The Passion Trilogy – The Calvary, The Torture Garden & The Diary of a Chambermaid. Octave MirbeauЧитать онлайн книгу.
tents, the forest, the fields, the small town way yonder, whose chimneys were smoking in the mist, and the sky where huge clouds were floating, bleak and low. I asked the sergeant for permission to see a doctor.
Our tents were arranged in two rows, backed against the forest on each side of the road of Senonches which led into the open country through a magnificent grove of oak trees, crossed the Chartre road three hundred meters away and still further the town of Belhomert and extended farther toward Loupe. At the crossing of these two roads there was a small dilapidated building covered with thatch, a sort of abandoned shed which provided shelter for the laborers on the road during rain. It was here that the surgeon had established a sort of improvised field hospital recognizable by a Red Cross flag put up in a crack in the wall and adorning it.
In front of the house a crowd was waiting. A long line of human beings, wan and worn out, some standing with fixed looks, others sitting on the ground, sad with stooped and pointed shoulders, their heads buried in their hands. Death had already laid its terrible hand upon these emaciated countenances, these scraggy frames, these members which hung loose, devoid of blood and marrow. And confronted with this heartbreaking sight, I forgot my own suffering, and my heart was touched with pity. Three months were sufficient to break down these robust bodies, inured to labor and fatigue! … Three months! And these young men who loved life, these children of the soil who grew up as dreamers in the freedom of the fields, trusting in the goodness of nature, these youths were done for! … To the marine who dies is given the sea as a burying place; he descends into eternal darkness to the rhythm of its murmuring waves. But these! … A few more days of grace perhaps, and then these tatterdemallions will suddenly tumble down into the mud of a ditch, their corpses delivered, up to the fangs of prowling dogs and to the beaks of nightbirds.
I was swept by a feeling of such brotherly and sorrowful pity for them that I wished I could press all these unhappy men to my breast, in a single embrace, and I wished, oh, how ardently I wished it!—I had a hundred female breasts, like Isis, swollen with milk, that I might offer to all these bloodless lips. … They were entering the house one by one and were leaving it as quickly, pursued by growling and swearing sounds. For the rest, the surgeon did not bother with them at all. Very angry, he was demanding of his orderly his medicine chest which was missing from the luggage.
"My medicine chest, for God's sake!" he shouted. "Where is my medicine chest? And my instrument case? … What did you do with my instrument case? Ah! for God's sake! … "
A little soldier of the reserves who suffered from an abscess on his knee came back hopping on one foot, crying, pulling his hair in despair. They did not want to attend to him. When it was my turn to go in I was all atremble. Inside the place which was dark, four patients, lying flat in the straw, were emitting rattling sounds like the cock of a musket; a fifth one was gesticulating, muttering incoherent words in delirium; still another, half-reclining, with head drooped on his chest, was moaning and asking for a drink in a feeble voice, the voice of an infant. Squatted in front of the fire place, an attendant was holding over the flame, on the end of a stick, a piece of stale pudding whose stench of burned grease filled the room. The adjutant did not even look at me. He shouted:
"Well, what's the matter now? … A bunch of lazy buggers. A good ten league run at a stretch will fix you up, you straggler. … Face about! … March!"
On the threshold I met a peasant woman who asked me:
"Is this the place where you can see the doctor."
"Women now!" growled the adjutant. "What do you want now?"
"Beg pardon, excuse me, Doctor," rejoined the peasant woman, who came up very timidly. "I came for my son who is a soldier."
"Tell me now, old woman, am I here to keep track of your son, or what?"
With her hands crossed on the handle of her umbrella, timorous, she examined the place about her.
"It seems like he is very sick, my son is, very, very sick. … And so I came to see if he was not around here, Doctor."
"What's your name?"
"My name is Riboulleau."
"Riboulleau. … Riboulleau! … That may be … look in that pile there."
The attendant who was broiling his pudding turned his head.
"Riboulleau," he said, "why he has been dead three days already. … "
"What is that you are saying?" cried the peasant woman whose sunburned face suddenly became pallid. "Where did he die? … Why did he die, my little darling boy."
The adjutant intervened, and rudely pushing the old woman toward the door, shouted:
"Go on, go on, no scenes around here! Well, he is dead—and that is all there is to it."
"My little darling boy! My little darling boy!" wailed the old woman in a heart-breaking manner.
I walked away with a heavy heart and felt so discouraged that I was asking myself whether it was not better to put an end to it all at once by hanging myself on the branch of a tree or by blowing my brains out with the gun. While I was going to my tent, stumbling on the way, I was hardly paying any attention to the little soldier who, having stopped at the foot of a pine tree, had opened his abscess with his knife himself, and, pale, with sweat drops rolling all over his forehead, was bandaging his bleeding wound.
In the morning I felt a great deal better than I thought I would. I was relieved of all work, and after having greased my rifle which became rusted in the rain, I enjoyed a few hours of rest. Stretched out on my blanket, with my body torpid in delicious half slumber where I distinctly heard all the noises of the camp—the sounding of the bugle, the neighing of the horses as if coming from afar—I was thinking of the people and the things I had left behind me. A thousand images and a thousand scenes of the past rapidly filed before my eyes. I saw again the Priory, my dead mother and my father, with his large straw hat and the short beggar with his flaxen hair and Felix squatted in the lettuce patches, lying in wait for a mole. I saw again my study room, my school mates and, topping the noise of the Bal Bullier, Nini, her hair loose and brown, with her ruddy neck and her pink stockings showing like some lascivious flower from under the skirt raised in dancing. Then the image of an unknown woman in a yellow dress, whom I noticed in the shadow of a box in a theatre one evening, came back to me—an insistent and sweet vision.
During this time the strongest among us had gone out to roam in the fields and on the farms. They came back merrily carrying bundles of straw, chickens, turkeys and ducks. One of them was driving before him with a switch, a big, grunting pig; another was balancing a sheep on his shoulder. At the end of a halter the latter was also dragging a calf which, tangled up in the rope, resisted comically and shook its snout, bellowing all the time. The peasants came up running to the camp to complain that they had been robbed; they were hooted and driven out.
The general, very stiff and with round eyes, came to review us in the afternoon, accompanied by our lieutenant who walked at his right. His shiny look, his flushed cheeks, his mealy voice bore witness to the fact that he had had a plentiful breakfast. He was munching the end of an extinguished cigar; he spat, sniffed, swore. One could not tell at whom or what, for he did not address himself to any one in particular. When standing in front of our company, he looked at our lieutenant-colonel severely, and I heard him say:
"Your men are dirty slops!"
Then he walked away, his body weighed down by his belly, dragging his feet, dressed in yellow boots above which red breeches swelled and folded like a skirt.
The rest of the day was devoted to loitering in the taverns of Belhomert. There was such crowding and such noise everywhere, and besides I knew so well these fights in the cabarets, these violent outbursts as a result of drunkenness which often degenerated into general scuffles, that I preferred to go out on the road, far from all these brawls, in the company of a few peaceable comrades.
Just then the weather grew better, dim sunlight came from the sky freed from clouds. We seated ourselves on the side of a sloping hill, bending our backs under the warm sun rays as does a cat under the hand that caresses it. Vehicles kept passing