.. and all the
rest who lay moaning, hoping for an impossible repose. ...
Then I would get up and go back to work, haunted by the terrible
fear that excess of fatigue might have made my eye less keen, my
hand less steady than imperious duty required.
At night more especially, the bombardment was renewed, in
hurricane gusts.
The air, rent by projectiles, mewed like a furious cat; the
detonations came closer, then retired methodically, like the
footsteps of a giant on guard around us, above us, upon us.
Every morning the orderlies took advantage of a moment of respite
to run and inspect the new craters, and unearth the fuses of
shells. ... I thought of the delightful phrase of assistant-
surgeon M----whom we had attended for a wound on the head, and
who said to me as I was taking him back to bed, and we heard the
explosions close by:
"Oh, the marmites (big shells) always fall short of one."
But to a great many of the wounded, the perpetual uproar was
intolerable. They implored us with tears to send them somewhere
else; those we kept were, as a fact, unable to bear removal; we
had to soothe them and keep them, in spite of everything. Some,
overcome by fatigue, slept all day; others showed extraordinary
indifference, perhaps due to a touch of delirium, like the man
with a wound in the abdomen which I was dressing one morning, and
who when he saw me turn my head at the sound of an explosion which
ploughed up a neighbouring field, assured me quietly that "those
things weren't dangerous.
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