NIGHTS IN ARTOIS
I
One more glance into the dark ward, in which something begins to
reign which is not sleep, but merely a kind of nocturnal stupor.
The billiard-table has been pushed into a corner; it is loaded
with an incoherent mass of linen, bottles, and articles of
furniture. A smell of soup and excrements circulates between the
stretchers, and seems to insult the slender onyx vases that
surmount the cabinet.
And now, quickly! quickly! Let us escape on tiptoe into the open
air.
The night is clear and cold, without a breath of wind: a vast
block of transparent ice between the snow and the stars. Will it
suffice to cleanse throat and lungs, nauseated by the close
effluvium of suppurating wounds?
The snow clings and balls under our sabots. How good it would be
to have a game. ... But we are overwhelmed by a fatigue that has
become a kind of exasperation. We will go to the end of the lawn.
Here is the great trench in which the refuse of the dressing-ward,
all the residuum of infection, steams and rots. Further on we come
to the musical pines, which Dalcour the miner visits every night,
lantern in hand, to catch sparrows, Dalcour, the formidable
Zouave, whom no one can persuade not to carry about his stiff leg
and the gaping wound in his bandaged skull in the rain.
Let us go as far as the wall of the graveyard, which time has
caused to swell like a protuberance on the side of the park, and
which is so providentially close at hand.
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