we sorted the cases. Ten times a day
we thought we had emptied this reservoir of misery; but we always found
it full again, paved with muddy stretchers on which men lay, panting and
waiting.

Opposite to this ante-room was a clearing ward; it seemed less dismal
than the other, though it was just as bare, and not any lighter; but
the wounded there were clean; they had been operated on, they wore white
bandages, they had been comforted with hot drinks and with all sorts of
hopes, for they had already escaped the first summons of Death.

Between these two rooms, a clerk lived in the draught, the victim of an
accumulation of indispensable and stupefying documents.

In the beginning, the same man sat for three days and three nights
chained to this ungrateful task until at last we saw him, his face
convulsed, almost mad after unremittingly labelling all this suffering
with names and figures.

The first days of March were chilly, with alternations of snow and
sunshine. When the air was pure, we heard it vibrate with the life of
aeroplanes and echo to their contests. The dry throb of machine-guns,
the incessant scream of shrapnel formed a kind of crackling dome over
our heads. The German aeroplanes overwhelmed the environs with bombs
which gave a prolonged whistle before tearing up the soil or gutting a
house. One fell a few paces from the ward where I was operating on a
man who had been wounded in the head. I remember the brief glance I cast
outwards and the screams and headlong flight of the men standing under
the windows.

One morning I saw an airship which was cruising over the hills of the
Meuse suddenly begin to trail after it, comet-wise, a thick tail of
black smoke, and then rush to the earth, irradiated by a burst of flame,
brilliant even in the daylight. And I thought of the two men who were
experiencing this fall.

The military situation improved daily, but the battle was no less
strenuous. The guns used by the enemy for the destruction of men
produced horrible wounds, certainly more severe on the whole than those
we had tended during the first twenty months of a war that has been
pitiless from its inception. All doctors must have noted the hideous
success achieved in a very short time, in perfecting means of
laceration. And we marvelled bitterly that man could adventure his frail
organism through the deflagrations of a chemistry hardly disciplined as
yet, which attains and surpasses the brutality of the blin