The Debacle - Emile Zola [178]
But, tired already and anxious to get it done with:
‘Oh well, you, the corporal, have some all the same… Hurry up there, next!’
He had dropped the coins into the képi Jean was holding out. Jean, staggered by the amount – nearly six hundred francs – wanted Maurice to have half at once. You never knew, they might get separated.
They shared it out in the garden, near the ambulance station, and then they went in there as they recognized their company drummer Bastian lying on the straw almost by the door. He was a fat, jolly chap and he had had the ill-luck to get a stray bullet in the groin at five o’clock, after the battle was over. He had been at death’s door since yesterday.
In the dim morning light, time for waking up in the hospital, the sight of the place chilled them with horror. Three more wounded had died during the night without anybody noticing, and the orderlies were busy carrying off the bodies and making room for others. Yesterday’s operation cases, still half asleep, opened staring eyes and gazed bewildered at this vast dormitory of suffering, where a herd of half-slaughtered creatures were lying on the straw. For all the sweeping and mopping up of the night before, after the bleeding butchery of the operations, the floor had not been properly wiped and there were trails of blood here and there, and a big sponge stained red and looking like brains was floating in a pail, and an odd hand with broken fingers had been dropped near the shed door. These were the bits fallen from the butchery, the awful refuse of the day after a massacre, lit up by the gruesome light of dawn. The normal bustling and noisy life of the earlier hours had given way to a sort of apathy under the pressure of fever. Only now and again was the reeking silence broken by some incoherent moan, muffled by sleep. Glazed eyes looked frightened of the daylight, coated mouths breathed foul breath, the whole ward was relapsing into that endless succession of livid, disgusting, agonizing days through which these wretched wounded were to exist, and from which after two or three months they might emerge with a limb missing.
Bouroche, coming on again after a few hours’ rest, paused in front of the drummer Bastian, then went on with an imperceptible shrug of the shoulders. Nothing to be done. But the drummer had opened his eyes again and seemed to come back to life as his keen glance followed a sergeant who had had the bright idea of coming in holding his képi full of gold in his hand to see if any of his men might be here among these poor devils. Other sergeants came in and gold began to rain down on the straw. Bastian, who had managed to sit up, held out the shaking hands of a dying man:
‘Me! Me!’
The sergeant was for going on as Bouroche had. What was the point? But then an instinct of kindness prevailed, and without counting he threw some coins into the already cold hands.
‘Me! Me!’
Bastian had fallen back. He tried to catch the gold that eluded his grasp, clutching for some time with stiff fingers. Then he died.
‘Night-night, the gent has blown out his candle!’ said a neighbour, a dark wizened little Zouave. ‘Too bad just when you’ve got something to stand yourself a drink!’
This man had his left foot in an appliance, but he managed to lift himself and crawl on his elbows and knees as far as the dead man and pick up the lot, looking into his hands and ransacking the folds of his coat. When he got back to his own place he realized he was being looked at, but all he said was:
‘No need for it to get lost, is there?’
Maurice felt sick at heart in this atmosphere of human misery and got Jean away quickly. As they re-crossed the operating shed they saw Bouroche, exasperated at not having got any chloroform, deciding to amputate all the same the leg of a poor young fellow of twenty. They hurried away so as not to hear.
At that moment Delaherche was coming in from the street. He beckoned them over and said:
‘Come upstairs quick. We’re going to have breakfast, cook