The Debacle - Emile Zola [137]
It was true that he was less conscious of the painful tightness in his head and ribs, the strait-jacket of fear that makes your bones crack. He teased Lapoulle, who was worrying about the disappearance of Chouteau and Loubet and talking of going to look for them – lovely idea that was, to go and take cover behind a tree and smoke a pipe! Pache would have it that they had been kept by the ambulance people who were short of stretcher-bearers. That’s not a pleasant occupation either, going round picking up the wounded under fire. Then, tormented as ever by his rustic superstitions, he added that it was bad luck to touch the dead, you might die yourself.
‘Oh shut up, for God’s sake!’ shouted Lieutenant Rochas. ‘As though you would!’
Colonel de Vineuil, riding by on his tall horse, turned his head, and he smiled for the only time since the early morning. Then he relapsed into his immobility, always unmoved under fire, waiting for orders.
Maurice’s interest was being caught by the stretcher-bearers, and he watched them as they searched among the ups and downs of the terrain. There must be a first-aid post behind the hedge at the end of the sunken lane and it was the men from there who had set about exploring the plateau. A tent was being quickly set up while the essential material was unloaded from a van, the few instruments and pieces of apparatus, bandages, the wherewithal for quick dressings before the wounded were dispatched for Sedan as and when transport could be made available; and soon it would not be. There were only orderlies at that point. But it was the stretcher-bearers whose heroism was steadfast and inconspicuous. They could be seen in their grey uniforms with the red cross on their caps and armbands, slowly, quietly risking their lives under fire to get to places where men had fallen. They crawled on all fours, trying to utilize ditches and hedges and any mound or dip without showing off by needlessly exposing themselves. Then as soon as they found men lying on the ground their hard task began, for many of these men had lost consciousness, and they had to distinguish the wounded from the dead. Some had stayed lying on their faces with their mouths in a pool of blood and were choking to death, others had their gullets full of mud as though they had bitten off lumps of earth, others lay in heaps higgledy-piggledy, arms and legs contorted and ribs nearly crushed. With great care the bearers freed and lifted the ones still breathing, straightened out their limbs, raised their heads and cleaned them as best they could. Each man had a can of fresh water, but was exceedingly sparing with it. Often they could be seen kneeling for minutes at a time trying to revive a wounded man and waiting for him to open his eyes.
Some fifty metres away to the left Maurice watched one trying to locate the wound of a young soldier from whose sleeve blood was trickling drop by drop. There was a haemorrhage that the red-cross man found eventually and stopped by compressing an artery. In urgent cases they simply took immediate precautions, avoiding harmful movements in fracture cases, binding up limbs and immobilizing them so as to make it safe to move the men. And transport then became the main problem: they supported the walking cases, carried others in their arms like children or pickaback, or again they worked in pairs of three or four together according to the degree of difficulty, making a chair with joined hands, or supporting their legs and shoulders. Beside the regulation stretchers there were also all kinds of ingenious devices, stretchers improvised from rifles tied together with straps from packs. And from all directions all over the plain being raked by gunfire, they could be seen singly or in groups, moving along with their burdens, keeping their heads down, testing the ground with their feet with cautious, admirable heroism.
As Maurice was watching one of them on his right, a puny, delicate-looking young man who was carrying a heavily-built sergeant on his back and struggling along on his