The Debacle - Emile Zola [154]
Delaherche was frozen with horror and would have liked to run away. But there was no time, the arm being already on the table. The soldier who had had his arm amputated, a recruit, a hefty peasant, was regaining consciousness and caught sight of the arm being taken by an orderly to the place behind the laburnums. He glanced at his shoulder and saw it cut and bleeding. He flew into a furious rage.
‘Oh Christ, what a bloody silly trick you’ve done!’
Bouroche was too tired to answer at once. Then with man-to-man heartiness:
‘I did it for the best, I didn’t want you to peg out, my boy… Anyhow, I did consult you, and you said yes!’
‘I said yes! I said yes! How could I know what I was saying?’
His anger vanished and he began to cry bitterly.
‘What’s the fucking good of me now?’
He was carried back to the straw, the American cloth and table were vigorously swabbed, and once again the pails of red water were thrown over the lawn and bloodied the whole bed of daisies.
Delaherche was amazed that he could still hear the guns. Why hadn’t they stopped? Surely Rose’s tableloth must now be hoisted above the citadel. It seemed, on the contrary, that the Prussians’ fire was growing in intensity. The ear-splitting din shook even the least nervous from head to foot in growing distress. It could hardly be good for operators or patients, for these explosions pulled your insides out. The whole ambulance station was upset by them and being strained to breaking-point.
‘It was over, what are they going on for?’ cried Delaherche, straining his ears all the time, thinking that each shot he heard was the last.
Then as he was making for Bouroche to remind him about the captain, he was astonished to find him on a bale of straw on the ground, lying on his front with both arms bare to the shoulders and thrust into two buckets of ice-cold water. At the end of his moral and physical resources, the major was trying to relax like this, for he was stunned and knocked out by immense sadness and despair – at one of those moments when a practitioner is in agony over his own apparent powerlessness. Yet he was a strong man, thick-skinned and stout-hearted. But he had been struck by the ‘what’s the use?’ and the feeling that he would never do it all, could never do it all, had suddenly paralysed him. What was the use? Death would always come out the strongest!
Two orderlies brought Captain Beaudoin up on a stretcher.
‘Major,’ Delaherche ventured to say, ‘here’s the captain.’
Bouroche opened his eyes, took his arms out of the pails, gave them a shake and wiped them on the straw. Then getting up on to his knees:
‘Oh yes, fuck it, another of them!… Oh well, come on, the day’s not over yet!’
Already he was on his feet and refreshed, shaking his leonine head with its tawny mane, having got himself back to normal by professional habit and ruthless self-discipline.
Gilberte and Madame Delaherche had followed the stretcher and they remained standing at a little distance when the captain had been laid on the mattress with the American cloth over it.
‘Right, it’s above the right ankle,’ Bouroche was saying, for he always talked a lot to take the patient’s mind off it. ‘Not too bad in that place, you get over it quite well… Let’s have a look at it.’
But it was clear that he was worried about the torpor of Beaudoin’s condition. He looked at the emergency dressing, which was just a simple band, tightened and held over the trouser-leg by a bayonet sheath. He muttered between his teeth, wondering what sort of silly clot had done that. But then he suddenly went quiet for he understood – it must have happened on the journey, in the landau