The forbidden zone

The General came one morning after the big attack, to visit the hospital. He went through all the huts, stopping beside each bed to speak to the wounded, and he decorated every man who had lost a leg or an arm with the Medaille Militaire. It was a short ceremony. The General stood at the foot of the bed and recited quickly the military formula citing the man for bravery in the field, and he raised his sword and saluted the wounded man; then he pinned the medal on his nightshirt, and, leaning over him, kissed him on both cheeks. When he rose and moved on down the ward, “the amputé” found an envelope on his coverlet with a hundred francs in it. The General, so they said, gave all his pay to the men in this way.

He admired the white coverlets with their gay patterns of pink or red flowers. He had a stony face and his eyes were like bits of blue steel; but he congratulated us on the gay appearance of our huts. He said, looking out of the door at the bare ground, the ugly sheds, and the artillery rattling down the road past the flimsy gate of the hospital, that to awake after a battle in a clean bed, dressed in a pink nightshirt and with a white coverlet with pink roses on it spread over your feet, must be like waking in Paradise.

I said, following him from bed to bed, that the coverlets came from Selfridges and cost two shillings apiece, and I thought they were worth it. They even, I said, made the difference sometimes between a man’s slipping away or back into the world when he awoke.

The General did not have very much time. All the beds were full. He couldn’t stop to talk to each man for more than half a minute, but when he came to No. 11 in Mademoiselle de M——’s ward and saw the ugly, scarred, black, burnt-up face grinning on the pillow and the eyes twinkling so astonishingly under the singed eyebrows, he seemed very taken aback.

“What’s the matter with his face?” he asked me in a low tone. “It’s a cinder! Why is he so jolly?”

“The shell burst so near that he was burnt. All his skin is burnt black, you see. Both arms are broken, and both legs. He is wounded all over his body. God knows why he is so jolly.”

There was very little to be seen of the man but his merry, burnt, scarred face. The cradle over his broken legs hid him from view till you got round it close to his pillow. His arms were in splints, and were supported by pulleys attached to a scaffolding over his bed. He couldn’t move any part of himself but his head. He grinned up at us and began to talk in his rough patois that was very difficult to understand. He was a great talker, was No. 11. He must have been the wag of his village. He came from somewhere near Nantes. He had a very strong accent and a rough rollicking comical voice that bubbled out of him in a stream in answer to the General’s enquiry as to how he felt.

The General listened, fascinated and puzzled. “What does he say?” he asked me.

“He says he feels fine, except for his legs and arms. He says he’s in fine shape. He says if he hadn’t had to wait on the battlefield for four days and nights his wounds would be nothing. He was lost, he said, in No Man’s Land, and had to crawl along on his stomach, and it was a slow business because his legs and arms were broken. He hitched himself along somehow on his stomach, but it was a slow way of travelling. He says he had to lie quiet in the daytime, and could only crawl along at night, and he didn’t know which way to make for. He said the men were lying out there as thick as flies, but the stretcher-bearers didn’t come his way, so he is lucky to be here. He says he’s always lucky, always has been.”

The bright laughing eyes in the burnt-up face watched me while I explained. When I paused he began to talk again.

“What’s he saying now?” asked the General. “He seems to think it is all a good joke.”

“He says when he woke up here and saw the pink roses on his bedspread he thought he was in Heaven, and then he felt a great hunger, and knew he was alive, and that his luck was good; a miracle had happened. He says the priest at home told him about miracles, and he always poked fun at him.”

The General was evidently intrigued, but he hadn’t much time. “Four days and four nights out there! I congratulate you, mon vieux.” He turned reluctantly to go.

“One minute, mon General, one minute. I saw something, a little thing. I would like to tell you what I saw out there on the battlefield.”

The General turned, came back again past the mountain of bedclothes and looked down with his steel-blue eyes into the ugly blackened face. “Tell me,” he said, “what did you see?” The General might possibly have looked in that way at a beautiful woman whom he loved very tenderly in the secret depths of his stone heart. His eyes were fixed intently, questioningly, wistfully, on the ugly visage with its incredible jollity. “What was it you saw, mon vieux, quick—tell me.”

“It was like this. There were men dying out there and there were priests on their knees going from one to the other. It was early morning, just after sunrise, and the Boche were shelling again. Every now and then a shell would fall and a shower of shrapnel, and pht—some poor devil would stop groaning. I wasn’t dying, you see, so I didn’t call to the priests. I’d been crawling along in the dark during the night, but now in the light I lay still, pretending I was dead, because of the sniping. There was a man dying a little way off, and a priest was kneeling, holding up a crucifix in front of him, and a little further off there was another man dying, who was a Jew, and the Rabbi of his regiment was kneeling beside him; and just then, when I watched, I saw the priest fall forward on the ground, on his face, with the crucifix in his hands. The Rabbi saw it, too. His man was just dead, and he saw that the priest had been hit in the back. He looked over his shoulder, you see, when the shell exploded. Then he crawled over on his hands and knees to where the priest was lying and took the crucifix out of his hands and knelt just where the priest had been kneeling, and held up the crucifix in front of the eyes of the man, the good Catholic who was dying; and he didn’t know the difference, you see; and so he died, not noticing the priest was dead and the Rabbi was in his place—only seeing the crucifix.”

There was a silence. The General drew himself up and turned away, staring out of the window. Two stretcher-bearers were passing, carrying a tightly rolled bundle to the morgue. I did not try to see the General’s face. The man in the bed was smiling.

“Lucky for him, wasn’t it?” he said to me. “I’ll tell the priest in my village when I get home, and I’ll tell him about the coverlet with the pink roses. Maybe the wife could get one like it.”

“They come from Selfridges,” I said. “They cost five francs. I’ll send you one when the war is over.”