he cheek,
a cloven skull that showed the palpitating brain beneath. Those in whose
case the bullet had touched the brain or spinal marrow were already as
dead men, sunk in the lethargy of coma, while the fractures and other
less serious cases tossed restlessly on their pallets and beseechingly
called for water to quench their thirst.

Leaving the large room and passing out into the courtyard, the shed
where the operations were going on presented another scene of horror.
In the rush and hurry that had continued unabated since morning it
was impossible to operate on every case that was brought in, so their
attention had been confined to those urgent cases that imperatively
demanded it. Whenever Bouroche's rapid judgment told him that amputation
was necessary, he proceeded at once to perform it. In the same way
he lost not a moment's time in probing the wound and extracting the
projectile whenever it had lodged in some locality where it might do
further mischief, as in the muscles of the neck, the region of the
arm pit, the thigh joint, the ligaments of the knee and elbow. Severed
arteries, too, had to be tied without delay. Other wounds were merely
dressed by one of the hospital stewards under his direction and left
to await developments. He had already with his own hand performed four
amputations, the only rest that he allowed himself being to attend to
some minor cases in the intervals between them, and was beginning to
feel fatigue. There were but two tables, his own and another, presided
over by one of his assistants; a sheet had been hung between them,
to isolate the patients from each other. Although the sponge was kept
constantly at work the tables were always red, and the buckets that were
emptied over a bed of daisies a few steps away, the clear water in which
a single tumbler of blood sufficed to redden, seemed to be buckets of
unmixed blood, torrents of blood, inundating the gentle flowers of the
parterre. Although the room was thoroughly ventilated a nauseating smell
arose from the tables and their horrid burdens, mingled with the sweetly
insipid odor of chloroform.

Delaherche, naturally a soft-hearted man, was in a quiver of
compassionate emotion at the spectacle that lay before his eyes, when
his attention was attracted by a landau that drove up to the door. It
was a private carriage, but doubtless the ambulance attendants had found
none other ready to their hand and had crowded their patients into it.
Th