There was nothing they wanted done. But after a while they asked permission to carry him out and lay him with the badly wounded.
“No. No. No!” said the doctor, who was busy. “What’s the matter? Are you afraid of him?”
“We don’t like to hear him in there with the dead.”
“Don’t listen to him. If you take him out of there you will have to carry him right back in.”
“We wouldn’t mind that, Captain Doctor.”
“No,” said the doctor. “No. Didn’t you hear me say no?”
“Why don’t you give him an overdose of morphine?” asked an artillery officer who was waiting to have a wound in his arm dressed.
“Do you think that is the only use I have for morphine? Would you like me to have to operate without morphine? You have a pistol, go out and shoot him yourself.”
“He’s been shot already,” said the officer. “If some of you doctors were shot you’d be different.”
“Thank you very much,” said the doctor waving a forceps in the air. “Thank you a thousand times. What about these eyes?” He pointed the forceps at them. “How would you like these?”
“Tear gas. We call it lucky if it’s tear gas.”
“Because you leave the line,” said the doctor. “Because you come running here with your tear gas to be evacuated. You rub onions in your eyes.”
“You are beside yourself. I do not notice your insults. You are crazy.”
The stretcher-bearers came in.
“Captain Doctor,” one of them said.
“Get out of here!” said the doctor.
They went out.
“I will shoot the poor fellow,” the artillery officer said. “I am a humane man. I will not let him suffer.”
“Shoot him then,” said the doctor. “Shoot him. Assume the
