We washed, combed, and peeled them, and laid them very cautiously between clean sheets; then we found that one had the look of an old man, and that the other was still a boy.

Their beds face each other in the same grey room.  All who enter it notice them at once; their infinite misery gives them an air of kinship.  Compared with them, the other wounded seem well and happy.  And in this abode of suffering, they are kings; their couches are encircled by the respect and silence due to majesty.

I approach the younger man and bend over him.

“What is your name?”

The answer is a murmur accompanied by an imploring look.  What I hear sounds like:  Mahihehondo.  It is a sigh with modulations.

It takes me a week to discover that the boyish patient is called
Marie Lerondeau.

The bed opposite is less confused.  I see a little toothless head.  From out the ragged beard comes a peasant voice, broken in tone, but touching and almost melodious.  The man who lies there is called Carre.

They did not come from the same battlefield, but they were hit almost at the same time, and they have the same wound.  Each has a fractured thigh.  Chance brought them together in the same distant ambulance, where their wounds festered side by side.  Since then they have kept together, till now they lie enfolded by the blue radiance of the Master’s gaze.

He looks at both, and shakes his head silently; truly, a bad business!  He can but ask himself which of the two will die first, so great are the odds against the survival of either.

The white-bearded man considers them in silence, turning in his hand the cunning knife.

We can know nothing till after this grave debate.  The soul must withdraw, for this is not its hour.  Now the knife must divide the flesh, and lay the ravage bare, and do its work completely.

So the two comrades go to sleep, in that dreadful slumber wherein each man resembles his own corpse.  Henceforth we enter upon the struggle.  We have laid our grasp upon these two bodies; we shall not let them be snatched from us easily.

The nausea of the awakening, the sharp agony of the first hours are over, and I begin to discover my new friends.

This requires time and patience.  The dressing hour is propitious.  The man lies naked on the table.  One sees him as a whole, as also those great gaping wounds, the objects of so many hopes and fears.

The afternoon is no less favourable to communion, but that is another matter.  Calm has come to them, and these two creatures have ceased to be nothing but a tortured leg and a screaming mouth.

Carre went ahead at once.  He made a veritable bound.  Whereas Lerondeau seemed still wrapped in a kind of plaintive stupor, Carre was already enfolding me in a deep affectionate gaze.  He said: 

“You must do all that is necessary.”

Lerondeau can as yet only murmur a half articulate phrase: