The Debacle - Emile Zola [155]
Bouroche took it out violently on an orderly who was helping him.
‘You clumsy sod, cut it away, quick!’
The orderly cut away the trouser leg and pants underneath, also the sock and boot. The leg and the foot could now be seen, colourless bare flesh flecked with blood. Above the ankle there was a terrible hole into which the fragment of shell had driven a piece of red cloth. A lump of jagged flesh and muscle was sticking out of the wound in a mass of pulp.
Gilberte had to support herself against one of the posts of the shed. Oh that flesh, such white flesh, and now bloody and mangled! For all her horror she could not take her eyes off it.
‘Gosh!’ declared Bouroche. ‘They’ve made a fine old job of you!’
He touched the foot, which was cold, and he could feel no pulse. His face became very grave, with a puckering of the lip that he always had over desperate cases.
‘Gosh!’ he said again. ‘That’s a bad foot!’
The captain, whose anxiety woke him out of his daze, watched him and waited, and at length he said:
‘You think so, major?’
Bouroche’s tactics were never to ask a wounded man directly for the usual permission when an amputation was clearly necessary. He preferred the patient to come round to it himself.
‘Bad foot!’ he murmured as though thinking aloud. ‘We shan’t be able to save it.’
Nervously Beaudoin went on:
‘Look here, it’s got to be faced, major. What do you think?’
‘I think you are a brave man, captain, and that you’re going to let me do what’s necessary.’
Beaudoin’s eyes lost their lustre and seemed to cloud over with a sort of reddish mist. He had understood. But in spite of the unbearable fear choking him, he answered simply and with courage:
‘Carry on, major.’
The preparations did not take long. Already the assistant had in readiness the cloth soaked in chloroform and it was at once held under the patient’s nose. Then, at the exact moment when the brief spasm preceding unconsciousness occurred, two orderlies moved the captain along on the mattress so as to have his legs accessible, and one held the left leg and supported it, while an assistant seized the right and squeezed it tight with both hands up near the groin to compress the arteries.
When she saw Bouroche drawing near with his narrow knife Gilberte could bear it no longer.
‘No, no! It’s horrible!’
She was swooning and holding on to Madame Delaherche, who had to put her arm out to save her from falling.
‘Why stay, then?’
Yet both women did stay. They turned their heads away, trying not to see, and stood there rooted to the spot and trembling, clinging to each other although there was so little love lost between them.
It was certainly at this hour of the day that the thunder of the guns was at its worst. It was now three, and Delaherche, feeling let down and exasperated, declared that it was beyond his comprehension. For now there was no doubt about it that, far from stopping, the Prussian batteries were redoubling their fire. Why? What was going on? It was a hellish bombardment, the ground shook and the very air was on fire. All round Sedan the eight hundred pieces of German equipment, a girdle of bronze, were firing at once, blasting the fields with a continuous thunder, and this converging fire, all these surrounding heights aiming at the centre, would burn and pulverize the town within two hours. The worst of it was that shells were beginning to come down on houses again. More and more crashes could be heard. One shell went off in the rue des Voyards. Another knocked a bit off one of the tall chimneys of the mill and rubble came down outside the shed.
Bouroche glanced up and growled:
‘Do they want to finish our wounded off? This row is unbearable.’
However, the orderly was holding the captain’s leg out straight, and, with a rapid incision all round, the major cut the skin below the knee, five centimetres below the point where he intended to cut through the bones. Then at once, using the same