This smell!
It enters through your nose and fills your whole body - a revolting sweet mixture of chloroform and disinfectant.
If only I could escape it for half an hour and breathe some fresh air.
A hospital is a realm of odors. The red-haired boy who lies in the big room claims he can tell the time of day with his nose. He is seven-teen years old. He joined the Palmach in search of adventure. He is said to have been a good-looking youth. Born in one of the agricul-tural settlements in the Emek.1 He himself claims to have been the best rider in the area. That was, of course, before "it" happened to him. After the capture of Majdal he found some German hand grenades. He wanted to find out how to take them apart. A grenade exploded in his hand, tearing off most of his fingers and destroying both his eyes. In a few weeks he will be eighteen and admits that he has never slept with a woman.
He is an expert on smells. In the morning, after the floors have been mopped, disinfectant dominates everything else. In the early afternoon this disgusting smell of chloroform and carbolic acid reasserts itself. The stink of excrement, which occasionally wafts through the wards, is less sickening than the chloroform. Those are the chief odors. Blood and pus also have their own smells, as do the secretions of healing wounds.
War is not for people with a sensitive nose. That may be one of the reasons why most people don’t understand war. They see the pic-tures in the movie theater. But movies convey no smells. Nor do books transmit any idea of the emanations of war. A way needs to be discovered of filling the nose with them.