The New Book of Martyrs | Page 4

THROUGHOUT OUR LAND
From the disfigured regions where the cannon reigns supreme, to the
mountains of the South, to the ocean, to the glittering shores of the
inland sea, the cry of wounded men echoes throughout the land, and a
vast kindred cry seems to rise responsive from the whole world.
There is no French town in which the wounds inflicted on the
battle-field are not bleeding. Not one which has not accepted the duty
of assuaging something of the sum of suffering, just as it bears its part
in the sum of mourning; not one which may not hear within its own
walls an echo of the greater lamentation swelling and muttering where
the conflict seems to rage unceasingly. The waves of war break upon
the whole surface of the country, and like the incoming tide, strew it
with wreckage.

In the beds which the piety of the public has prepared on every side,
stricken men await the verdict of fate. The beds are white, the bandages
are spotless; many faces smile until the hour when they are flushed
with fever, and until that same fever makes a whole nation of wounded
tremble on the Continent.
Some one who had been visiting the wounded said to me: "The beds
are really very white, the dressings are clean, all the patients seem to be
playing cards, reading the papers, eating dainties; they are simple, often
very gentle, they don't look very unhappy. They all tell the same story ...
The war has not changed them much. One can recognise them all."
Are you sure that you recognise them? You have just been looking at
them, are you sure that you have seen them?
Under their bandages are wounds you cannot imagine. Below the
wounds, in the depths of the mutilated flesh, a soul, strange and furtive,
is stirring in feverish exaltation, a soul which does not readily reveal
itself, which expresses itself artlessly, but which I would fain make you
understand.
In these days, when nothing retains its former semblance, all these men
are no longer those you so lately knew. Suffering has roused them from
the sleep of gentle life, and every day fills them with a terrible
intoxication. They are now something more than themselves; those we
loved were merely happy shadows.
Let us lose none of their humble words, let us note their slightest
gestures, and tell me, tell me that we will think of them together, now
and later, when we realise the misery of the times and the magnitude of
their sacrifice.

THE STORY OF CARRE AND LERONDEAU
They came in like two parcels dispatched by the same post, two clumsy,
squalid parcels, badly packed, and damaged in transit. Two human
forms rolled up in linens and woollens, strapped into strange

instruments, one of which enclosed the whole man, like a coffin of zinc
and wire.
They seemed to be of no particular age; or rather, each might have been
a thousand and more, the age of swaddled mummies in the depths of
sarcophagi.
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