I could see, dimly, the
stage at the back of the room, and still hanging, tattered and
restless in the draught, a forgotten backcloth of some old play. I
could see that it was a picture of a gay scene in an impossibly highly
coloured town--high marble stairs down which flower-girls with swollen
legs came tripping into a market-place filled with soldiers and their
lovers--"Carmen" perhaps. It seemed absurd enough there in the
uncertain candlelight with the wounded groaning and crying in front of
it. There was already in the air that familiar smell of blood and
iodine, the familiar cries of: "Oh, _Sestritza_--Oh, _Sestritza_!" the
familiar patient faces of the soldiers, sitting up, waiting for their
turn, the familiar sharp voice of the sanitar: "What Division? What
regiment? bullet or shrapnel?"
I remember that some wounded man, in high fever, was singing, and that
no one could stop him.
"He's dead," I heard Semyonov's curt voice behind me, and turning saw
them cover the body on the stretcher with a sheet.
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