A little soldier of the reserves who suffered from an abscess on his knee came back hopping on one foot, crying, pulling his hair in despair. They did not want to attend to him. When it was my turn to go in I was all atremble. Inside the place which was dark, four patients, lying flat in the straw, were emitting rattling sounds like the cock of a musket; a fifth one was gesticulating, muttering incoherent words in delirium; still another, half-reclining, with head drooped on his chest, was moaning and asking for a drink in a feeble voice, the voice of an infant. Squatted in front of the fire place, an attendant was holding over the flame, on the end of a stick, a piece of stale pudding whose stench of burned grease filled the room. The adjutant did not even look at me. He shouted: "Well, what's the matter now?... A bunch of lazy buggers. A good ten league run at a stretch will fix you up, you straggler.... Face about!... March!" On the threshold I met a peasant woman who asked me: "Is this the place where you can see the doctor." "Women now!" growled the adjutant. "What do you want now?" "Beg pardon, excuse me, Doctor," rejoined the peasant woman, who came up very timidly. "I came for my son who is a soldier." "Tell me now, old woman, am I here to keep track of your son, or what?" With her hands crossed on the handle of her umbrella, timorous, she examined the place about her. "It seems like he is very sick, my son is, very, very sick.... And so I came to see if he was not around here, Doctor." "What's your name?" "My name is Riboulleau." "Riboulleau.... Riboulleau!... That may be ... look in that pile there." The attendant who was broiling his pudding turned his head. "Riboulleau," he said, "why he has been dead three days already...." "What is that you are saying?" cried the peasant woman whose sunburned face suddenly became pallid. "Where did he die?... Why did he die, my little darling boy." The adjutant intervened, and rudely pushing the old woman toward the door, shouted: "Go on, go on, no scenes around here! Well, he is dead--and that is all there is to it." "My little darling boy! My little darling boy!" wailed the old woman in a heart-breaking manner. I walked away with a heavy heart and felt so discouraged that I was asking myself whether it was not better to put an end to it all at once by hanging myself on the branch of a tree or by blowing my brains out with the gun. While I was going to my tent, stumbling on the way, I was hardly paying any attention to the little soldier who, having stopped at the foot of a pine tree, had opened his abscess with his knife himself, and, pale, with sweat drops rolling all over his forehead, was bandaging his bleeding wound.