The Hospital de Sangre de Aravaca is the setting of a wartime medical scene in which the narrator saves a soldier who appears to be dying. Against the stream of refugees and the hospital’s rows of wounded men, the first successful transfusion he performs becomes more than a medical achievement: it gives a face to the human cost of war and makes rescue feel like a lasting obligation.

Setting and Arrival

As a truck approaches the hospital, the narrator is still carrying the image of refugees moving along the road: families burdened with clothes, luggage, sacks and folded mattresses, children clinging to their mothers. He compares their procession, seen from above, to ants laboriously carrying crumbs across grass. The image remains with him when he reaches the hospital, where the flow of refugees has given way to a bloody line of the dying bordering the rear courtyard.

The First Rescue

Faced with the line of dying men, the narrator decides to save one ordinary soldier: someone born into a family like those who have reached Madrid with only what they could carry. He finds him at the edge of the line, already judged beyond help and breathing in death’s rattling gasps. The choice turns the hospital from a place of mass suffering into the setting of a particular encounter, shaped by one patient’s exposed vulnerability.

The Transfusion and Its Witnesses

The narrator kneels beside the young soldier, takes a blood sample, and notices the details that make him more than one of the indistinguishable dying: sun-lightened strands in his brown hair and an olive twig hooked through the second buttonhole like a badge. The first bottle of blood has almost no effect. Only when the second is already more empty than full does the soldier open his eyes and lips. His brown eyes catch gold, and his regular white teeth include one front tooth broken diagonally, like a knife blade. The sequence makes the rescue precarious and physical: the narrator cannot know whether the transfusion will work until the soldier’s face begins to answer it.

The response overwhelms the narrator. He feels a new, intense euphoria and laughs as if he has gone mad; he remembers neither that Norman Bethune reportedly laughed whenever he brought a soldier back to life nor any explanation for his own reaction. The soldier, speaking with a strong inland Andalusian accent, asks what has happened and why the narrator is laughing. He looks from side to side and understands that he had been one among the dying men surrounding him, but a coughing fit prevents him from joining in the laughter. Their first exchange thus holds recovery and the hospital’s continuing proximity to death in the same moment.

A small metallic sound repeats, and the narrator realizes that a Canadian has been photographing them. The image makes the rescue a witnessed scene, not merely a private triumph. Norman Bethune then addresses the narrator in French, saying that he too is God. The remark gives the episode its startling measure of the doctor’s achievement while the photographs preserve its human scale: a physician kneeling beside one man brought back from the edge of death.

Scale of the Work and the Saving Debt

Bethune’s remark follows a day of repeated rescues: by the time the team returned to Madrid, sixteen soldiers had been saved, five through the narrator’s work. He had already gained the impression of having spent half a lifetime transfusing men written off as hopeless. Yet the first soldier remained singular in his memory, more affecting than any of the others he had helped—or even a previous patient he recalled as a girl with bare breasts and a peacock’s tail. The hospital’s mass of casualties therefore resolves, in memory, into one face that cannot be exchanged for another.

Before leaving, the narrator approaches the soldier, who is still pale and tired but cannot stop smiling. He tells the narrator that, among so-called savages, a person whose life has been saved owes it to the rescuer as a debt that lasts forever, and asks whether the soldier understands. The claim transforms a brief medical intervention into a lasting bond: at the hospital, survival does not erase the encounter but creates an obligation between the one who saved and the one who was saved.

The Hospital as a Human Measure of War

The hospital episode narrows the view from a procession of displaced families and a courtyard edged with the dying to the face of one soldier. His olive twig, broken tooth, failing breath, and eventual smile give individual form to the casualties around him. The narrator’s decision to save someone from a family like those arriving in Madrid makes the rescue an answer to mass suffering without pretending that one successful transfusion can undo it.