And he dropped the gold coins into the kepi that Jean held out to him.  The latter, oppressed by the magnitude of the amount, nearly six hundred francs, insisted that Maurice should take one-half.  No one could say what might happen; they might be parted from each other.

They made the division in the garden, before the ambulance, and when they had concluded their financial business they entered, having recognized on the straw near the entrance the drummer-boy of their company, Bastian, a fat, good-natured little fellow, who had had the ill-luck to receive a spent ball in the groin about five o’clock the day before, when the battle was ended.  He had been dying by inches for the last twelve hours.

In the dim, white light of morning, at that hour of awakening, the sight of the ambulance sent a chill of horror through them.  Three more patients had died during the night, without anyone being aware of it, and the attendants were hurriedly bearing away the corpses in order to make room for others.  Those who had been operated on the day before opened wide their eyes in their somnolent, semi-conscious state, and looked with dazed astonishment on that vast dormitory of suffering, where the victims of the knife, only half-slaughtered, rested on their straw.  It was in vain that some attempts had been made the night before to clean up the room after the bloody work of the operations; there were great splotches of blood on the ill-swept floor; in a bucket of water a great sponge was floating, stained with red, for all the world like a human brain; a hand, its fingers crushed and broken, had been overlooked and lay on the floor of the shed.  It was the parings and trimmings of the human butcher shop, the horrible waste and refuse that ensues upon a day of slaughter, viewed in the cold, raw light of dawn.

Bouroche, who, after a few hours of repose, had already resumed his duties, stopped in front of the wounded drummer-boy, Bastian, then passed on with an imperceptible shrug of his shoulders.  A hopeless case; nothing to be done.  The lad had opened his eyes, however, and emerging from the comatose state in which he had been lying, was eagerly watching a sergeant who, his kepi filled with gold in his hand, had come into the room to see if there were any of his men among those poor wretches.  He found two, and to each of them gave twenty francs.  Other sergeants came in, and the gold began to fall in showers upon the straw, among the dying men.  Bastian, who had managed to raise himself, stretched out his two hands, even then shaking in the final agony.

“Don’t forget me! don’t forget me!”

The sergeant would have passed on and gone his way, as Bouroche had done.  What good could money do there?  Then yielding to a kindly impulse, he threw some coins, never stopping to count them, into the poor hands that were already cold.

“Don’t forget me! don’t forget me!”

Bastian fell backward on his straw.  For a long time he groped with stiffening fingers for the elusive gold, which seemed to avoid him.  And thus he died.