The business that lay before him now was the rescision of a shoulder-joint in accordance with Lisfranc’s method, which surgeons never fail to speak of as a “very pretty” operation, something neat and expeditious, barely occupying forty seconds in the performance.  The patient was subjected to the influence of chloroform, while an assistant grasped the shoulder with both hands, the fingers under the armpit, the thumbs on top.  Bouroche, brandishing the long, keen knife, cried:  “Raise him!” seized the deltoid with his left hand and with a swift movement of the right cut through the flesh of the arm and severed the muscle; then, with a deft rearward cut, he disarticulated the joint at a single stroke, and presto! the arm fell on the table, taken off in three motions.  The assistant slipped his thumbs over the brachial artery in such manner as to close it.  “Let him down!” Bouroche could not restrain a little pleased laugh as he proceeded to secure the artery, for he had done it in thirty-five seconds.  All that was left to do now was to bring a flap of skin down over the wound and stitch it, in appearance something like a flat epaulette.  It was not only “pretty,” but exciting, on account of the danger, for a man will pump all the blood out of his body in two minutes through the brachial, to say nothing of the risk there is in bringing a patient to a sitting posture when under the influence of anaesthetics.

Delaherche was white as a ghost; a thrill of horror ran down his back.  He would have turned and fled, but time was not given him; the arm was already off.  The soldier was a new recruit, a sturdy peasant lad; on emerging from his state of coma he beheld a hospital attendant carrying away the amputated limb to conceal it behind the lilacs.  Giving a quick downward glance at his shoulder, he saw the bleeding stump and knew what had been done, whereon he became furiously angry.

“Ah, nom de Dieu! what have you been doing to me?  It is a shame!”

Bouroche was too done up to make him an immediate answer, but presently, in his fatherly way: 

“I acted for the best; I didn’t want to see you kick the bucket, my boy.  Besides, I asked you, and you told me to go ahead.”

“I told you to go ahead!  I did?  How could I know what I was saying!” His anger subsided and he began to weep scalding tears.  “What is going to become of me now?”

They carried him away and laid him on the straw, and gave the table and its covering a thorough cleansing; and the buckets of blood-red water that they threw out across the grass plot gave to the pale daisies a still deeper hue of crimson.

When Delaherche had in some degree recovered his equanimity he was astonished to notice that the bombardment was still going on.  Why had it not been silenced?  Rose’s tablecloth must have been hoisted over the citadel by that time, and yet it seemed as if the fire of the Prussian batteries was more rapid and furious than ever.  The uproar was such that one could not hear his own voice; the sustained vibration tried the stoutest nerves.  On both operators and patients the effect could not but be most unfavorable of those incessant detonations that seemed to penetrate the inmost recesses of one’s being.  The entire hospital was in a state of feverish alarm and apprehension.