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By Root 1953 0

and given emergency dressings. It was a horrible unloading of poor wretches, some with the greenish pallor of death on them, others purple with congestion, many unconscious, others screaming, some so stupefied that they gave themselves to the orderlies with terrified eyes while others died of shock as soon as they were touched. The crowd was so dense that all the mattresses in the huge low shed were on the point of being used up, and Major Bouroche ordered the straw to be used, a large supply of which he had had put at one end. But so far he and his assistants could cope with the operations. All he had asked for was another table, with a mattress and American cloth over it, in the operating shed. An orderly quickly thrust a towel soaked in chloroform under the patient’s nose. Little steel scissors gleamed, saws made a tiny file-like sound, blood squirted out in sudden jets, to be stopped at once. Patients for operation were brought up and carried away in a rapid shuttle-service, with just time for the American cloth to be wiped with a sponge. At the further end of the lawn, behind a clump of laburnums, into the charnel-house they had had to make there to get the dead out of the way, they also threw amputated legs and arms and all the bits of flesh and bone left on the tables.

Madame Delaherche and Gilberte were sitting under one of the big trees and could not manage to roll enough bandages. Bouroche, rushing by red-faced and with his apron already red, threw a bundle of linen to Delaherche and shouted:

‘Look here, why don’t you do something and make yourself useful!’

But the mill-owner protested:

‘Excuse me, I must go again and find out what the news is. We don’t know whether we’re alive or dead.’

He touched his wife’s hair with his lips.

‘Poor Gilberte, to think that one shell can set fire to all this! It’s terrifying.’

She was very pale, she looked up and glanced round with a shudder. Then her involuntary, irresistible smile came to her lips.

‘Oh yes, terrible, all these men being cut up… It’s funny that I can stick it without fainting.’

Madame Delaherche had watched her son kiss the young woman’s hair. She made a little movement as though to thrust the thing out of sight, thinking of the other one, the man who must also have kissed that hair last night. Her old hands shook and she murmured:

‘Oh God, what suffering! It makes you forget your own.’

Delaherche went off, saying he would be back in a moment with definite news. Even in the rue Maqua he was surprised by the number of soldiers coming back with no weapons, their uniforms in tatters and filthy with dust. But he could not get any exact details out of those he took the trouble to question: some answered in a daze that they didn’t know, others talked so much and with such a frenzy of gesture and extravagance of words that they might have been mad. So he instinctively made for the Sub-Prefecture again, with the idea that all the news went there. As he was crossing the Place du Collège two cannons, probably the only two left out of a battery, dashed up and were stopped by a kerbstone. In the Grande-Rue he had to admit that the town was beginning to get overcrowded with the first fugitives. Three hussars who had lost their horses were sitting in a doorway and sharing a loaf, two others were slowly leading their horses along by the bridle with no idea where to stable them, officers were frantically running hither and thither, apparently not knowing where they were making for. On the Place Turenne a second lieutenant advised him not to hang about because quite a few shells were coming down, and a fragment had even broken the railing surrounding the statue of the Great Captain, conqueror of the Palatinate. And indeed, as he slipped quickly along the rue de la Sous-Préfecture, he saw two projectiles burst with a terrific noise on the Meuse bridge.

He was standing in front of the concierge’s lodge trying to think up an excuse to ask for one of the aides-de-camp and question him, when a young voice hailed him:

‘Monsieur Delaherche!… Come in quick, this is no time