“Is he unconscious?” you ask the woman, who has followed you and looks at you kindly as at a friend.
“No, he can still hear—but he is very bad,” she adds in a whisper. “I gave him some tea today—though he is a stranger one must have pity—and he could hardly drink it.”
“How do you feel?” you ask him. The wounded man turns his eyes towards you, but neither sees you nor understands, and only says—
“My heart is on fire.”
A little further on you see an old soldier changing his shirt. His face and body are a kind of brick-red, and he is as gaunt as a skeleton. One arm is quite gone, taken right off at the socket. He is sitting up firmly, and has recovered; but you can see by the dull, dead look of his eyes, by the terrible gauntness of his body, and by the wrinkles on his face, that the best part of this man’s life has been wasted by his sufferings.
On a bed on the other side you may see the pale, suffering, delicate face of a woman, her cheeks suffused with a feverish glow.
“That’s the wife of one of our sailors,” says your guide. “She was hit in the leg by a bomb on the 5th; she was taking her husband’s dinner to him at the bastion.”
“Have they amputated it?”
“Yes, above the knee.”
Now, if your nerves are strong, go in at the door to the left; it is there they bandage and operate. There you will see doctors with pale, gloomy