Military life in Italy : sketches - Societa italiana di storia militare

THE DISABLED SOLDIER. 247
lessly over the fields, houses, and kitchen-gardens near the street.
He approached his home as he would have done an unknown
place. The sensitiveness of his heart was exhausted. Such is
our nature, that we submit with entire impassibility and a species
of abandonment to the excess of those sufferings which
seemed to us at first quite insupportable. And for this reason
that poor unfortunate fellow now gave all his attention, with
open mouth and eyes quite fixed, to the noise of the cart,
the presentiment
as if
of the sorrows into which he was about to
cast his family had entirely disappeared.
Now, giving a blow
with his hand to the sack, he looked astonished at the white
dust which flew about ;
now he buckled and unbuckled listlessly
the straps stretched between those two sticks fastened to
the wooden opening into which the stump of the leg is put
(two sticks that hold the leg quite firmly in its support) ; now,
seizing a crutch near the end, he went on beating the handle
lightly on the end of his foot. . . . But he had been feeling
a slight pain at the end of that poor thigh for some time, although
he had wrapped it carefully in some old pieces of linen
with which his
pockets had been filled when he left the hospital
;
and so, almost involuntarily, he unbuckled the straps for
the last time, stretched out his arm, took off
that wretched apparatus,
lifted it, and placed
it at his side. When the leg was
free, the pain decreased.
On the cart went, and he, without giving himself any other
thought, passed and repassed his hand over the leg, as if to
soothe the little pain that remained, when, on raising
he suddenly changed color, clasped his
his eyes,
hands, gave a cry, and
remained as motionless as a statue. He had seen the shrine
where they had parted ;
he came to himself ;
all the memories