of the unbearable fear choking him, he answered simply and with courage:
‘Carry on, major.’
The preparations did not take long. Already the assistant had in readiness the cloth soaked in chloroform and it was at once held under the patient’s nose. Then, at the exact moment when the brief spasm preceding unconsciousness occurred, two orderlies moved the captain along on the mattress so as to have his legs accessible, and one held the left leg and supported it, while an assistant seized the right and squeezed it tight with both hands up near the groin to compress the arteries.
When she saw Bouroche drawing near with his narrow knife Gilberte could bear it no longer.
‘No, no! It’s horrible!’
She was swooning and holding on to Madame Delaherche, who had to put her arm out to save her from falling.
‘Why stay, then?’
Yet both women did stay. They turned their heads away, trying not to see, and stood there rooted to the spot and trembling, clinging to each other although there was so little love lost between them.
It was certainly at this hour of the day that the thunder of the guns was at its worst. It was now three, and Delaherche, feeling let down and exasperated, declared that it was beyond his comprehension. For now there was no doubt about it that, far from stopping, the Prussian batteries were redoubling their fire. Why? What was going on? It was a hellish bombardment, the ground shook and the very air was on fire. All round Sedan the eight hundred pieces of German equipment, a girdle of bronze, were firing at once, blasting the fields with a continuous thunder, and this converging fire, all these surrounding heights aiming at the centre, would burn and pulverize the town within two hours. The worst of it was that shells were beginning to come down on houses again. More and more crashes could be heard. One shell went off in the rue des Voyards. Another knocked a bit off one of the tall chimneys of the mill and rubble came down outside the shed.
Bouroche glanced up and growled:
‘Do they want to finish our wounded off? This row is unbearable.’
However, the orderly was holding the captain’s leg out straight, and, with a rapid incision all round, the major cut the skin below the knee, five centimetres below the point where he intended to cut through the bones. Then at once, using the same thin knife which he did not change so as not to waste time, he took off the skin and raised it all round like peeling an orange. But as he was about to cut through the muscles an orderly came up and whispered into his ear:
‘Number two’s gone.’
In the appalling din the major could not hear.
‘Speak up, for God’s sake! Those bloody guns are splitting my ears.’
‘Number two’s gone.’
‘Which is number two?’
‘The arm.’
‘Oh, all right… Well, bring along number three, that’s the jaw.’
With wonderful skill, and without any hesitation, he cut the muscles with a single stroke right down to the bones, laying bare the tibia and fibula between which he put a three-tailed compress to keep them in position. Then he cut them through with one stroke of the saw. The foot remained in the hands of the orderly who was holding it.
There was little loss of blood thanks to the pressure being applied higher up round the thigh by the assistant. The ligature of the three arteries was rapidly done. But the major was shaking his head, and when his assistant had taken away his fingers he examined the wound, and feeling sure that the patient could not yet hear he murmured:
‘It’s the devil, there’s no blood coming through the arterioles.’
And he finished his diagnosis with a gesture: one more poor bugger done for! Fatigue and an immense sadness had come back to his sweating face, the despairing ‘what’s the use?’, since they weren’t saving four out of ten. He mopped his brow and began to put back the skin to do the three stitchings.
Gilberte had just turned round again, as Delaherche had told her it was all over and she could look. But she did see the captain’s foot that the orderly was taking away behind the laburnums. The charnel-house was still piling up, two more dead were laid out there, one with his mouth unnaturally open and black, looking as though he were still shrieking, and the other screwed up in an awful death-struggle that had reduced him to the size of a sickly and deformed child. Worst of all, the pile of human remains was now overflowing on to the path. Not knowing where he could decently put the capain’s foot, the orderly hesitated and then made up his mind to throw it on to the pile.
‘Well, that’s that!’ said the major to Beaudoin as they revived him. ‘You’ll be all right now.’
But the captain had nothing like that happy awakening that follows successful operations. He sat up a little and then fell back, gasping in a lifeless voice:
‘Thank you, major. I’m glad it’s over.’
But then he felt the sting of the spirit dressing. And as the stretcher was being brought up to take him away a terrible explosion shook the whole factory. It was a shell that had exploded behind the shed, in the little y
ard where the pump was. Windows were shattered and a thick smoke came into the ambulance station. In the other hall the wounded had risen in panic from their straw beds and were all screaming with fear and trying to run away.
Delaherche rushed off in a frenzy to assess the damage. Were they going to burn down and destroy his house now? What on earth was going on, then? If the Emperor wanted it to stop why had they started again?
‘For God’s sake, stir your stumps!’ Bouroche bawled to the orderlies. ‘Come on, wash down the table and bring me number three!’
They swabbed the table and once more threw the pails of water over the lawn. The bed of daisies was now nothing but a bloodstained mess, greenery and flowers all mangled up in blood. The major, to whom number three had been brought, began by way of a restful change to look for a bullet which after breaking the lower jawbone must have buried itself under the tongue. There was a great deal of blood which made his fingers all sticky.
In the main hall Captain Beaudoin was back on his mattress, and Gilberte and Madame Delaherche had followed the stretcher. Even Delaherche, upset though he was, came and chatted for a moment.
‘Just relax, captain, we’ll get a room ready and have you with us.’
But the stricken man roused out of his stupor and had a moment of lucidity.
‘No, I’m sure I’m going to die.’