Of a sudden I see a globular mass with a moon-like face oscillating in the night.  With hands held out and groping for the rails of the bedsteads, it is seeking its way.  The orb of its belly distends and stretches its shirt like a crinoline, and shortens it.  The mass is carried by two little and extremely slender legs, knobbly at the knees, and the color of string.  It reaches the next bed, the one which a single ditch separates from mine.  On another bed, a shadow is swaying regularly, like a doll.  The mass and the shadow are a negro, whose big, murderous head is hafted with a tiny neck.

The hoarse concert of lungs and throats multiplies and widens.  There are some who raise the arms of marionettes out of the boxes of their beds.  Others remain interred in the gray of the bed-clothes.  Now and again, unsteady ghosts pass through the room and stoop between the beds, and one hears the noise of a metal pail.  At the end of the room, in the dark jumble of those blind men who look straight before them and the mutes who cough, I only see the nurse, because of her whiteness.  She goes from one shadow to another, and stoops over the motionless.  She is the vestal virgin who, so far as she can, prevents them from going out.

I turn my head on the pillow.  In the bed bracketed with mine on the other side, under the glow which falls from the only surviving lamp, there is a squat manikin in a heavy knitted vest, poultice-color.  From time to time, he sits up in bed, lifts his pointed head towards the ceiling, shakes himself, and grasping and knocking together his spittoon and his physic-glass, he coughs like a lion.  I am so near to him that I feel that hurricane from his flesh pass over my face, and the odor of his inward wound.

* * * * * *

I have slept.  I see more clearly than yesterday.  I no longer have the veil that was in front of me.  My eyes are attracted distinctly by everything which moves.  A powerful aromatic odor assails me; I seek the source of it.  Opposite me, in full daylight, a nurse is rubbing with a drug some gnarled and blackened hands, enormous paws which the earth of the battlefields, where they were too long implanted, has almost made moldy.  The strong-smelling liquid is becoming a layer of frothy polish.

The foulness of his hands appalls me.  Gathering my wits with an effort, I said aloud: 

“Why don’t they wash his hands?”

My neighbor on the right, the gnome in the mustard vest, seems to hear me, and shakes his head.

My eyes go back to the other side, and for hours I devote myself to watching in obstinate detail, with wide-open eyes, the water-swollen man whom I saw floating vaguely in the night like a balloon.  By night he was whitish.  By day he is yellow, and his big eyes are glutted with yellow.  He gurgles, makes noises of subterranean water, and mingles sighs with words and morsels of words.  Fits of coughing tan his ochreous face.