Wounded

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Heaps of the dying and the dead, weeping women who were on their knees praying for the aid of Heaven, infants wildly clasped in the arms of their frantic mothers, wretched girls shrieking with terror or vainly begging for mercy, wounded children and bleeding patriots were presented to the sight of the savage soldiers in their career of glory! ”

“ All this shows the havoc of battle, but the sight that appals is the human dead. Dead, dying, and wounded in various ways. The spectator must callous his heart, or, if fairly human, he will be overwhelmed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Almost every day brought its battle or its skirmish. Almost every day men,—sometimes many hundreds,—would be shot dead, or be wounded and borne away in ambulances or on stretchers, not grudging the sacrifices they had made. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ Since dark forty wounded men have been brought in, many of which will prove mortal, one with the shoulder gone, a number of legs off, one with both arms gone, some blown up with shells and terribly burned, some in the breast. ”

“ It far out-did all that I ever saw in America. For about an hour and a half there was such weeping, so many falling into deep distress, and expressing it various ways, as is inexpressible. The people seem to be slain by scores. They are carried off, and come into the house like soldiers wounded in, and carried off a field of battle. Their cries and agonies are exceedingly affecting. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We were constantly surrounded by plunderers, incendiaries, and the dying, who, stretched on the sides of the road, implored assistance in a feeble voice, saying, "I am not infected—I am only wounded;" ”

“ As the armies drew near together, they assailed the one the other as fiercely as if mortal enemies with their banners spread should fight for their goods, their lands, their lives, their liberty, their country, their wives and their children, so that within the moment of an hour, four men were slain, and many wounded. ”

“ Unwind my riddle.
Cruel as hawks the hours fly;
Wounded men seldom come home to die;
The hard waves see an arm flung high;
Scorn hits strong because of a lie;
Yet there exists a mystic tie. ”

“ My dear J——, you can little imagine how much suffering I have witnessed in the last few weeks—how much, that acts or kind words have no power to mitigate. There have been many wounded brought in from Corinth, many who have died since their arrival, many who will die; but, saddest of all, a young boy, too young to be a soldier, yet possessing all a soldier’s spirit. I walked into a ward, one morning, that I had visited the evening before—a ward of very sick patients—and saw an old man sitting by a new cot, fanning a young boy, who lay with flushed face, and burning eyes fixed on the ceiling. ”

“ Wounded men lying in the shell holes among the decaying corpses: helpless under the scorching sun and bitter nights, under repeated shelling. Men with bowels dropping out, lungs shot away, with blinded smashed faces, or limbs blown into space. Men screaming and gibbering. ”

“ And many of the soldier-boys had sad hearts under their brave faces. Soon hundreds of these poor fellows were falling dead and wounded on fields of battle, and then their people at home had good reason to weep and mourn. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I am completely worn out in body, but this joyful news renovates my soul, and in prospect of speedy release I drag myself about. There will be but little if any more fighting, in all probability, and the wounded are feeling so glad over thoughts of the homes soon to be seen. ”

“ With the help of a friend I got father into a wagon, when the crowd had gone. I held his head in my lap during the ride home. I believed he was mortally wounded. He had been stabbed down through the kidneys, leaving an ugly wound. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ At times he regarded the wounded soldiers in an envious way. He conceived persons with torn bodies to be peculiarly happy. He wished that he, too, had a wound, a red badge of courage. ”

“ In almost every house there were wounded soldiers. In order to shew the number quartered in these houses, and the country to which they belonged, the inhabitants affixed a paper on their windows or their doors, intimating that they had four wounded English, or four wounded Scotch, &c. Nothing could exceed the attention of the ladies to their patients. ”