"
He understood, and pleaded the cause of his illness:
"I'm done in, I spit blood. I've no strength left, and it doesn't
come back, you know, when it goes away like that."
"Ah, ah!" murmured the comrades--wavering, but secretly convinced
all the same of the inferiority of civilian ailments to wounds.
In resignation he lowered his head and repeated to himself very
quietly, "I can't walk any more; where would you have me go?"
* * * * * *
A commotion is arising for some unknown reason in. the horizontal
gulf which lengthens as it contracts from stretcher to stretcher as
far as the eye can see, as far as the pallid peep of daylight, in
this confused corridor where the poor winking flames of candles
redden and seem feverish, and winged shadows cast themselves. The
odds and ends of heads and limbs are agitated, appeals and cries
arouse each other and increase in number like invisible ghosts. The
prostrate bodies undulate, double up, and turn over.
In the heart of this den of captives, debased and punished by pain,
I make out the big mass of a hospital attendant whose heavy
shoulders rise and fall like a knapsack carried crosswise, and whose
stentorian voice reverberates at speed through the cave. "You've
been meddling with your bandage again, you son of a lubber, you
varmint!" he thunders. "I'll do it up again for you, as long as it's
you, my chick, but if you touch it again, you'll see what I'll do to
you!"
Behold him then in the obscurity, twisting a bandage round the
cranium of a very little man who is almost upright, who has
bristling hair and a beard which puffs out in front.
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