The Debacle - Emile Zola [152]
right through, some with a hole so tiny that there was no bleeding, but others with an open gash through which the life-blood ebbed away in a red stream, and unseen internal haemorrhages struck men down all of a sudden in raving delirium and turned them black. Heads had suffered even worse things, smashed jaws with tongue and teeth a bleeding mess, eye-sockets driven in and eyes half out, skulls split open with brains visible. All those whose spinal cord or brain had been reached by bullets were like corpses, in a deathlike coma, while the others, those with fractures or feverish temperatures, were softly begging for something to drink.
Then in the operating shed next door there was a fresh horror. In this first rush only urgent operations were being done, the ones that had to be done because of the desperate condition of the patients. Any danger of haemorrhage made Bouroche decide on immediate amputation. Neither could he stop to look for bullets buried in wounds and remove them if they had lodged in some dangerous place, such as the bottom of the neck, the region of the armpit or groin, or in the elbow or back of the knee. Other wounds that he preferred to leave for observation were just dressed by orderlies under his supervision. Already he had done four amputations, spacing them out by taking ‘rest’ periods, during which he extracted a few bullets, between the major operations, and now he was beginning to tire. There were only two tables, his and one where one of his assistants was working. They had hung up a sheet between the two so that men being operated on could not see each other. However well they were sponged down the tables remained red, and the buckets they emptied a few steps away over a bed of daisies – buckets in which a single glassful of blood was enough to turn the clear water red – looked like pailfuls of pure blood, great sploshes of which covered the flowerbeds in the lawn. Although the fresh air came in freely a revolting stench rose from the tables, bandages and instruments in the sickly smell of chloroform.
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