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A commotion is arising for some unknown reason in. the horizontal gulf which lengthens as it contracts from stretcher to stretcher as far as the eye can see, as far as the pallid peep of daylight, in this confused corridor where the poor winking flames of candles redden and seem feverish, and winged shadows cast themselves.  The odds and ends of heads and limbs are agitated, appeals and cries arouse each other and increase in number like invisible ghosts.  The prostrate bodies undulate, double up, and turn over.

In the heart of this den of captives, debased and punished by pain, I make out the big mass of a hospital attendant whose heavy shoulders rise and fall like a knapsack carried crosswise, and whose stentorian voice reverberates at speed through the cave.  “You’ve been meddling with your bandage again, you son of a lubber, you varmint!” he thunders.  “I’ll do it up again for you, as long as it’s you, my chick, but if you touch it again, you’ll see what I’ll do to you!”

Behold him then in the obscurity, twisting a bandage round the cranium of a very little man who is almost upright, who has bristling hair and a beard which puffs out in front.  With dangling arms, he submits in silence.  But the attendant abandons him, looks on the ground and exclaims sonorously, “What the—?  Eh, come now, my friend, are you cracked?  There’s manners for you, to lie down on the top of a patient!” And his capacious hand disengages a second limp body on which the first had extended himself as on a mattress; while the mannikin with the bandaged head alongside, as soon as he is let alone, puts his hands to his head without saying a word and tries once more to remove the encircling lint.

There is an uproar, too, among some shadows that are visible against a luminous background; they seem to be wildly agitated in the gloom of the crypt.  The light of a candle shows us several men shaken with their efforts to hold a wounded soldier down on his stretcher.  It is a man whose feet are gone.  At the end of his legs are terrible bandages, with tourniquets to restrain the hemorrhage.  His stumps have bled into the linen wrappings, and he seems to wear red breeches.  His face is devilish, shining and sullen, and he is raving.  They are pressing down on his shoulders and knees, for this man without feet would fain jump from the stretcher and go away.

“Let me go!” he rattles in breathless, quavering rage.  His voice is low, with sudden sonorities, like a trumpet that one tries to blow too softly.  “By God, let me go, I tell you!  Do you think I’m going to stop here?  Allons, let me be, or I’ll jump over you on my hands!”

So violently he contracts and extends himself that he pulls to and fro those who are trying to restrain him by their gripping weight, and I can see the zigzags of the candle held by a kneeling man whose other arm engirdles the mutilated maniac, who shouts so fiercely that he wakes up the sleepers and dispels the drowsiness of the rest.  On all sides they turn towards him; half rising, they listen to the incoherent lamentations which end by dying in the dark.  At the same moment, in another corner, two prostrate wounded, crucified on the ground, so curse each other that one of them has to be removed before the frantic dialogue is broken up.