the corridor; they are low stretchers, like
coffins. Around and above them one then dimly discerns the movement of
broken and drooping shadows, and the stirring of ranks and groups of
specters against the walls.

I turn round. At the end opposite that where the faraway light leaks
through, a mob is gathered in front of a tent-cloth which reaches from
the ceiling to the ground, and thus forms an apartment, whose
illumination shines through the oily yellow material. In this retreat,
anti-tetanus injections are going on by the light of an acetylene lamp.
When the cloth is lifted to allow some one to enter or leave, the glare
brutally besplashes the disordered rags of the wounded stationed in
front to await their treatment. Bowed by the ceiling, seated, kneeling
or groveling, they push each other in the desire not to lose their turn
or to steal some other's, and they bark like dogs, "My
turn!"--"Me!"--"Me!" In this corner of modified conflict the tepid
stinks of acetylene and bleeding men are horrible to swallow.

I turn away from it and seek elsewhere to find a place where I may sit
down. I go forward a little, groping, still stooping and curled up, and
my hands in front.

By grace of the flame which a smoker holds over his pipe I see a bench
before me, full of beings. My eyes are growing accustomed to the gloom
that stagnates in the cave, and I can make out pretty well this row of
people whose bandages and swathings dimly whiten their beads and limbs.
Crippled, gashed, deformed, motionless or restless, fast fixed in this
kind of barge, they present an incongruous collection of suffering and
misery.

One of them cries out suddenly, half rises, and then sits down again.
His neighbor, whose greatcoat is torn and his head bare, looks at him
and says to him--"What's the use of worrying?"

And he repeats the sentence several times at random, gazing straight in
front of him, his hands on his knees. A young man in the middle of the
seat is talking to himself. He says that he is an aviator. There are
burns down one side of his body and on his face. In his fever he is
still burning; it seems to him that he is still gnawed by the pointed
flames that leaped from his engine. He is muttering, "Gott mit uns!"
and then, "God is with us!"

A zouave with his arm in a sling, who sits awry and seems to carry his
shoulder like a torturing burden, speaks to him: "You're the aviator
that fell, aren't you?"

"I've seen--things," replies