Opposite to this ante-room was a clearing ward; it seemed less dismal than the other, though it was just as bare, and not any lighter; but the wounded there were clean; they had been operated on, they wore white bandages, they had been comforted with hot drinks and with all sorts of hopes, for they had already escaped the first summons of Death.

Between these two rooms, a clerk lived in the draught, the victim of an accumulation of indispensable and stupefying documents.

In the beginning, the same man sat for three days and three nights chained to this ungrateful task until at last we saw him, his face convulsed, almost mad after unremittingly labelling all this suffering with names and figures.

The first days of March were chilly, with alternations of snow and sunshine.  When the air was pure, we heard it vibrate with the life of aeroplanes and echo to their contests.  The dry throb of machine-guns, the incessant scream of shrapnel formed a kind of crackling dome over our heads.  The German aeroplanes overwhelmed the environs with bombs which gave a prolonged whistle before tearing up the soil or gutting a house.  One fell a few paces from the ward where I was operating on a man who had been wounded in the head.  I remember the brief glance I cast outwards and the screams and headlong flight of the men standing under the windows.

One morning I saw an airship which was cruising over the hills of the Meuse suddenly begin to trail after it, comet-wise, a thick tail of black smoke, and then rush to the earth, irradiated by a burst of flame, brilliant even in the daylight.  And I thought of the two men who were experiencing this fall.

The military situation improved daily, but the battle was no less strenuous.  The guns used by the enemy for the destruction of men produced horrible wounds, certainly more severe on the whole than those we had tended during the first twenty months of a war that has been pitiless from its inception.  All doctors must have noted the hideous success achieved in a very short time, in perfecting means of laceration.  And we marvelled bitterly that man could adventure his frail organism through the deflagrations of a chemistry hardly disciplined as yet, which attains and surpasses the brutality of the blind forces of Nature.  We marvelled more especially that flesh so delicate, the product and the producer of harmony, could endure such shocks and such dilapidations without instant disintegration.

Many men came to us with one or several limbs torn off completely, yet they came still living ....  Some had thirty or forty wounds, and even more.  We examined each body systematically, passing from one sad discovery to another.  They reminded us of those derelict vessels which let in the water everywhere.  And just because these wrecks seemed irredeemably condemned to disaster, we clung to them in the obstinate hope of bringing them into port and perhaps floating them again.