lness,
drenched with the cold sweat that streamed from every pore, raved like
lunatics, as if their suffering had made them mad. And whether they
were calm or violent, it mattered not; when the contagion of the fever
reached them, then was the end at hand, the poison doing its work,
flying from bed to bed, sweeping them all away in one mass of
corruption.

But worst of all was the condemned cell, the room to which were assigned
those who were attacked by dysentery, typhus or small-pox. There were
many cases of black small-pox. The patients writhed and shrieked in
unceasing delirium, or sat erect in bed with the look of specters.
Others had pneumonia and were wasting beneath the stress of their
frightful cough. There were others again who maintained a continuous
howling and were comforted only when their burning, throbbing wound was
sprayed with cold water. The great hour of the day, the one that was
looked forward to with eager expectancy, was that of the doctor's
morning visit, when the beds were opened and aired and an opportunity
was afforded their occupants to stretch their limbs, cramped by
remaining long in one position. And it was the hour of dread and terror
as well, for not a day passed that, as the doctor went his rounds, he
was not pained to see on some poor devil's skin the bluish spots that
denoted the presence of gangrene. The operation would be appointed for
the following day, when a few more inches of the leg or arm would be
sliced away. Often the gangrene kept mounting higher and higher, and
amputation had to be repeated until the entire limb was gone.

Every evening on her return Henriette answered Jean's questions in the
same tone of compassion:

"Ah, the poor boys, the poor boys!"

And her particulars never varied; they were the story of the daily
recurring torments of that earthly hell. There had been an amputation at
the shoulder-joint, a foot had been taken off, a humerus resected; but
would gangrene or purulent contagion be clement and spare the patient?
Or else they had been burying some one of their inmates, most frequently
a Frenchman, now and then a German. Scarcely a day passed but a coarse
coffin, hastily knocked together from four pine boards, left the
hospital at the twilight hour, accompanied by a single one of the
attendants, often by the young woman herself, that a fellow-creature
might not be laid away in his grave like a dog. In the little cemetery
at Remilly two trenches had be