andage round the cranium
of a very little man who is almost upright, who has bristling hair and
a beard which puffs out in front. With dangling arms, he submits in
silence. But the attendant abandons him, looks on the ground and
exclaims sonorously, "What the--? Eh, come now, my friend, are you
cracked? There's manners for you, to lie down on the top of a patient!"
And his capacious hand disengages a second limp body on which the first
had extended himself as on a mattress; while the mannikin with the
bandaged head alongside, as soon as he is let alone, puts his hands to
his head without saying a word and tries once more to remove the
encircling lint.

There is an uproar, too, among some shadows that are visible against a
luminous background; they seem to be wildly agitated in the gloom of
the crypt. The light of a candle shows us several men shaken with their
efforts to hold a wounded soldier down on his stretcher. It is a man
whose feet are gone. At the end of his legs are terrible bandages, with
tourniquets to restrain the hemorrhage. His stumps have bled into the
linen wrappings, and he seems to wear red breeches. His face is
devilish, shining and sullen, and he is raving. They are pressing down
on his shoulders and knees, for this man without feet would fain jump
from the stretcher and go away.

"Let me go!" he rattles in breathless, quavering rage. His voice is
low, with sudden sonorities, like a trumpet that one tries to blow too
softly. "By God, let me go, I tell you! Do you think I'm going to stop
here? Allons, let me be, or I'll jump over you on my hands!"

So violently he contracts and extends himself that he pulls to and fro
those who are trying to restrain him by their gripping weight, and I
can see the zigzags of the candle held by a kneeling man whose other
arm engirdles the mutilated maniac, who shouts so fiercely that he
wakes up the sleepers and dispels the drowsiness of the rest. On all
sides they turn towards him; half rising, they listen to the incoherent
lamentations which end by dying in the dark. At the same moment, in
another corner, two prostrate wounded, crucified on the ground, so
curse each other that one of them has to be removed before the frantic
dialogue is broken up.

I go farther away, towards the point where the light from outside comes
through among the tangled beams as through a broken grating, and stride
over the interminable stretchers that take up all the width of the
underg