the uniform of a staff-surgeon came around the table where I was lying.
“Bon!” he exclaimed, eying me sharply through his gold-rimmed glasses. “Can you feel your hind-legs now, young man?”
I could feel them all too intensely, and I said so.
The surgeon began to turn down his shirt-sleeves and button his cuffs, saying, “You’re lucky to have a pain in your legs.” Turning to the Turco, he added, “Lift him!” And the giant rifleman picked me up and laid me in a long chair by the window.
“Your case is one of those amusing cases,” continued the surgeon, buckling on his sword and revolver; “very amusing, I assure you. As for the bullet, I could have turned it out with a straw, only it rested there exactly where it stopped the use of those long legs of yours! – a fine example of temporary reflex paralysis, and no hemorrhage to speak of – nothing to swear about, young man. By-the-way, you ought to go to bed for a few days.”
He clasped his short baldric over his smartly buttoned tunic. The room was shaking with the discharges of cannon.
“A millimetre farther and that bullet would have cracked your spine. Remember that and keep off your feet. Ouf! The cannon are tuning up!” as a terrible discharge shattered the glass in the window-panes beside me.
“Where am I, doctor?” I asked.
“Parbleu, in Morsbronn! Can’t you hear the orchestra, zim-bam-zim! The Prussians are playing their Wagner music for us. Here, swallow this. How do you feel now?”
“Sleepy. Did you say a day or two, doctor?”
“I said a week or two – perhaps longer. I’ll look in this evening if I’m not up to my chin in amputations. Take these every hour if in pain. Go to sleep, my son.”
With a paternal tap on my head, he drew on his scarlet, gold-banded cap, tightened the check strap, and walked out of the room. Down-stairs I heard him cursing because his horse had been shot. I never saw him again.
Dozing feverishly, hearing the cannon through troubled slumber, I awoke toward noon quite free from any considerable pain, but thirsty and restless, and numbed to the hips. Alarmed, I strove to move my feet, and succeeded. Then, freed from the haunting terror of paralysis, I fell to pinching my legs with satisfaction, my eyes roving about in search of water.
The room where I lay was in disorder; it appeared to be completely furnished with well-made old pieces, long out of date, but not old enough to be desirable. Chairs, sofas, tables were all fashioned in that poor design which marked the early period of the Consulate; the mirror was a fine sheet of glass imbedded in Pompeian and Egyptian designs; the clock, which had stopped, was a meaningless lump of gilt and marble, supported on gilt sphinxes. Over the bed hung a tarnished canopy broidered with a coronet, which, from the strawberry leaves and the pearls raised above them, I took to be the coronet of a count of English origin.
The room appeared to be very old, and I knew the house must have stood for centuries somewhere along the single street of Morsbronn, though I could not remember seeing any building in the village which, judging from the exterior, seemed likely to contain such a room as this.
The nearer and heavier cannon-shots had ceased, but the window-sashes hummed with the steady thunder of a battle going on somewhere among the mountains. Knowing the Alsatian frontier fairly well, I understood that a battle among the mountains must mean that our First Corps had been attacked, and that we were on the defensive on French soil.
The booming of the guns was unbroken, as steady and sustained as the eternal roar of a cataract. At moments I believed that I could distinguish the staccato crashes of platoon firing, but could not be certain in the swelling din.
As I lay there on my long, cushioned chair, burning with that insatiable thirst which, to thoroughly appreciate, one must be wounded, the door opened and a Turco soldier came into the room and advanced toward me on tip-toe.
He wore full uniform, was fully equipped, crimson chechia, snowy gaiters, and terrible sabre-bayonet.
I beckoned him, and the tall, bronzed fellow came up, smiling, showing his snowy, pointed teeth under a crisp beard.
“Water, Mustapha,” I motioned with stiffened lips, and the good fellow unslung his blue water-bottle and set it to my burning mouth.
“Merci, mon brave!” I said. “May you dwell in Paradise with Ali, the fourth Caliph, the Lion of God!”
The Turco stared, muttered the Tekbir in a low voice, bent and kissed my hands.
“Were you once an officer of our African battalions?” he asked, in the Arab tongue.
“Sous-officier of spahi cavalry,” I said, smiling. “And you are a Kabyle mountaineer from Constantine, I see.”
“It is true as I recite the fatha,” cried the great fellow, beaming on me. “We Kabyles love our officers and bear witness to the unity of God, too. I am a marabout, my inspector, Third Turcos, and I am anxious to have a Prussian ask me who were my seven ancestors.”
The music of his long-forgotten tongue refreshed me; old scenes and memories of the camp at Oran, the never-to-be-forgotten cavalry with the scarlet cloaks, rushed on me thick and fast; incidents, trivial matters of the bazaars, faces of comrades dead, came to me in flashes. My eyes grew moist, my throat swelled, I whimpered:
“It is all very well, mon enfant, but I’m here with a hole in me stuffed full of lint, and you have your two good arms and as many legs with which to explain to the Prussians who your seven ancestors may be. Give me a drink, in God’s name!”
Again he held up the blue water-bottle, saying, gravely: “We both worship the same God, my inspector, call Him what we will.”
After a moment I said: “Is it a battle or a bousculade? But I need not ask; the cannon tell me enough. Are they storming the heights, Mustapha?”
“Macache comprendir,” said the soldier, dropping into patois. “There is much noise, but we Turcos are here in Morsbronn, and we have seen nothing but sparrows.”
I listened for a moment; the sound of the cannonade appeared to be steadily receding westward.
“It seems to me like retreat!” I said, sharply.
“Ritrite? Quis qui ci, ritrite?”
I looked at the simple fellow with tears in my eyes.
“You would not understand if I told you,” said I. “Are you detailed to look after me?”
He said he was, and I informed him that I needed nobody; that it was much more important for everybody that he should rejoin his battalion in the street below, where even now I could hear the Algerian bugles blowing a silvery sonnerie – “Garde à vous!”
“I am Salah Ben-Ahmed, a marabout of the Third Turcos,” he said, proudly, “and I have yet to explain to these Prussians who my seven ancestors were. Have I my inspector’s permission to go?”
He was fairly trembling as the imperative clangor of the bugles rang through the street; his fine nostrils quivered, his eyes glittered like a cobra’s.
“Go, Salah Ben-Ahmed, the marabout,” said I, laughing.
The soldier stiffened to attention; his bronzed hand flew to his scarlet fez, and, “Salute!
