They found them lying next to each other on the burned grass, and gathered them both up. Their clothes had been blown off in shreds. The explosion had burned out the numbers and shattered the metal identity tags. They were like two pieces of human clay. The same fragment of shrapnel, flying slantwise, had sliced off their faces, so that they lay on the tussocks like a couple of trunks with a single red top. The Major who had loaded them into the ambulance did so mostly out of curiosity: for the effect was, in truth, most singular. They had neither nose, cheeks, nor lips. Their eyes had sprung out of their shattered sockets, their mouths gaped open in a bloodied hole where the severed tongue still wagged. What could be odder: two creatures of the same height, and faceless. Their skulls, covered in close-cropped hair, now had two red sides, simultaneously and identically carved out, with cavities where the eyes had been and three holes for mouth and nose.

In the ambulance they were dubbed Sans-Gueule no. 1 and Sans-Gueule no. 2. An English surgeon, who was working there voluntarily  was intrigued by the case and took it on. He anointed and dressed the wounds, extracted the splinters of bone, stitched and modelled meat, fashioning two red, concave hoods of flesh, identically exotic furnace. Lying in adjoining beds, the two Sans-Gueule stained the sheets with a twin wound, round, gaping, and meaningless. The eternal stillness of the wound was frozen in silent suffering: the severed muscles did not even pull against the stitches; the dreadful shock had annihilated the sense of hearing, so the only sign of life left was in the movement of their limbs, and by a twin rasping cry, emitted at intervals from between their gaping palates and the stumps of their tongues. 

And yet they started to heal. Slowly and surely they began to control their movements, to develop their arms, to fold their legs so they could sit down, move their hardened gums that still fleshed out their wired jaws. They had one pleasure, which was signalled by some sharply modulated sounds that still had no syllabic content: it was procured by smoking pipes—the stems were held in place in their mouths by pieces of oval rubber, fitted to the dimensions of their mouths. Curled in their blankets, they stank of tobacco, and plumes of smoke escaped from the orifices in their skulls: from the double hole of the nose, from the dark caverns of their eye-sockets, and through the torn mouth, between the remains of their teeth. And each plume of grey smoke was accompanied by an inhuman laugh and a sort of gurgling that came from the uvula while the rest of the tongue wagged feebly.

There was a stir in the hospital when a little woman with a mass of hair was brought by the intern to the bedside of the Sans-Gueule‘, she looked at them one after the other, with a terrified expression, and then burst into tears. Sitting in the office of the head doctor, she explained, between her sobs, that one of the two must be her hus­band. He had been listed among the casualties: but these two mutilated soldiers had no identifying marks, and belonged to a special category. The height, the width of shoulder, and the hands recalled the lost man infallibly. And yet she was in a terrible perplexity: which of the two Sans-Gueule was her husband?                                                               ,

The little lady was kindness itself: her cheap gown moulded her breast, and due to the way she put up her hair, in the Chinese style, she had a sweet, childlike face. Her straightforward grief and her almost absurd uncertainty mingled in her expression and contracted her features in a way reminiscent of a child that has broken its toy. So much so that the head doctor couldn’t stop himself from smiling; and because he had a crude way of talking, he said to the little woman looking up at him:

“Well, what of it! Take them both home! You’ll recognize which is which when you try them out!”

At first she was scandalized and averted her head, like a child blushing for shame: then she lowered her eyes and looked from one bed to the other. The two red mugs rested in their stitches on the pillows, with the same lack of meaning that constituted the whole enigma. She leaned down towards them, and whispered in the ear, first of one, and then the other. The heads did not react at all — but all four hands started to shake — undoubtedly because these two poor bodies whose souls had fled had a vague feeling that a very gentle little woman was close by, who had an endearing manner, and who gave off the sweet smell of a baby.

She hesitated some more, and then asked if they would let her take the mo Sans-Gueule home for a month. They were transported in a big padded ambulance, and the little woman, seated opposite, wept hot tears unceasingly.

When they got to the house, a strange life began for the three of them. Tirelessly she went to and fro from one to the other, looking for a clue, waiting for a sign. She observed the red surfaces that would never stir again. Anxiously she contemplated the stitches, as one would the features of a beloved face. She examined them in turn, as one might consider different photographs, without being able to choose.

Little by little the sharp grief that wrung her heart, in the early days, when she thought about her lost husband, ended by dissolving into an irresolute calm. She lived like someone who has renounced everything, but goes on by sheer force of habit. The two broken pieces that between them represented the loved one never joined together in her affections; but her thoughts went regularly from one to the other, as if her soul were continually tilting like a balance. She regarded them as her ‘puppets’; they were the two comical dolls that peopled her existence. Smoking their pipes, sitting in the same attitude on their beds, blowing out the same plumes of smoke, and uttering the same inarticulated cries, they resembled more those gigantic puppets brought back from the East, those scarlet masks from overseas, than beings possessed of conscious life that had once been men.

They were her ‘two monkeys’, her red mannikins, her two little husbands, her burned men, her meaty rascals, her bloodied faces, her holey heads, her brainless bonces. She mothered them in turn, arranging their blankets, tucking in their sheets, mixing their wine and breaking their bread. She led them out into the middle of the room, one on each side of her, and made the caper on the parquet floor; she played with them, and if they became vexed she would slap them down with the flat of her hand. At a single caress they flocked ,round her, like two famished dogs; and at a gesture of impatience they would double up, cringing like repentant animals. They would rub against her, in quest of morsels; they both had a wooden bowl, and into these, with joyful howlings, from time to time they would plunge their two red muzzles.

The two bonces no longer agitated the little woman as they had before, and no longer fascinated her, like two scarlet wolf-masks superimposed on familiar faces. She loved them equally in her child­like, pouting way. She would say: ‘My dolls are asleep; my little men are taking a walk.’ She was bewildered when someone came from the hospital to enquire which of the two she was going to keep. The ques­tion was absurd, it was like demanding she cut her husband in two. Often she would punish them, the way children do when their dolls have been naughty. She would say to one: ‘Look, my little lad, your brother’s been bad, he’s naughty as a monkey—and so I’ve turned his face to the wall, and I shan’t turn him back until he’s said sorry. And then, with a little laugh, she would turn the poor, penitent body back again, and kiss its hands. Sometimes she would even kiss their dread­ful stitches, and then privately wipe her mouth afterwards, pursing her lips. Then straightaway she would almost split herself laughing.

Imperceptibly, however, she got more used to one of them, because he was the gentler of the two. Quite unconsciously, since she had long given up any hope of recognition. She preferred him, like a favourite pet that one likes to caress the most. She spoiled him more and kissed him more tenderly. And by degrees the other Sans-Cueule grew sad, for he sensed about him less and less of her feminine presence. He would frequently remain curled up on his bed, his head hidden under his arm, like a wounded bird. He refused to smoke, while the other, knowing nothing of his grief, went on exhaling streams of grey smoke through every vent in his purple face, to the accompaniment of little squawks.

So the little woman started to tend to her sad husband, without really understanding his sadness. His head in her bosom would shake with deep sobs that came from his chest; and a kind of harsh groaning would shake his torso. This poor occluded heart was prey to a terrible an animal jealousy borne of feelings mingled with memor­ies, it may be, of a former life. She sang him lullabies, as if he were a child, and calmed him by laying her cool hands upon his burning head. When she realized he was very ill, big tears would fall from her laughing eyes onto his poor mute face.

And soon she was prey to a poignant anguish, for she thought she recognized gestures he had made in an earlier illness. Certain move­ments seemed familiar from before; and the way he held his emaci­ated hands reminded her of hands that had been dear to her, and which had brushed her sheets, before the great abyss had opened up in her life.

And the wail coming from the poor abandoned one pierced her heart; and in a breathless uncertainty, she once more scrutinized the faceless heads. They were no longer just two purple dolls—one was a stranger—and the other was part of her own self. When the one who was ailing died, all her grief returned.

She now truly believed that she had lost her husband; and she ran, full of hate, towards the other Sans-Gueule, and then stopped short, seized by her childlike pity, in front of the wretched red mannikin who was smoking away joyously, uttering his little cries.