The Debacle - Emile Zola [223]
Every evening when she came home Henriette answered Jean’s questions, and her voice always shook with the same emotion.
‘Oh, poor boys, poor boys!’
Then came the details, always similar, of the daily torments of this hell. They had amputated an arm at the shoulder, or a foot, performed the resection of a humerus, but would gangrene or septicaemia spare the patient? Or again, they had buried one of them, usually a Frenchman, but sometimes a German. Hardly a day passed when some furtive coffin, bodged up quickly out of four pieces of wood, did not leave the hospital at dusk, accompanied by one orderly and often Henriette herself, so that a man should not just be buried like a dog. In the little cemetery of Remilly two trenches had been dug, and they all slept side by side, the Germans on the left and the French on the right, reconciled in the earth.
Jean had become interested in some of the patients whom he had never seen, and he asked for news of them.
‘What about “Poor Kid”, how’s he doing today?’
This was a young trooper in the fifth regiment of the line, who had enlisted as a volunteer and was not yet twenty. The nickname ‘Poor Kid’ had stuck to him because he constantly used these words about himself, and when one day somebody had asked him why, he had answered that his mother always called him that. Poor kid, indeed, for he was dying of pleurisy, the aftermath of a wound in his left side.
‘Oh the dear boy,’ said Henriette, who had developed a motherly affection for him. ‘He’s not doing too well and has coughed all day long… It breaks my heart to hear him.’
‘And your bear, this Gutmann of yours?’ Jean went on with a wan smile. ‘Is the doctor more hopeful?’
‘Yes, they may save him. But he is in terrible pain.’
In spite of really great pity, they could not refer to Gutmann without a sort of affectionate flippancy. On the very first day she had gone to work at the hospital she had been horrified to recognize in this Bavarian soldier the man with the red beard and hair, bulging blue eyes and wide, square nose, who had carried her off in his arms at Bazeilles when they shot her husband. He recognized her too, but he could not speak, for a bullet had gone through the back of his neck and taken away half his tongue. After two days of horror and revulsion and an uncontrollable shuddering every time she went near his bed, she was won over by his most desperate and appealing look as he followed her round with his eyes. Was he no longer the monster with bloodstained hair and eyes, mad with frenzy, who haunted her with a terrible memory? It needed an effort to recognize him now in this poor wretch with such a friendly, gentle expression in spite of all his atrocious suffering. His case, an uncommon one involving this sudden incapacity, touched the whole hospital. They were not even quite sure his name was Gutmann, but that is what they called him because the only sound he could manage to get out was a growl in two syllables which made roughly that name. As far as the rest was concerned, they only thought they knew that he was married and had children, because he knew a few words of French and sometimes answered with a vigorous nod. Married? Yes, yes! Children? Yes, yes! His emotion one day when he saw some flour had also made them guess he might be a miller. But that was all. Where was the mill? Were a wife and children weeping at this very moment in some remote village in Bavaria? Was he going to die unknown, nameless, leaving his own folk over there to wait for him for ever?
‘Today,’ Henriette told Jean one evening, ‘Gutmann blew me some kisses… I can’t give him a drink now or do the slightest thing for him but he puts his fingers to his lips in a fervent gesture of gratitude… We mustn’t smile, it’s too terrible to buried alive like that before