In the hubbub of lamentation and groaning, in the strong smell of a countless concentration of wounds, in this blinking cavern of confused and unintelligible life, I try first to get my bearings.  Some weak candle flames are shining along the Refuge, but they only relieve the darkness in the spots where they pierce it.  At the farthest end faint daylight appears, as it might to a dungeon prisoner at the bottom of an oubliette.  This obscure vent-hole allows one to make out some big objects ranged along the corridor; they are low stretchers, like coffins.  Around and above them one then dimly discerns the movement of broken and drooping shadows, and the stirring of ranks and groups of specters against the walls.

I turn round.  At the end opposite that where the faraway light leaks through, a mob is gathered in front of a tent-cloth which reaches from the ceiling to the ground, and thus forms an apartment, whose illumination shines through the oily yellow material.  In this retreat, anti-tetanus injections are going on by the light of an acetylene lamp.  When the cloth is lifted to allow some one to enter or leave, the glare brutally besplashes the disordered rags of the wounded stationed in front to await their treatment.  Bowed by the ceiling, seated, kneeling or groveling, they push each other in the desire not to lose their turn or to steal some other’s, and they bark like dogs, “My turn!”—­“Me!”—­“Me!” In this corner of modified conflict the tepid stinks of acetylene and bleeding men are horrible to swallow.

I turn away from it and seek elsewhere to find a place where I may sit down.  I go forward a little, groping, still stooping and curled up, and my hands in front.

By grace of the flame which a smoker holds over his pipe I see a bench before me, full of beings.  My eyes are growing accustomed to the gloom that stagnates in the cave, and I can make out pretty well this row of people whose bandages and swathings dimly whiten their beads and limbs.  Crippled, gashed, deformed, motionless or restless, fast fixed in this kind of barge, they present an incongruous collection of suffering and misery.

One of them cries out suddenly, half rises, and then sits down again.  His neighbor, whose greatcoat is torn and his head bare, looks at him and says to him—­“What’s the use of worrying?”

And he repeats the sentence several times at random, gazing straight in front of him, his hands on his knees.  A young man in the middle of the seat is talking to himself.  He says that he is an aviator.  There are burns down one side of his body and on his face.  In his fever he is still burning; it seems to him that he is still gnawed by the pointed flames that leaped from his engine.  He is muttering, “Gott mit uns!” and then, “God is with us!”

A zouave with his arm in a sling, who sits awry and seems to carry his shoulder like a torturing burden, speaks to him:  “You’re the aviator that fell, aren’t you?”