The discovery itself had not been made by
them, but they had been so near to it that many of them would never be
the same man again. "No, your Honour," one soldier said to me. "It
isn't my arm.... That is nothing, _Slava Bogu_ ... but life isn't so
real now. It is half gone." He would explain no more.
Since the battle of S----, I had been restless. I wanted to be back
there again and this work was to me like talking to travellers who
had come from some country that one knew and desired.
In the early morning, when the light was so cold and inhuman, when the
candles stuck in bottles on the window-sills shivered and quavered in
the little breeze, when the big basin on the floor seemed to swell
ever larger and larger, with its burden of bloody rags and soiled
bandages and filthy fragments of dirty clothes, when the air was
weighted down with the smell of blood and human flesh, when the sighs
and groans and cries kept up a perpetual undercurrent that one did not
notice and yet faltered before, when again and again bodies, torn
almost in half, faces mangled for life, hands battered into pulp, legs
hanging almost by a thread, rose before one, passed and rose again in
endless procession, then, in those early hours, some fantastic world
was about one.
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