Part 4

By this time the men were in a broad ripple of laughter--all save Georges, who continued to howl with every move the doctor made. But finally the operation was over. Doctor and nurse disappeared.

“How many?” I inquired.

“Twenty-eight!” grinned the opera singer.

Georges had screeched _Doucement!_ eight-and-twenty times inside of five minutes, at a practically painless operation! And now the opera singer began to mock him by singing _Doucement!_ in every conceivable accent up and down the scale.

“Son of generations of monkeys!” grunted Georges contemptuously. He turned to me: “A drop of cognac, mees! Regard how my hand trembles.”

And he lifted that member and waggled it before my eyes without the faintest glimmer of a smile. Needless to say, he got his cognac; he had earned it. The men had expected amusement and Georges had done his best not to disappoint them. Such a mirth provoker in a ward is worth any amount of drugs. Moreover, it is only justice to Georges to add that, in a subsequent operation, he had his leg taken off above the knee with a coolness, a gay devil-may-caredom that touched even his pain-hardened comrades. Upon that occasion never a single _Doucement_ fell from his lips. He was far more concerned over the noon meal he was forced to miss, and cursed like a pirate because he must lose both his lunch and his leg at the same fell clip!

But even Georges, with all his impudence and nerve, had his black moments, his fits of melancholy, of piercing nostalgia, of deadly ennui of the soul. _Cafard_ the soldiers call these seasons of gloom. “Blue devils” is our equivalent term. While the Russian muzhik says simply: “My soul suffers!”

The men dread this _cafard_ more than an operation. To fight off its approach they reread old letters, finger over beloved relics in their small sacks of personal belongings, smoke miles of cigarettes, read endless romances, or write up their simple histories--poor, meager, ill-spelled and laboriously penciled narratives of the individual rôles they played in the present mighty conflict.

But sooner or later the _cafard_, lying in wait, gets them. That Georges, however, witty, jeering, pungent as Javelle water, should fall a victim filled me with surprise. But one morning I came upon him with his head smothered under a pillow. And when I lifted it off, fancying him asleep, his young face startled me with its look of utter and naked misery, which he was too proud to show his little world.

“Why, what is the matter?” I cried.

He looked at me silently with brooding, gloom-filled eyes.

“I have the _cafard_,” he said simply at last.

Despite himself, his mouth quivered. Every one of those arid and sterile hours of his sickness had piled its heavy weight upon his soul.

“Ah, when will it all be finished?” he breathed. “When shall I see my mother, my little sister, again?”

For this I had no reply. Georges’ chances of recovery at that time were about fifty-fifty.

“Do you see that verse?” He pointed to the high clock tower of the hospital, which bore, in old French script, the following couplet:

_Every hour wounds; The last one kills._

Georges repeated it slowly, with intense bitterness.

“The other day I counted how many hours I had lain couched here. Three thousand three hundred and twenty hours!” He held up to the light a yellow, emaciated hand. “Pretty, isn’t it? Every hour wounds, and the last one kills, eh? Well, I’ll take my killing all at once, thanks. I’m tired, you know. I’ll dispatch myself some day!”

A tender word on my part at that instant and Georges would have wept outright--and never forgiven me for disgracing him! I tried a joke--his own favorite weapon.

“Well,” I said, smiling, “if you want to die right away, this very minute, here’s a method.”

And I picked up from his bedside table a broken and rusted knife. It was his trench knife, a battered old wreck of an affair, the big blade of which was still crusted with dried blood--Georges’ own blood, spilt there when he got his wound, and carefully preserved by him as a souvenir. As a lethal instrument that knife was a joke, and I trusted he would see the point. But I underestimated the depth of blackness in his soul. For a long moment he stared at me, silent. Then suddenly, with a swift and violent movement, he tore open his chemise at the throat.

“_Voilà!_ There you are!” he exclaimed. I laid the knife out of reach in a hurry.

“_Peu!_” he said contemptuously, and turned his back on me.

It later appeared that the _cafard_ in this particular case had its origin in a girl. Following hard upon his operation, as soon as he could grasp a pen, Georges had written to his fiancée, telling her that he was now a cripple and releasing her from her engagement. And it seemed that the girl had taken him at his word. Not a single line had he received from her! And added bitterness lay in the fact that, deep down in the unplumbed depths of him, Georges had a fine upstanding confidence in himself, and believed that, cripple or no cripple, he was a pretty fine match for any girl.

As the days filed by without news he began to bleed inwardly. But one afternoon, shortly afterward, as I passed down the ward I beheld by Georges’ bedside her hand tightly locked in his, a small, pale-browed but radiant young person, in a heavy veil of black crêpe. Georges, exultant and gay, beckoned me over.

“_C’est ma fiancée!_” he introduced proudly.

Upon receipt of his letter she had waited only to bury a relative, and then hastened up from their native village to give him her reply in person.

In the hospital there were innumerable love affairs that came under my eye as the busy, monotonously diverse days flowed by; and the soldiers, one by one, made me their confidante while I wrapped their bandages, made their beds, or scrubbed the ingrained mud of the Somme from their feet with liquid soap and a flesh brush. But there is one that lingers in my mind because it became a game, half playful, half serious, between me and the soldier lover.

On visitors’ day the spacious _salle_ was always crowded by a throng of wives, mothers, sweethearts and friends. Before the big double doors were thrown open each soldier had his tiny pocket mirror out, combing his mustache and grooming himself for the occasion. Among these, I came to observe Coussin, a jeweler by trade, who, with his wife and small son of three, lived in Montmartre before the war.

Coussin was a quiet young man with an understanding eye and an unfailing sunny smile. I always hated to hurt him in dressing his wound, because it hurt him so to hurt me. As the hands of the clock approached two he would shift on his pillow so that his glance could reach the door without obstruction. He was one of those rare Frenchmen who do not smoke; and he would lie thus, motionless, a little pale from emotion, his eyes glued to that distant door. They never left it save to consult his watch. And when finally, on the stroke of two, his wife, Fabienne, appeared, a pretty, dark young woman, trimly veiled, pushing her son ahead of her, Coussin would lift himself abruptly out of bed--despite stern orders to the contrary, for there was still danger of hemorrhage--and wave his uninjured arm.

And Fabienne would lift her wee son for a salute to _Papa_! After which she would start down the long, crowded aisle. Smiling, her eyes still clinging to those of Coussin, she moved sedately, controlling her eagerness; but at the end she always ran. The kiss that followed was--well, indescribable. You will have to imagine it. And the look which they exchanged afterward was even more than a kiss, more passionate, tender, revealing.

As the afternoon drew on to a close the bell rang, warning the visitors that it was time to begin to get ready to think of departure. It was at this juncture that the comedy with Coussin began. Earlier in the day he had secretly set his watch half an hour back. If he could have got hold of a stick long enough to reach from his bed I am convinced he would have unblushingly turned back the hands of the ward clock to match, without a single compunction. As it was, he and Fabienne blandly ignored the first bell, as none of their private concerns. But when it rang again, and the orderlies began shooing the dilatory ones out into the corridor, Coussin would glance guilelessly at his watch, start, compare it hastily with the ward clock, and then exclaim with an air of surprise, mingled with indignation:

“Again too fast! But it is no good--that big old clock. This admirable little watch of mine has not been out a minute in five years!”

And Fabienne would regard lovingly the admirable little watch of her admirable little husband. In the end, of course, he won his extra half hour, and after the departure of his wife his timepiece and that of the ward would somehow mysteriously synchronize. But this was not quite all of the comedy. When the visitors had gone basins were passed round and the men bathed themselves before supper. But on the day of his wife’s visit Coussin always refused to bathe.

“I don’t wish to!” he would say with gentle obstinacy.

“But you must. It’s the rule. It’s good for you.”

“Not to-night. To-morrow.”

“But to-night it’s very necessary. Many visitors--many microbes.”

“I don’t wish to--to-night.” He would shake his head with smiling decision.

“But why don’t you want to wash to-night?” I asked him on the first occasion.

He gave me a single full look, and the truth dawned upon me: He did not wish to wash away the kisses of his wife and little son!

“To-morrow night I will wash twice!” he added magnanimously; and upon that we compromised.

There are certain French words--one can hardly call them slang--which have come into popular usage since the war, and which one hears constantly on the lips of the soldier. One of these is _pinard_, the trench word for wine, corresponding loosely to our term “booze.” Another is _copain_. A _copain_ is a pal, a chum, a trench comrade; one with whom a soldier shares his bed and his blanket and whiles away the long dull hours of inactivity. Not to have such a friend at the Front--or _là-bas_--Out There--as the soldiers call it--is a severe deprivation; for it means spiritual isolation; one puny soul bearing alone the terrific impact of the war. To illustrate this tender feeling toward a _copain_:

One day I was given the task of taking down the histories of the men in my ward; and I discovered, somewhat to my surprise, that a postman, a quiet, drab, nondescript little man with a bald spot, had won both the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille Militaire. To me, his tale was astounding in its valor, for this timid, oldish little person seemed the sort to flee for his life, like a frightened rabbit, at the first big thunder of the guns.

It appeared that one night he had volunteered to go out upon the battlefield, still under French and German fire, to rescue a fallen soldier. While carrying his charge a shell exploded near at hand, injuring both his legs and wounding his companion afresh. At this point he might have saved himself by deserting his comrade. Instead of which, he remained all night beside him; made his dressings; fed him the dew that collected on the adjacent leaves, drop by drop; remained beside him throughout the following day, under constant bombardment; and at nightfall got him, like a sack of meal, up on his shoulders, and, crawling on his hands and knees, dragging his injured legs--“_Grâce à Dieu_ it was not my arms,” he said, “or I never could have made it!”--he eventually reached a dressing station, five kilometers away. But he had paid the toll of that long wait upon the infected field of glory. Gangrene set in and it was found necessary to amputate both feet. Never again could he be a postman.

“That was very splendid of you!” I said at the end of his recital.

“But no! But no!” he denied swiftly. “You see, ’twas my _copain_!”

There is still another word the war has brought into being; an epithet that, falling in anger from the lips of a soldier, is the supreme and ultimate insult. It is the word that has been coined to cover the case of the man who evades military service. _Embusqué_ is the French term. Literally it means one who hides in ambush. But practically it has come to embrace all who, through graft or influence, hide in easy administrative jobs, soft snaps, sinecures, saving their pusillanimous skins instead of taking their chances with their fellows in the trenches. The contempt for this particular brand of coward is great, and insults are extremely likely to be the portion of any civilian who walks the streets of Paris these days in mufti.

An American ambulance driver on the field service at Verdun told me that, on a recent _permission_ in Paris, he had taken all his uniforms to the tailor to be cleaned.

“It seemed bully,” he said, “to have a real American all-over bath and get into real American clothes again--that is, it seemed bully until I ventured out upon the boulevards _en civile_. But presently I began to hear ‘_Embusqué!_’ ‘_Embusqué!_’ all round me in the air. Sometimes it was hurled in my face in passing; sometimes it was hissed close to my ear. And finally there approached four _poilus_ abreast, _mutilé_ every one, taking the entire width of the pavement, stumping along on their wooden pegs, gay as larks, and chattering seventeen to the dozen. Convalescents, I figured them, out on their promenade. When they came alongside, naturally I gave them the road. But they halted, confronted me contemptuously, and cried: ‘_Embusqué! Embusqué vous!_’ Well, it was too much for me. I beat it back to the tailor and got into respectable clothes.”

Like many opprobrious epithets, however, _embusqué_, among friends, has a different slant; used thus, it becomes a term of endearment, a sort of rough caress. A soldier, fresh Out There, muddy-booted, unshaved, bristling with the accouterments of war, will clump awkwardly into the hospital, bend over his wounded comrade, salute him on both cheeks, and exclaim jovially: “Well, old _embusqué_, how goes it?” And on the morning following my weekly afternoon off the men never failed to greet me: “Aha, Mees _Embusqué_! You deserted us yesterday. _Embusqué vous!_”

Used so, it was a term of affection. Nevertheless, it is a word to be handled with discretion. Returning from the hospital late one night to my quiet hotel, I found the place in a tumult. The police had invaded the kitchen; and the Dutch chef, a stout, pompous white-capped tyrant, before whom the entire establishment walked in terror, lay on the floor with his head smashed in, weltering in his own gore. Over him stood the head waiter, a tiny sprite of a Frenchman, hands clenched, eyes blazing, and looking ready to jump on the chef’s fat stomach if that prostrate gentleman so much as batted an eyelid.

“What’s the matter?” I inquired.

“He--he called me _embusqué_! Me!” exploded the head waiter, stammering in his rage. “I knocked the fat swine down and his head hit the stove.”

The police, upon hearing the provocation, vindicated the servant completely, and the Dutchman went to the hospital to mend his head and his manners. It was another version of Owen Wister’s famous Western tale: “When you call me that--smile!”

At the end of three months I was transferred to another ward with only twelve beds--a small, tranquil family, it seemed to me, after the continual rush and hurry of the big receiving ward. But still there was plenty to do. No time to sit like a lady, with folded lilylike hands. And the first three days, in addition to the regular routine, I had a dying man in charge. For three days and three nights he lay dying from general gas infection, a poor wreck, too ghastly to look upon with composure. His face, under the process of decay, had turned a horrible greenish yellow; beneath one eye yawned a deep unhealed bayonet gash; his mouth was filled with poisonous ulcers; and his tongue was so swollen that he could scarce articulate.

One leg had been amputated at the thigh in a vain effort to arrest the gangrene; but the infection had immediately showed in the other leg. The stench of this moribund organism was such that, with every window flung wide open, the odor was still almost overpowering. And the danger of infection was no imaginary fear. A nurse, with her hands tender from being constantly in water, is always crocking off bits of superficial skin.

Conceive the daily dressing and bandaging of this poor wretch; the daily changing of linen, soaked through and through with deadly suppurations, down to the very mattress! In touching him the doctor, the nurse and the orderlies wore gloves; so, also, did I whenever that was possible. But at this time there was a temporary shortage of nurses and I had the ward to myself, save when the head nurse looked in for a minute to ask if all went well. And perhaps I would be busy when the cry would come:

“Mees! Mees! Number Two! A drink! Quick!”

Upon which I would drop everything in a panic and fly to his bedside, barely in time to prevent him from swallowing the contents of the spittoon; for he had long, lean, powerful arms, this Number Two, which were always wandering, always in motion. With these he would pull into his bed whatever of the adjacent landscape he could lay hands on; for this reason we were forced to discard the bedside screens that usually inclose the dying. Once this blind, wandering hand discovered a thermometer on the bedside table of a neighbor. Instantly it was in his mouth and was broken in two between his teeth. Nothing for it but to thrust in my bare hand and pull the pieces out. No time for rubber gloves! He might die of gas gangrene; but I was not going to have him die of a thermometer.

Happily he did not suffer and at times he was conscious. Once, as I held up his head--this time with gloves--to give him water, he looked into my eyes and said, quite matter-of-factly:

“_C’est la fin, n’est-ce’pas?_”--It’s the end, isn’t it?

As he lingered and still lingered on, there came a subtle change over the attitude of the ward with regard to this long-spun-out dying. At first, when, after what seemed to them a proper and suitable length of time, Number Two still stubbornly held on, complaints began to be heard. No Frenchman loves an open window. Were they all to die of colds in the head because of one inconsiderate fellow? Frankly, they had had enough of him. It was not courteous to linger thus!

“_Bon Dieu_, not yet? Will he go to-night, think you?” they would impatiently inquire.

But as the feeble flame still burned mysteriously on, unquenched, this feeling gradually altered; it merged into a wondering awe and respect. The gallant fight of Number Two, his gaspings, his wrestlings with the invisible foe, commanded their admiration.

“How strong he is!” they would murmur respectfully, “What force!”

“’Tis the force of youth,” commented another.

“’Tis sad to die like that, so young, so brave--_n’est-ce-pas_, mees?”

And when the final spells of periodic shuddering began, showing the last phase was at hand, they watched him with undisguised interest.

“He’s passing!” announced one.

“Not yet,” retorted another, almost with pride. “See him drink! _Pauvre brave!_ ’Tis a good warrior.”

“He’ll go to-night--that’s sure!”

They began to argue about it.

But he did not go that night, nor yet the next morning; and the afternoon found him still battling feebly for breath. Late in the afternoon of the third day his wife arrived, a shabby, terrified little peasant woman, infinitely pathetic in her rusty black crêpe and her gnarled toil-worn hands. Accompanying her was the soldier’s father, a gaunt Breton, in smock and wooden shoes, with a small, round beribboned hat like that of a priest, and beneath it deep-set, intelligent eyes.

Upon me devolved the unpleasant task of breaking the news. I led them out into the corridor and, for a space, I could find no words. What is the polite formula in such a case, anyhow? Perhaps the wife read the trouble in my face, for her eyes upon me were like those of a dog, piteous, begging not to be beaten. She grasped me by both elbows.

“How goes it?” she breathed. “He is better? Say that my husband is better!”

The situation was intolerable.

“He is dying,” I blurted out brutally.

With a loud cry she flung herself into my arms. The father gazed stonily out the window. Soon, however, she had composed herself, and I asked whether they wished a priest. Was her husband a Catholic? Briefly they conferred apart, and then the woman turned, with a timid query. Would it cost anything? And with that the whole bleak truth came out. They were poor, very poor, it appeared; so poor, indeed, that they had sold their cow to enable them to come to Paris.

They had counted the expenses down to the last sou; but they had not counted the expense of a priest.

I assured them we had an abbé in the hospital and that his services were free. Upon which they decided to have him. An hour later he celebrated Holy Communion, the soldiers looking on with simple, unaffected interest. Only one blemish marred the serenity of the sacred event: At the crucial moment Number Two absolutely refused to receive the Host. Twice the murmuring abbé bent over him and inserted the holy wafer, and twice it was rejected by the swollen lips.

“Let’s try it with water,” I suggested.

The dying man drank thirstily as ever, but again refused the symbol. I was nonplused, for plainly those black eyes staring up into mine were conscious. After the departure of the abbé a soldier beckoned me to his side.

“He’s not a Catholic,” he explained softly.

As daylight waned there came a brief respite in the struggle; Number Two breathed more easily; he lay quiet, relaxed; his invisible antagonist seemed to have removed a short way off. The men meantime chatted cheerfully. Some sang.

Presently a knock sounded at the door. It was the X-ray man from upstairs, who had come to take a photograph of a certain plaster cast, an extraordinarily fine specimen, made at the Front.

“Who’s the new _blessé_ with the leg cast?” he called out jovially. He consulted a card. “Peletier’s the name.”

“Present!” came a voice from the corner.

“But you can’t take a picture now!” I protested, scandalized. “A man’s dying in here. Wait until he’s dead.”

“Can’t! The cast comes off to-morrow morning. Got to take the picture right away. Here’s the order.”

Perforce I let him come in. And now a lively bustle ensued. The bed containing the soldier adorned with the desired cast was wheeled into the center of the room, the leg exposed to the best advantage, bandages unwrapped, the bedcovers composed neatly, the tripod set up, the lights arranged.