ng convalescents and those who were
dying by inches. Doctor Dalichamp had had the greatest difficulty in
procuring the necessary beds, sheets and pillows, and every day he had
to accomplish miracles to keep his patients alive, to obtain for them
bread, meat and desiccated vegetables, to say nothing of bandages,
compresses and other appliances. As the Prussian officers in charge
of the military hospital in Sedan had refused him everything, even
chloroform, he was accustomed to send to Belgium for what he required.
And yet he had made no discrimination between French and Germans; he was
even then caring for a dozen Bavarian soldiers who had been brought
in there from Bazeilles. Those bitter adversaries who but a short time
before had been trying to cut each other's throat now lay side by side,
their passions calmed by suffering. And what abodes of distress and
misery they were, those two long rooms in the old schoolhouse of
Remilly, where, in the crude light that streamed through the tall
windows, some thirty beds in each were arranged on either side of a
narrow passage.

As late even as ten days after the battle wounded men had been
discovered in obscure corners, where they had been overlooked, and
brought in for treatment. There were four who had crawled into a
vacant house at Balan and remained there, without attendance, kept from
starving in some way, no one could tell how, probably by the charity of
some kind-hearted neighbor, and their wounds were alive with maggots;
they were as dead men, their system poisoned by the corruption that
exuded from their wounds. There was a purulency, that nothing could
check or overcome, that hovered over the rows of beds and emptied them.
As soon as the door was passed one's nostrils were assailed by the
odor of mortifying flesh. From drains inserted in festering sores fetid
matter trickled, drop by drop. Oftentimes it became necessary to
reopen old wounds in order to extract a fragment of bone that had been
overlooked. Then abscesses would form, to break out after an interval
in some remote portion of the body. Their strength all gone, reduced to
skeletons, with ashen, clayey faces, the miserable wretches suffered the
torments of the damned. Some, so weakened they could scarcely draw their
breath, lay all day long upon their back, with tight shut, darkened
eyes, like corpses in which decomposition had already set in; while
others, denied the boon of sleep, tossing in restless wakefu