"An ambulance! Where can I find an ambulance?" ask some of the other wounded of the bearers.
"I say, you fellow there! Have you got any bandages?"
"Give him your flask, I say; give it to him!..."
Looking upon all which sights, the nerves of my men begin to suffer as I can plainly see.
Some of the wounded joke light-heartedly:
"Eh! Binet, now were you careful to number your giblets?..."
"Oh, my mother! If you could only see your son's face now!"
"Thank the good Boches for my nice wound; a billet at Nice, the Côte d'Azur and the Casinos where you can scratch up the gold with little rakes!"
"Saving! I should think so. Live carefully on a bullet a day, and it doesn't take you long to become a millionaire."
But gaiety finds no echo. The men fall silent, stricken with nameless forebodings. Suddenly the shells hurtle whistling over the wood.
We stumble against branches, get entangled in the brambles. The grass deadens the echo of our footsteps, which a moment before resounded along the road.
The order comes not a moment too soon, for hardly have we obeyed it when a shell bursts right on top of us. Stones are flung high in the air, and simultaneously two men behind me cry out. The detonation makes my ears tingle; a heavy, acrid odour fills the air.
"Lieutenant! That was my baptism. Just look at these two little holes!"
I turn to look into a rather pale and anxious face, which nevertheless expresses great relief. The man is a corporal, newly joined. He has unbuckled his pack to show me two bullet holes running right through the roll of it.
"You will find the bullets inside, all right," I tell him. "You had better keep them as souvenirs!"
All this while another of my men, named Gaubert, is grumbling and congratulating himself at one and the same moment. He playfully exhibits his flask, a battered, pitiful object which had just intercepted a bullet on its way to his thigh.
"Bravo, my little flask--bravo, my friend! You did not want your Gaubert to be sent down; so you took his place. What a good chap you are!... But what do you think your Gaubert is going to drink out of now? What do you want me to drink out of? I ask you!"
But he does not throw the useless can away; instead he places it carefully in his sack.