The only natural death I’ve ever seen, outside of loss of blood, which isn’t bad, was death from Spanish influenza. In this you drown in mucus, choking, and how you know the patient’s dead is: at the end he turns to be a little child again, though with his manly force, and fills the sheets as full as any diaper with one vast, final, yellow cataract that flows and dribbles on after he’s gone. So now I want to see the death of any self-called Humanist[2] because a persevering traveller like Mungo Park or me lives on and maybe yet will live to see the actual death of members of this literary sect and watch the noble exits that they make.
In my musings as a naturalist it has occurred to me that while decorum is an excellent thing some must be indecorous if the race is to be carried on since the position prescribed for procreation is indecorous, highly indecorous, and it occurred to me that perhaps that is what these people are, or were: the children of decorous cohabitation. But regardless of how they started I hope to see the finish of a few, and speculate how worms will try that long preserved sterility; with their quaint pamphlets gone to bust and into foot-notes all their lust.
While it is, perhaps, legitimate to deal with these self-designated citizens in a natural history of the dead, even though the designation may mean nothing by the time this work is published, yet it is unfair to the other dead, who were not dead in their youth of choice, who owned no magazines, many of whom had doubtless never even read a review, that one has seen in the hot weather with a half-pint of maggots working where their mouths have been. It was not always hot weather for the dead, much of the time it was the rain that washed them clean when they lay in it and made the earth soft when they were buried in it and sometimes then kept on until the earth was mud and washed them out and you had to bury them again.
Or in the winter in the mountains you had to put them in the snow and when the snow melted in the spring some one else had to bury them. They had beautiful burying grounds in the mountains, war in the mountains is the most beautiful of all war, and in one of them, at a place called Pocol, they buried a general who was shot through the head by a sniper. This is where those writers are mistaken who write books called Generals Die in Bed, because this general died in a trench dug in snow, high in the mountains, wearing an Alpini hat with an eagle feather in it and a hole in front you couldn’t put your little finger in and a hole in back you could put your fist in, if it were a small fist and you wanted to put it there, and much blood in the snow. He was a damned fine general, and so was General von Behr who commanded the Bavarian Alpenkorps troops at the battle of Caporetto and was killed in his staff car by the Italian rearguard as he drove into Udine ahead of his troops, and the titles of all such books should be Generals Usually Die in Bed, if we are to have any sort of accuracy in such things.
In the mountains too, sometimes, the snow fell on the dead outside the dressing station on the side that was protected by the mountain from any shelling. They carried them into a cave that had been dug into the mountainside before the earth froze. It was in this cave that a man whose head was broken as a flower-pot may be broken, although it was all held together by membranes and a skillfully applied bandage now soaked and hardened, with the structure of his brain disturbed by a piece of broken steel in it, lay a day, a night, and a day.
The stretcher-bearers asked the doctor to go in and have a look at him. They saw him each time they made a trip and even when they did not look at him they heard him breathing. The doctor’s eyes were red and the lids swollen, almost shut from tear gas. He looked at the man twice; once in daylight, once with a flashlight. That too would have made a good etching for Goya, the visit with the flashlight, I mean. After looking at him the second time the doctor believed the stretcher-bearers when they said the soldier was still alive.
“What do you want me to do about it?” he asked.
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 responsibility. I will make a report. Wounded shot by lieutenant of artillery in first curing post. Shoot him. Go ahead shoot him.”
“You are not a human being.”
“My business is to care for the wounded, not to kill them. That is for gentlemen of the artillery.”
“Why don’t you care for him then?”
“I have done so. I have done all that can be done.”
“Why don’t you send him down on the cable railway?”
“Who are you to ask me questions? Are you my superior officer? Are you in command of this dressing post? Do me the courtesy to answer.”
The lieutenant of artillery said nothing. The others in the room were all soldiers and there were no other officers present.
“Answer me,” said the doctor holding a needle up in his forceps. “Give me a response.”
“F—— yourself,” said the artillery officer.
“So,” said the doctor. “So, you said that. All right. All right. We shall see.”
The lieutenant of artillery stood up and walked toward him.
“F—— yourself,” he said. “F—— yourself. F—— your mother. F—— your sister. . . .”
The doctor tossed the saucer full of iodine in his face. As he came toward him, blinded, the lieutenant fumbled for his pistol. The doctor skipped quickly behind him, tripped him and, as he fell to the floor, kicked him several times and picked up the pistol in his rubber gloves. The lieutenant sat on the floor holding his good hand to his eyes.
“I’ll kill you!” he said. “I’ll kill you as soon as I can see.”
“I am the boss,” said the doctor. “All is forgiven since you know I am the boss. You cannot kill me because I have your pistol. Sergeant! Adjutant! Adjutant!”
“The adjutant is at the cable railway,” said the sergeant.
“Wipe out this officer’s eyes with alcohol and water. He has got iodine in them. Bring me the basin to wash my hands. I will take this officer next.”
“You won’t touch me.”
“Hold him tight. He is a little delirious.”
One of the stretcher-bearers came in.
“Captain Doctor.”
“What do you want?”
“The man in the dead-house——”
“Get out of here.”
“Is dead, Captain Doctor. I thought you would be glad to know.”
“See, my poor lieutenant? We dispute about nothing. In time of war we dispute about nothing.”
“F—— you,” said the lieutenant of artillery. He still could not see. “You’ve blinded me.”
“It is nothing,” said the doctor. “Your eyes will
