She told them off on her small fine fingers, stained with iodine: "Two heads, one of them has a bad leg-wound also; one amputé of the arm, infected; two of the leg, infected both of them; two faces; a bad chest-wound, bullet; other two slight. Zut! that Madame Bayle, will she never come! Run over to the store-house and tell them I have got to have tubes and funnels to feed the 9 and 14. See that they give them to you, whatever fuss they make, tell them it is for very bad faces. Quick now, the chief has been around, and they are going to trepan the worst head this morning."
The man they trepanned yesterday will not keep still; he worries about everything. They say he is doing well, but he talks all the time. They told me to sit by him and try to make him stay quiet. At first he held my hand and seemed to rest, but he would not shut his eyes, and after a little he began to talk again.
He was worried because he thought I had not enough to eat; he thought, because I was so thin, that I must be very poor. He said he had some biscuits and some rillettes de Tours done up together in a piece of newspaper. The package had been in his musette when he went into the charge. Where was his musette? He would have me go and find it, and eat the biscuits, and the rillettes de Tours. He worried because he had fallen back into a trench deep with water, and the newspaper package might have got wet. But I must not mind that, he said, it was better than starving. What had they done with his musette? I must go and get it. And I must not mind taking his biscuits and rillettes de Tours, for he was not hungry at all.
All day long there has been sunshine, and the sky has been blue. There were great white clouds that mounted up over the city, and that one kept imagining was the smoke of battle. The blue of the sky was wonderful, infinite and near, like something of music or of religion, and the sunshine was like golden wine. But those soft white puffs of cloud were terrible.
At the top of the Champs Elysées, behind the Arch, the clouds were driven up as if it were from the mouths of cannon.
It must be just like that the smoke is rising in the sunshine over the high edge of a field I used to know. They say that field is laid across everywhere with railroad tracks, along which monster grey cannon crawl up to their positions, and crawl back across again when their work is done. Hundreds of horses are corralled in the field, and everywhere there are dotted little white tents. Sometimes black faces come to the openings of the tents, and one would think of the Village Nègre people went to see in Magic City, ages and ages ago.