The Radio

"Water, water, water!"

My room-mate has recovered consciousness. At first he groaned, now he is howling more than shouting. Like a wounded animal. And between the howls his breathing is labored. It sounds like a blunt, rusty saw.

Rachel comes at a run. She still has the magazine she was reading in her hand. The sweaty face of a soldier is smiling out from the front page. A rifle with mounted bayonet is meant to lend the picture a certain glamor.

"Water ... Give me waaaater!" cries the wounded man.

If he keeps on shouting like that he will wake all the other wounded men in the big room. Rachel tries to calm him down, without success.

"Give him something to drink and be done with it," I feel like telling her. "He won’t survive the night!" But I keep my mouth shut. I am not quite that crazy.

A sentence comes to me, that I read once, written by some general: "The soldier must die with dignity." It must have seemed pretty sim-pie to the general at his desk. A bullet hits you in the chest, you raise your arms, shout "It is good to die for the fatherland!" - and you sink, as in the movies, gracefully to the ground. But if the bullet hits you in the face and not in the chest, then your dignified death doesn’t look quite so fine. In Ibdis there were two in a trench, arm in arm, but without heads. It was not easy to tell if they died with dignity. How can a man die with dignity when his body is racked with pain and he is not allowed anything to drink?

Rachel groans and sits on my bed. Nurses often appear to have no feelings for the suffering around them. That is not so. It is not possible

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