The Penguin Book of First World War Stories by None, Anne-Marie Einhaus

between the stretchers in the same row; they touched. The old territorials who worked with me passed up and down between the heads and feet. I had a squad of thirty of these old orderlies and two sergeants and two priests, who were expert dressers. Wooden screens screened off the end of the hut opposite the entrance. Behind these were the two dressing-tables where the priests dressed the wounds of the new arrivals and got them ready for the surgeons, after the old men had undressed them and washed their feet. In one corner was my kitchen where I kept all my syringes and hypodermic needles and stimulants.
    It was just before midnight when the stretcher-bearers brought in the blind man, and there was no space on the flooranywhere; so they stood waiting, not knowing what to do with him.
    I said from the floor in the second row: ‘Just a minute, old ones. You can put him here in a minute.’ So they waited with the blind man suspended in the bright, hot, misty air between them, like a pair of old horses in shafts with their heads down, while the little boy who had been crying for his mother died with his head on my breast. Perhaps he thought the arms holding him when he jerked back and died belonged to some woman I had never seen, some woman waiting somewhere for news of him in some village, somewhere in France. How many women, I wondered, were waiting out there in the distance for news of these men who were lying on the floor? But I stopped thinking about this the minute the boy was dead. It didn’t do to think. I didn’t as a rule, but the boy’s very young voice had startled me. It had come through to me as a real voice will sound sometimes through a dream, almost waking you, but now it had stopped, and the dream was thick round me again, and I laid him down, covered his face with the brown blanket, and called two other old ones.
    â€˜Put this one in the corridor to make more room here,’ I said; and I saw them lift him up. When they had taken him away, the stretcher-bearers who had been waiting brought the blind one and put him down in the cleared space. They had to come round to the end of the front row and down between the row of feet and row of heads; they had to be very careful where they stepped; they had to lower the stretcher cautiously so as not to jostle the men on either side (there was just room), but these paid no attention. None of the men lying packed together on the floor noticed each other in this curious dream-place.
    I had watched this out of the corner of my eye, busy with something that was not very like a man. The limbs seemed to be held together only by the strong stuff of the uniform. The head was unrecognizable. It was a monstrous thing, and a dreadful rattling sound came from it. I looked up and saw the chief surgeon standing over me. I don’t know how he got there. His small shrunken face was wet and white; his eyes were brilliant and feverish; his incredible hands that saved so manymen so exquisitely, so quickly, were in the pockets of his white coat.
    â€˜Give him morphine,’ he said, ‘a double dose. As much as you like.’ He pulled a cigarette out of his pocket. ‘In cases like this, if I am not about, give morphine; enough, you understand.’ Then he vanished like a ghost. He went back to his operating room, a small white figure with round shoulders, a magician, who performed miracles with knives. He went away through the dream.
    I gave the morphine, then crawled over and looked at the blind man’s ticket. I did not know, of course, that he was blind until I read his ticket. A large round white helmet covered the top half of his head and face; only his nostrils and mouth and chin were uncovered. The surgeon in the dressing station behind the trenches had written on his ticket, ‘Shot through the eyes. Blind.’
    Did he know? I asked myself. No, he couldn’t know yet. He would still be wondering, waiting, hoping, down there in that