But sights and sounds and smells forced themselves upon one's
senses. I had to look and to listen and to breathe in the odour of
death and corruption. For hours afterwards I would be haunted with
the death face of some young man, lying half-naked on his bed while
nurses dressed his horrible wounds. What waste of men! What
disfigurement of the beauty that belongs to youth! Bearded soldier
faces lay here in a tranquillity that told of coming death. They had
been such strong and sturdy men, tilling their Flemish fields, and
living with a quiet faith in their hearts. Now they were dying before
their time, conscious, some of them, that death was near, so that
weak tears dropped upon their beards, and in their eyes was a great
fear and anguish.
"Je ne veux pas mourir!" said one of them. "O ma pauvre femme! Je
ne veux pas mourir!"
He did not wish to die... but in the morning he was dead.
The corpse that I had to carry out lay pinned up in a sheet. The work
had been very neatly done by the nurse. She whispered to me as I
stood on one side of the bed, with a friend on the other side.
"Be careful. ... He might fall in half."
I thought over these words as I put my hands under the warm body
and helped to lift its weight on to the stretcher.
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