The wounded

“ The stars looked down with kindly gleams upon thousands of worn-out soldiers sleeping as quietly as little children, while the wounded were groaning with pain, as the life-blood slowly trickled over the grass which the hot sun and the trampling of feet and stamping of horses had matted into a tangled and brown mass. ”

“ The wounded man suddenly comes to himself with heart-rending cries, with curses. The assistant surgeon throws the arm into a corner, while another wounded man on a stretcher who sees the operation turns and groans, more on account of the mental torture of expectation than from the physical pain he feels. You will witness these horrible, heart-rending scenes; you will see war without the brilliant and accurate alignment of troops, without music, without the drum-roll, without standards flying in the wind, without galloping generals—you will see it as it is, in blood, in suffering, and in death! ”

“ The wounded man who comes down to the dressing-station after his fight sees only the men around him at the time, and it is a personal adventure of pain limited to his own suffering, and relieved by the joy of his escape. But we see the many wounded who stream down month after month from the battlefields—for three and a half years I have watched the tide of wounded flowing back, so many blind men, so many cripples, so many gassed and stricken men—and there is something staggering in the actual sight of the vastness and the unceasing drift of this wreckage of war. ”

“ There lay the ghastly dead, cold and pale in the grey light of the morning,—across them in heaps the wounded, quivering with intensity of agony, grasping the gory ground with convulsive clutches, and tearing up the earth, which was soon to cover them, in handfuls, while their eyes, starting from the sockets, were becoming glazed and terrible in death. ”

“ Wounded men everywhere. Crawling about, delirious with pain and agony; lying prone and almost motionless, staring up into the blue sky, dying slowly and making no sign; shrieking, groaning, cursing, praying, imploring help, begging for a bandage, for water, lying quietly, laughing even,—wounded men everywhere. In hospitals, under trees, in tents, in houses, in stables, with surgeons probing and cutting and carving and sawing and clumsily bandaging; in ambulances jolting off towards Springfield; limping along to hide and escape another hurt—wounded men everywhere. ”

“ The multitude of the wounded was so great, that notwithstanding the utmost exertions of the surgeons, hour after hour of the long night lingered away, while thousands of the wounded and the dying bit the dust in their agony. ”

“ Near the close of the day when the evening shadows creep over this vast field of carnage, more than one officer, more than one French soldier, seek here and there a comrade, a compatriot, or a friend, when he finds the wounded friend, he kneels beside, trying to restore him to consciousness, wiping away the blood, bandaging the wounds as well as he can, wrapping a handkerchief around the broken limb, but rarely can he secure water for the suffering man. ”

“ Our wounded, that is to say, those men who have come back from that hell, "whose horrors," they say themselves, "are indescribable;" those who have marched beneath "that terrible, moving curtain of iron," to which an officer compared the mass of balls and shells in battle, a mass so compact that it obscured the very daylight on the firing line. Our wounded! Those, in a word, who have brought back in their very flesh the frightful scars of the enemy's iron, those who have cemented with their own blood the human wall that is now our frontier. ”

“ The lives of the wounded were too often taken to the accompaniment of shocking barbarities and, when the breath was out of their bodies, their heads were hacked off and borne away in triumph, to grin from spiked palisades at the foe who refused to respect them even in death. ”

“ I know of no sadder scene than a field of battle presents soon after the conflict, even though the glorious result may have filled our hearts with joy. When the roll is called, and name after name uttered without response, it cannot but awaken the deepest sensibility in the heart of the survivors. And then the hasty burial of the dead, and the hurried sending off the wounded, the surgeon’s necessary operations, and the groans of the sufferers, all make us feel that these are the horrors of war. ”

“ This is war; here are we approaching the place of horror. We have left behind the French villages where peace was still sleeping. Now there is nothing but tumult. And here are direct victims of the war.
The soldiers: blood, mud and dirt. The wounded. Those whom we pass at first are the least suffering—wounds in arms, in hands. In most of them can clearly be seen, in the midst of their fatigue and distress, great relief at having been let off comparatively easily. ”

“ Here and there, amongst the wounded, were the rigid faces of the dead, in some cases peaceful, with blue lines round their eyes, in others contorted through the death struggle, with terrifying eyes and grinning teeth. ”

“ The dead, the dying, the wounded, strewed the ground in every direction. Out of nearly one hundred, including the teamsters, only seven or eight escaped from the bloody spot. The wounded were indiscriminately massacred. ”

“ The groans and cries of the wounded and dying, of which we so often read as filling up the grand discord of sounds on the battle-field, are things scarcely known in actual war. Rarely, as in the present battles, wounded men, unable to get away, are left between the lines in such numbers that, when the musketry dies away, their groans become heart-rending. ”

“ Day and night we have done nothing but bring in the wounded and the dead. When one sees [pg 89] the dead, their limbs crushed and mangled, their features distorted and blackened, one can only have repulsion for war. It is easy to talk of glory and heroism when one is away from it, when memory has softened the gruesome details. ”

“ For several days after the assault, our troops were occupied in repairing the old defences, building new ones, remounting cannon, burying the stray corpses, which were sometimes found in retired nooks and corners, and in attending to the wounded; whilst I remained inactive on the list of the convalescents. To me, these were days of indescribable misery and ennui: I endured agony, both of mind and body; for a wound on the head, dangerous at all times, is doubly so in a warm climate. ”

“ The wretched loads of wounded were emptied before the doors of the improvised hospitals until they overflowed with maimed humanity and all hearts and hands were full of grief for the dead and work for the wounded. ”

“ I turned and looked to the other side, and saw that I was in one of those vast sheds used by the brewers of the country as a shelter for their casks and wagons. All around, on mattresses and heaps of straw, numbers of wounded lay ranged; and in the middle, on a large kitchen-table, a surgeon-major and his two aids, their shirt-sleeves rolled up, were amputating the leg of a soldier, who was shrieking in agony. Behind them was a mass of legs and arms. I turned away sick and trembling.
Five or six soldiers were walking about, giving bread and drink to the wounded. ”

“ The yells, the groans, the frenzied gladness,
The death the danger warmed no more.
In plundered churches piled with dead
The heavy charger neighed for food,
The wounded soldier laid his head
'Neath roofless chambers splashed with blood. ”

“ Your brothers, your sons, your husbands, are arming for war. Our blood is to make your happiness secure. Women! let your efforts stanch its shedding. I beg you for the love of humanity to make lint and bandages for the wounded. That offering from fair hands will relieve the sufferings of the wounded and spur on courage itself. ”

“ I heard the thunder of our own guns, and the shouts of our men, and the splintering crash of the heavy shot that came aboard of us. But before long, when the streams of wounded began to come our way, I heard nothing but gasps and groans, and saw nothing but horrors which I would fain blot out of my memory, but cannot, even now.
I had seen wounded men before. I had been wounded myself. But seeing men fall, torn and mangled in the heat of fight, with the red fury blazing in one's own veins, and the smoke and smell of battle pricking in one's nostrils, and death in the very air—that is one thing. ”

“ For it was known that in that horrible obscurity, riderless horses, frantic with the smell of blood, galloped wildly here and there, or, maddened by wounds, plunged furiously at the intruder; that the wounded soldier, still armed, could not always distinguish friend from foe or from the ghouls of camp followers who stripped the dead in the darkness and struggled with the dying. ”

“ The dead and wounded lay everywhere covered with terrible injuries, and the crying of the wounded, which might soften a stone, but not a soldier's heart, told of the awful pain which those "defenders of their country" had to suffer.
However, not all the soldiers approved of that senseless, that criminal murdering. Some of the "gentlemen" who had ordered us to massacre our French comrades were killed "by mistake" in the darkness of the night, by their own people, of course. ”

“ The great club was full uplifted in the air, when the combatants saw him suddenly waver and stagger, then saw the deadly weapon drop, a stream of spouting blood from the wounded breast gush over the white garment, and that tall figure and ghastly face sink downward to the earth, one last long yell, wilder and more fearful than any that had preceded it, sounding the signal of his death, and the battle again going on over the trampled body. ”

“ Here a wounded soldier would half raise himself on one arm, and beg for water, while others, bleeding and dying, lay uncomplainingly, their eyes fixed on the blue sky, which nevermore would greet their waking vision. ”

“ Some idea may be formed of its appearance, when I state on the authority of a surgeon who dressed a great many of the wounded, that at one period of the battle, there were nearly a thousand wounded soldiers belonging to the 3d and 5th divisions in that narrow space. The cries of the poor fellows were most heart-rending, and the appearance of the mangled and mutilated corpses which strewed the square in every direction, was so ghastly and appaling, that he must have possessed a heart of adamant, who could have entered that place of death and lamentation, without being sensibly affected. ”

“ We have twenty-five hundred wounded men in now, some with arms and legs off, and the most frightful mutilations. A captain and a corporal have died to-day. How our grave-yard fills up with the hero-dust. I have worn out my feet, as I did at Fredericksburg, for so many are wounded through the mouth, that all they eat has to be fed them by our hands. I had a letter from home, but hardly had time to be glad over it. ”

“ From a dread of imminent attack, of charging rebels and retreating defenders, and a fight to the death by the house, they came suddenly to a desire for blood and battle, for dead men and the cries of the wounded ”

“ KILLING THE WOUNDED There are great numbers of wounded who, on their solemn oath, have related how, when lying on the field of battle, they saw their wounded comrades "finished off" by rifle or revolver shots, or by blows from butt-ends, or by bayonet stabs, or kicked to death by German soldiers, non-commissioned officers, and even by officers. ”

“ Wounded lay here, there, and everywhere, heaped as they had fallen, drenched in their own gore and helpless, yet struggling pathetically to edge themselves with hands or knees or heels nearer some place of safety. ”

“ I have clasped the rude hands, sometimes deformed, of more than twenty-two thousand soldiers, some wounded, others well again, returning to the firing line, a flame in their eyes and in their hearts. I have bent over more than ten thousand beds of mutilated young men, many of them with gangrene. ”

“ Wretched beings at the point of death, thrown by the wayside, continued to call with feeble voice, 'I have not the plague, I am but wounded;' and, to convince those that passed, they might be seen tearing open their real wounds, or inflicting new ones. ”

“ There we knew men had fallen singly, and had long lain wounded or dead, until their friends had taken them to grave or shelter. Out in the open again, where skirmishes had happened and bill and bow or spear had met their like, the dead lay thicker. Gods! how drear those fair French fields did lie in the autumn moonlight, with their scattered dead in twos and threes and knots and clusters! There were some who sprawled upon the ground—still clutching in their dread white fingers the grass and earth torn up in the moment of their agony. ”

“ As the advancing and retreating hosts wavered to and fro, the wounded, by thousands, were left on hill-sides and in dark ravines, with the drifting snow, crimsoned with blood, their only blanket; there in solitude and agony to moan and freeze and die. ”

“ The wounded pray to be saved from death; the dying recall the words of old petitions learned in childhood, and in those broken accents commit their souls to God.”
[Pg 279] The only amusing incident after a battle is, the crowd of spectators from Washington and other places. If they are in carriages, their vehicles are sure to get smashed, and then the trouble arises, what are they to do with their baggage? Carry it, of course, or leave it behind. Even the wounded soldiers cannot help laughing at their sorry plight, gesticulations, and absurd questions. ”

“ Men were for many days engaged in burying the dead, of whom there were nearly eight thousand. The wounded of both armies, who were able to be removed, were at once carried into hospitals and tenderly cared for. ”