The New Book of Martyrs | Page 6

turned his head slightly, saw the visitor, and frowning, began to sing:
"Il n'est ni beau ni grand mon verre."
The stranger looked at him with tears in his eyes but the more he looked, the more resolutely Carre smiled, clutching the edges of the table with his two quivering hands.
Lerondeau has good strong teeth. Carre has nothing but black stumps. This distresses me, for a man with a fractured thigh needs good teeth.
Lerondeau is still at death's door, but though moribund, he can eat. He attacks his meat with a well-armed jaw; he bites with animal energy, and seems to fasten upon anything substantial.
Carre, for his part, is well-inclined to eat; but what can he do with his old stumps?
"Besides," he says, "I was never very carnivorous."
Accordingly, he prefers to smoke. In view of lying perpetually upon his back, he arranged the cover of a cardboard box upon his chest; the cigarette ash falls into this, and Carre smokes without moving, in cleanly fashion.
I look at the ash, the smoke, the yellow, emaciated face, and reflect sadly that it is not enough to have the will to live; one must have teeth.
Not every one knows how to suffer, and even when we know, we must set about it the right way, if we are to come off with honour. As soon as he is on the table, Carre looks round him and asks:
"Isn't there any one to squeeze my head to-day?"
If there is no answer, he repeats anxiously:
"Who is going to squeeze my head to-day?"
Then a nurse approaches, takes his head between her hands and presses.... I can begin; as soon as some one is "squeezing his head" Carre is good.
Lerondeau's method is different. He wants some one to hold his hands. When there is no one to do this, he shrieks: "I shall fall."
It is no use to tell him that he is on a solid table, and that he need not be afraid. He gropes about for the helpful hands, and cries, the sweat breaking out on his brow: "I know I shall fall." Then I get some one to come and hold his hands, for suffering, at any rate, is a reality....
Each sufferer has his characteristic cry when the dressing is going on. The poor have only one, a simple cry that does service for them all. It makes one think of the women who, when they are bringing a child into the world, repeat, at every pain, the one complaint they have adopted.
Carre has a great many varied cries, and he does not say the same thing when the dressing is removed, and when the forceps are applied.
At the supreme moment he exclaims: "Oh, the pain in my knee!"
Then, when the anguish abates, he shakes his head and repeats:
"Oh, that wretched knee!"
When it is the turn of the thigh, he is exasperated.
"Now it's this thigh again!"
And he repeats this incessantly, from second to second. Then we go on to the wound under his heel, and Carre begins:
"Well, what is wrong with the poor heel?"
Finally, when he is tired of singing, he murmurs softly and regularly:
"They don't know how that wretched knee hurts me... they don't know how it hurts me."
Lerondeau, who is, and always will be, a little boy compared with Carre, is very poor in the matter of cries. But when he hears his complaints, he checks his own cries, Borrows them. Accordingly, I hear him beginning:
"Oh, my poor knee! ... They don't know it hurts!"
One morning when he was shouting this at the top of his voice, I asked him gravely:
"Why do you make the same complaints as Carre?"
Marie is only a peasant, but he showed me a face that was really offended:
"It's not true. I don't say the same things."
I said no more, for there are no souls so rugged that they cannot feel certain stings.
Marie has told me the story of his life and of his campaign. As he is not very eloquent, It was for the most part a confused murmur with an ever-recurring protestation:
"I was a good one to work, you know, strong as a horse."
Yet I can hardly imagine that there was once a Marie Lerondeau who was a robust young fellow, standing firm and erect between the handles of a plough. I know him only as a man lying on his back, and I even find it difficult to picture to myself what his shape and aspect will be when we get him on his feet again.
Marie did his duty bravely under fire. "He stayed alone with the wagons and when he was wounded, the Germans kicked him with their heavy boots." These are the salient points of the interrogatory.
Now and again Lerondeau's babble ceases, and he looks up to the ceiling, for this takes the place of distance