"We're waiting to be cleared, you know," I am informed by a big man
who pants and sweats--all the bulk of him seems to be boiling. His
mustache hangs as if it had come half unstuck through the moisture
of his face. He turns two big and lightless eyes on me, and his
wound is not visible.
"That's so," says another; "all the wounded of the Brigade come and
pile themselves up here one after another, without counting them
from other places. Yes, look at it now; this hole here, it's the
midden for the whole Brigade."
"I'm gangrened, I'm smashed, I'm all in bits inside," droned one who
sat with his head in his hands and spoke through his fingers; "yet
up to last week I was young and I was clean. They've changed me.
Now, I've got nothing but a dirty old decomposed body to drag
along."
"Yesterday," says another, "I was twenty-six years old. And now how
old am I?" He tries to get up, so as to show us his shaking and
faded face, worn out in a night, to show us the emaciation, the
depression of cheeks and eye-sockets, and the dying flicker of light
in his greasy eye.
"It hurts!" humbly says some one invisible.
"What's the use of worrying?" repeats the other mechanically.
There was a silence, and then the aviator cried, "The padres were
trying on both sides to hide their voices."
"What's that mean?" said the astonished zouave.
"Are you taking leave of 'em, old chap?" asked a chasseur wounded in
the hand and with one arm bound to his body, as his eyes left the
mummified limb for a moment to glance at the flying-man.
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