To be exact, they were not all natives of Madagascar: they were types selected from the 1st Colonial Corps which was at that very moment strenuously fighting before Laffaux. There were a few natives of the Soudan, whose age was difficult to tell, sombre and wrinkled, and concealing under their regimental tunics charms that were coated with dirt, and smelling with leather, sweat and exotic oils. The negroes of Madagascar were of medium height, looking like embryos, very dark and silent. They slipped on the straps, and at my command began carrying the wounded with quiet unconcern, as if they were unloading bales of cotton at the docks. I was content, or rather reassured. The A.C.A., surfeited at last, worked at high pressure, and hummed like well-tended machines that drip with oil, shining and flashing from every point. Flash! The word is not too strong. I was dazzled on entering the operating hut. Night had just fallen--one of those warm beautiful nights of this brutal spring. The gunfire came and went in short spasms, like a sick giant. The wards of the hospital overflowed with a heaving mass of pain, and death was trying to restore order there. I breathed in deeply the night air of the garden and, as I was saying, I entered the operating hut. It had been partitioned off into several rooms. The one I suddenly stepped into made a bulge in the side of the building. It was as hot as a puddling-oven. Men were cleaning, scrubbing, and polishing, with scrupulous care, a mass of shining instruments, while others were stoking fires which gave out the white heat of soldering lamps. With never a pause, orderlies were coming and going, carrying trays held out rather stiffly at arm’s length, like hotel-keepers devoted to the ceremonious rites of the table. “It’s warm here,” I murmured, in order to say something. “Come over here: you’ll find it all right,” said a grinning little chap as hairy as a kobold. I lifted a lid, feeling I was opening the breast of some monster. In front of me steps led to a kind of throne on which, seated like a king, the heart of the thing was to be found. It was a steriliser--an immense pot in which a calf could easily have been cooked whole. It lay on its stomach and emitted a jet of steam that stupefied one, and its weary monotony made one hardly conscious of time and space. But suddenly the infernal noise stopped, and it was like the end of eternity. On the back of the machine a load of kettles continued to spit and gurgle. A man looking like a ship’s pilot was turning a large heavy wheel, and the lid of the cauldron, suddenly unbolted, rose, exposing to view its red-hot bowels, from which all sorts of boxes and packages were taken out. The heat of the furnace had given way to the damp, crushing atmosphere of a drying-stove. “But where do they operate on the wounded?” I asked a boy who was washing a pair of rubber gloves in a big copper tub. “Over there, in the operating-room, of course. But don’t go in that way.”