VIII
The large, lofty, dark hall, lit only by the four or five candles with which the doctors examined the wounded, was literally filled. The bearers kept bringing in fresh men, laying them side by side on the floor (which was already so crowded that the unfortunates jostled one another and were soaked with each other’s blood), and going to fetch more wounded. The pools of blood visible in the unoccupied spaces, the feverish breathing of several hundred men, and the perspiration of the workmen with the stretchers, filled the air with a peculiar, heavy, thick, fetid mist, in which, in different parts of the hall, the candles burnt dimly. The sound of all sorts of groans, sighs, death-rattles, now and then interrupted by shrill screams, filled the whole room. Sisters, with quiet faces, expressing not an empty, feminine, painfully tearful pity, but active, practical sympathy, here and there among the bloody coats and shirts stepped across the wounded with medicines, water, bandages, and lint. The doctors, with sleeves turned up, kneeling beside the wounded—near whom the assistants held the candles—examined, felt, and probed their wounds, not heeding the terrible groans and the prayers of the sufferers. One doctor sat at a table near the door, and at the moment Gáltsin came in was already entering No. 532.
“Iván Bogáef, Private, Company III, S⸺ Regiment, fractura femuris complicata!” shouted another doctor from the end of the room, examining a shattered leg.
“Turn him over.”
“Oh, oh, fathers! Oh, you’re our fathers!” screamed the soldier, beseeching them not to touch him.
“Perforatio capitis!”
“Simon Nefyórdof, Lieutenant-Colonel of the N⸺ Infantry Regiment. Have a little patience, Colonel, or it is quite impossible; I’ll have to leave you!” said a third doctor, poking about with some kind of hook in the skull of the unfortunate Colonel.
“Oh, don’t; oh, for God’s sake be quick! be quick. Ah—!”
“Perforatio pectoris. … Sebastian Séreda, Private … what regiment? But you need not write that: moritur. Carry him away,” said the doctor, leaving the soldier, whose eyes turned up while the death-rattle still sounded in his throat.
About forty soldiers, stretcher-bearers, stood at the door waiting to carry the bandaged to the wards and the dead to the chapel. They looked on in silence, broken only now and then by a heavy sigh, at the scene before them.