The Debacle - Emile Zola [222]
One of their topics of conversation was the field hospital, where Henriette spent all her time except when she kept Jean company. In the evening when she came home he would question her and he knew all her patients, wanted to know who were dying and who were recovering, and she, always wanting to talk about things near her heart, went over her days in the minutest detail.
‘Oh,’ was her refrain, ‘poor boys, poor boys!’
It was no longer the ambulance station on the day of battle, when fresh blood flowed and amputations were carried out on healthy red flesh. It was now an ambulance station infected by the putrescence of the hospital, smelling of fever and death, clammy with slow convalescences and protracted death agonies. Dr Dalichamp had had the greatest difficulty in procuring the necessary beds, mattresses and sheets, and every day still he had to perform miracles to keep his patients in bread, meat and dried vegetables, to say nothing of bandages, compresses and apparatus. The Prussians who had taken over the military hospital in Sedan refused to give him anything, even chloroform, and so he had got everything from Belgium. And yet he had taken in German wounded in the same way as French, and in particular he was tending a dozen Bavarians picked up at Bazeilles. The enemies who had flown at each other’s throats were now lying side by side in the good companionship of their common suffering. And what a home of fear and misery it was – these two long halls of the old school at Remilly, with fifty beds in each, in the bright, crude light from the lofty windows!
Even ten days after the battle wounded had still been brought in, forgotten men found in odd corners. Four had stayed in an empty house at Balan with no medical attention whatever, living God knows how but probably thanks to the charity of some neighbour; and their wounds were crawling with maggots and they had died, poisoned by their own filthy sores. This purulence, which nothing could check, raged through the place and emptied rows of beds. As soon as you reached the door a smell of necrosis caught you by the throat. Drainage tubes suppurated, dripping fetid pus drop by drop. Often flesh had to be reopened to get out still more unsuspected splinters of bone. Then abscesses appeared, that were going to discharge in some other part of the body. The wretched men, exhausted, emaciated, their faces grey, endured every kind of torture. Some, prostrate and scarcely able to breathe, spent all their days on their backs with eyelids closed and black, like corpses already half decomposed. Others, the sleepless ones, plagued with restless insomnia and soaked in copious sweat, got wildly excited as though the catastrophe had driven them out of their minds. And whether they were violent or inert, once the shivering of infectious fever seized them it was all over, the poison won, flitting from the one to the other and carrying them all off in the same tide of victorious corruption.
Worst of all, there was the condemned ward, the place for men stricken with dysentery, typhus or smallpox. Many had black pox. They were never still, but raved in a continual delirium, rising up in their beds and standing like spectres. Others, affected in the lungs, were dying of pneumonia racked with dreadful coughing. Others shouted all the time and only found relief when a jet of cold water was constantly cooling their wounds. That was the longed-for time, the hour for dressing wounds, which alone brought a bit of peace, when beds were aired and some relaxation was afforded to bodies grown stiff through staying in the same position. But this also was the dreaded hour, for not a day passed when the doctor examining wounds did not grieve to see on some poor devil’s skin the bluish patches that betrayed the advancing gangrene. That meant operating the next day. Yet another bit of leg or arm cut away. Sometimes even the gangrene went higher up and the job had to be repeated until the