“He’s back!” Dunbar screamed again.
“He’s back!” a patient delirious with fever echoed in automatic terror.
All at once the ward erupted into bedlam. Mobs of sick and injured men began ranting incoherently and running and jumping in the aisle as though the building were on fire. A patient with one foot and one crutch was hopping back and forth swiftly in panic crying, “What is it? What is it? Are we burning? Are we burning?”
“He’s back!” someone shouted at him. “Didn’t you hear him? He’s back! He’s back!”
“Who’s back?” shouted someone else. “Who is it?”
“What does it mean? What should we do?”
“Are we on fire?”
“Get up and run, damn it! Everybody get up and run!”
Everybody got out of bed and began running from one end of the ward to the other. One C.I.D. man was looking for a gun to shoot one of the other C.I.D. men who had jabbed his elbow into his eye. The ward had turned into chaos. The patient delirious with the high fever leaped into the aisle and almost knocked over the patient with one foot, who accidentally brought the black rubber tip of his crutch down on the other’s bare foot, crushing some toes. The delirious man with the fever and the crushed toes sank to the floor and wept in pain while other men tripped over him and hurt him more in their blind, milling, agonized stampede. “He’s back!” all the men kept mumbling and chanting and calling out hysterically as they rushed back and forth. “He’s back, he’s back!” Nurse Cramer was there in the middle suddenly like a spinning policeman, trying desperately to restore order, dissolving helplessly into tears when she failed. “Be still, please be still,” she urged uselessly through her massive sobs. The chaplain, pale as a ghost, had no idea what was going on. Neither did Nately, who kept close to Yossarian’s side, clinging to his elbow, or Hungry Joe, who followed dubiously with his scrawny fists clenched and glanced from side to side with a face that was scared.
“Hey, what’s going on?” Hungry Joe pleaded. “What the hell is going on?”
“It’s the same one!” Dunbar shouted at him emphatically in a voice rising clearly above the raucous commotion. “Don’t you understand? It’s the same one.”
“The same one!” Yossarian heard himself echo, quivering with a deep and ominous excitement that he could not control, and shoved his way after Dunbar toward the bed of the soldier in white.
“Take it easy, fellas,” the short patriotic Texan counseled affably, with an uncertain grin. “There’s no cause to be upset. Why don’t we all just take it easy?”
“The same one!” others began murmuring, chanting and shouting.
Suddenly Nurse Duckett was there, too. “What’s going on?” she demanded.
“He’s back!” Nurse Cramer screamed, sinking into her arms. “He’s back, he’s back!”
It was, indeed, the same man. He had lost a few inches and added some weight, but Yossarian remembered him instantly by the two stiff arms and the two stiff, thick, useless legs all drawn upward into the air almost perpendicularly by the taut ropes and the long lead weights suspended from pulleys over him and by the frayed black hole in the bandages over his mouth. He had, in fact, hardly changed at all. There was the same zinc pipe rising from the hard stone mass over his groin and leading to the clear glass jar on the floor. There was the same clear glass jar on a pole dripping fluid into him through the crook of his elbow. Yossarian would recognize him anywhere. He wondered who he was.
“There’s no one inside!” Dunbar yelled out at him unexpectedly.
Yossarian felt his heart skip a beat and his legs grow weak. “What are you talking about?” he shouted with dread, stunned by the haggard, sparking anguish in Dunbar’s eyes and by his crazed look of wild shock and horror. “Are you nuts or something? What the hell do you mean, there’s no one inside?”
“They’ve stolen him away!” Dunbar shouted back. “He’s hollow inside, like a chocolate soldier. They just took him away and left those bandages there.”
“Why should they do that?”
“Why do they do anything?”
“They’ve stolen him away!” screamed someone else, and people all over the ward began screaming, “They’ve stolen him away. They’ve stolen him away!”
“Go back to your beds,” Nurse Duckett pleaded with Dunbar and Yossarian, pushing feebly against Yossarian’s chest. “Please go back to your beds.”
“You’re crazy!” Yossarian shouted angrily at Dunbar. “What the hell makes you say that?”