'"You see that," says Palot, who has divined with the instinct of the dying the destination of those sinister planks. "Well, that will be my last bed." 'An assistant, a filthy apron round his body, signs to us to enter. 'The great tent is an unutterably miserable place; it has been battered about by wind and weather; the currents of air blow unchecked through it, and clouds of dust arise from the ground. Some twenty iron beds are there, not more; and beyond those a pile of mattresses, on which men are lying, rolled up in rough counterpanes. There are not sheets enough for all. They make a sick man rise and give up his place to Palot, whose pulse the surgeon feels. '"Done for," says the doctor, between his teeth, without heeding whether Palot hears him or not. 'To the rest of us they assign the mattresses lying on the earth; these are full of vermin; they throw on us some covering, stained with the vomit of our predecessors. 'How wretched it is, this hospital! How weary are the days passed, with no other companions than the dying, whose characters are poisoned by suffering and whose cries of horror and anguish ring in one's ears! When, moved by the disgust and despair which comes over you in this foetid hole filled with filth and misery, you drag yourself out on your trembling limbs into the sun, you feel so feeble, so exhausted, so helpless, you cannot walk a step. You sit down in the torrid heat; you are chilly, despite the high temperature; your teeth chatter, your body is drenched with sweat. And at evening you are obliged to return to the tent, where you pass such hideous nights, troubled by such frightful nightmares, by such vague sudden shapeless terrors, which seem to seize you by the throat and freeze the blood in your veins. Oh! those horrible nights when you see the dying shake off their covering with shrunken fingers and try to raise their haggard faces, lighted by the yellow-green rays of a lanthorn! 'These nights in which the living, who so soon will be the dead, clutch at the rags which cover them, and shriek with rage and fear as though they saw an enemy descend on them! These nights in which one hears the childlike sobs of young Palot, who is delirious, and who in his long agony calls on his mother, "Mamma! Mamma!"