Wounded man

“ Blackened muskets, broken saddles, overturned caissons, wounded horses snorting in agony, and fair-haired boys and gray-haired men mangled and bleeding,—some piled in heaps, and some stretched out singly to die,—lay all over that green hillside! Here and there a crippled soldier was creeping about among the wounded, and, close by, a stalwart man, the blood dripping from his dangling sleeve, was wrapping a blue-eyed, pale-faced boy in his blanket. ”

“ Sheer courage, and the will to ignore the pains that racked his entire body, brought the wounded man to a sitting position. At the time, the thought that murderers might still be lurking close at hand did not occur to him. ”

“ It will be well for them that they do not fall in a wild and desolate region like some that we have passed through. As you say, sir, war is an argument, a heated one at times. But a wounded man is an appeal to all kindly humanity. You would nurse me a little, Miss Baron, if I were brought in wounded, would you not? ”

“ Now and then they came on sinister forms apparently engaged in the same duty of tending the wounded and dead, but in truth murderous plunderers, to whom the dead and the dying were equal harvests. Did the wounded man attempt to resist the foul hands searching for their spoil, they added another wound more immediately mortal, grinning as they completed on the dead the robbery they had commenced on the dying. ”

“ It was soon evident that it was only going from the frying-pan into the fire, as the danger of walking back carrying a wounded man was immensely greater than remaining or advancing more or less on one's stomach. ”

“ All the sympathy that ought to have been devoted to the wounded man he diverted to himself by the tremendous fuss he made about his injured shins, and this, and the chaff he had to sustain in consequence, quite rounded off the affair, and we all went home in high good humour, and the wounded man for years afterwards used to show his ear-to-ear scar with considerable satisfaction. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They died to a man, fighting. It seemed to me one of the most pitiful and heroic things of this war, that little crowd of men, many of them wounded, some of them dazed and deaf, stumbling forward to their certain death to oppose the enemy's advance. ”

“ As a rule wounded men should not be removed from the field of battle under fire, at any rate when the troops are in open order at a range of 1,000 yards or more. I saw several instances in which mortal wounds were incurred by previously wounded men or their bearers during the process of removal, while it was astonishing how many scattered wounded men could lie out under a heavy fire and escape by the doctrine of chances. The erect position and small group necessary to bear off a wounded man at once draws a concentrated fire, if fighting is still proceeding. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They are unarmed and many of them are killed. The moment a man is wounded, a stretcher bearer rushes to his assistance; no matter how heavy the bombardment may be, he is in the thick of the fight attending to the wounded and dying. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Here a man with a bandaged arm was talking affectionately to a less fortunate "pal" on a stretcher, and asking him if he could do anything for him; it is extraordinary how suffering knits men together, and how much sympathy is brought out in a man at the sight of a badly wounded comrade: yonder by the huts an orderly assisted a "walking case," shot through the lungs and vomiting blood freely. ”

“ And now, in the midnight, the veil is torn aside, and I see a human heart in extremis, writhing with agony, groaning as the wounded never groan, stricken, bleeding, prostrate, overwhelmed with the enormity of its sorrow. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I do not forget the thousands left on the battlefield to die, or the groaning of the wounded sounding all day between the crashes of the guns. But there is a strange, deep gladness as well. 'One feels an extraordinary freedom,' says a young Russian officer, 'in the midst of death, with the bullets whistling round. The same with all the soldiers. The wounded all want to get well and return to the fight. They fight with tears of joy in their eyes.'
"Human nature is a mysterious thing, and man finds his weal and woe not in the obvious places. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If a man was shot through the heart, spine, or brain he was, of course, killed instantly; but very few of the wounded died—even under the appalling conditions which prevailed, owing to the lack of attendance and supplies in the field-hospitals with the army. ”

“ As to being wounded, some men will look on a mortal wound, feel his life ebbing away, perfectly calm and without concern, and give his dying messages with the composure of an every day occurrence; while others, if the tip of the finger is touched, or his shin-bone grazed, will "yell like a hyena or holler like a loon," and raise such a rumpus as to alarm the whole army. ”

“ We fight for the portion Death has chosen. The wounded Corporal looks on at our labours and our efforts, like a poor man who has placed his cause in the hands of a knight, and who can only be a spectator of the combat, can only pray and wait. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Where all with calm courage faced death it is almost out of place to mention individual cases, but some deeds of daring better illustrate the desperate chances taken when duty called. One regimental surgeon went out in No Man's Land amid a hail of machine gun bullets—it seemed sure death to face guns sending a spray of bullets searching the entire area—and calmly attended wounded men where they lay knowing that probably every minute would be his last. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The soul-bell in me, can but give one cry,
Like that, a wounded soldier—o'er whom pass
Riders and horses, and around whom lie
The dead and dying in a tangled mass—
Utters, unable or to move or die. ”

“ I'm wounded! But am I like them? Am I one of the halt, the lame, the blind? Am I like that detective who swells himself into a gross human balloon because he stuffs the growing void of his hurt with food?
"Am I like our hostess, whose green wound caused her to drive away two husbands because it festered so deep she went into a delirium of unfounded imaginings about them? And then got a third who fulfilled the image she'd built up of the first two?
"And am I like that thin-lipped woman who deep-freezes her wound because she is mortally afraid of pain? ”

“ Ahead they could see a heavy house-like fort which was inadequate to explain from whence came the myriad bullets. The remainder of the scene was landscape. Pale men, yellow men, blue men came out of this landscape quiet and sad-eyed with wounds. Often they were grimly facetious. There is nothing in the American regulars so amazing as his conduct when he is wounded—his apologetic limp, his deprecatory arm-sling, his embarrassed and ashamed shot-hole through the lungs. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There are certain recognised cries, which respectively signify the killing of a man and the taking of a prisoner, by which, when such an event occurs, the fighters on both sides are aware of it. An enemy wounded on the battlefield [183] may be killed at once or may be taken prisoner. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And so these lightly wounded men—men with their jaws shot away, men with holes in their breasts and their abdomens, men with their spine tips splintered, men with their arms and legs broken, men with their hands and feet shredded by shrapnel, men with their scalps ripped open, men with their noses and their ears and their fingers and toes gone, men jarred to the very marrow of their bones by explosives—these men, for whom ordinarily soft beds would have been provided and expert care and special food, came trundling up alongside that noisome station ”

“ What a contrast to the previous awful silence was there in the report of the guns, the rattle of musketry, the shouts of the officers, the cheers of the men, the crashing of spars and timber as the shot struck home, and the shrieks, and cries, and groans of the wounded! To these expressions of pain even the bravest cannot help giving way, when wounded where the nerves are most sensitive. ”

“ I find by this day’s muster, thirty-six killed, three of whom lingered a short time after the battle; thirty-six severely wounded, many of whom cannot recover, and thirty-two slightly wounded, who may all do well ”

“ 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. ”

“ Over four hundred wounded men have been brought in, of which number about forty are rebels, nearly all with terrible wounds. It is a hard sight to see them, and I feel desperate toward everything and everybody, and yet know not on whom to rest this dreadful suffering. ”

“ That night Doctor Webster Lindsly and I, with the permission of the Confederates, visited the field to care for the wounded, where I carried Captain Mack to the hospital. I found a young man, mortally wounded, a cannon ball having struck his abdomen. He said, "I know I am going to die. ”

“ Heaps of slain, where friend and foe lie side by side, mangled bodies, shrieks and groans of the wounded and dying, are things which we always associate with the victories and defeats of war. But we seldom expect or hear of songs of praise and shouts of triumph from dying lips on the dreadful battle-field. The following account was received from the lips of a brave and pious captain in one of the Western regiments, as some friends were conveying him to a hospital from the battle-field:
“The man had been shot through both thighs with a rifle bullet ”