Pocket Island: A Story of Country Life in New England

by Charles Clark Munn

CHAPTER XIX.

AMONG THE WOUNDED.

At nearly noon the day after the battle of Peach Creek the searchers for wounded came upon Manson, still alive, but delirious. Of that ghastly battlefield, or the long agony of that wounded boy, I hesitate to speak. No pen can describe, either, and to even faintly portray them is but to add gloom to a narrative already replete with it. The twenty-four hours of his indescribable pain and torturing thirst were only broken by a few hours of merciful delirium, when he was once more a boy and living his simple, care-free life on the farm, or happy with Liddy. When found he knew it not. When examined by a surgeon that stern man shook his head and remarked: "Slim chance for you, poor devil—too much blood gone already!"

For two weeks he was delirious most of the time, but his rugged constitution saved him, and when he showed signs of gaining and could be moved, he was taken to the hospital at Washington. Once there, he began to fail again, for the long journey had been too much for him.

"He won't last long," said the doctor in charge to the nurse. "Better ask him if there is any one he wishes to see."

When he made his rounds the next morning Manson was worse and again out of his head. "He has been wandering in his mind all night," was the nurse's report, "and he talks about fishing and catching things in traps, and there is a girl mixed in it all. Case of sweetheart, I guess."

That day the wounded boy rallied a little and began to think, and bit by bit the sane hours of the past few weeks came back to him. How near to the shores of eternal silence his bark had drifted, he little knew! The long hours of agony on the battlefield since the moment he had instinctively crawled behind a rock had been a delirium of despair broken only by visions of vague and shadowy import that he could not grasp. All that he thought was that death must soon end his misery, and he hoped it might come soon. At times he had bitten and torn the sleeves of his coat, soaked with blood from his shattered arm, or beaten his head against the dry earth in his agony.

How long it had lasted he could not tell, and the last that he remembered was looking at the moon, and then he seemed to be drifting away and all pain ceased. Then all around him he could hear voices and over his head a roof, and he felt as if awakened from some horrible dream. With his well arm he felt of the other and found it was bound with splints. The faces he could see were all strange, but the men wore the familiar blue uniform and he knew they were not enemies. He was carried to a freight-car and laid in it, where he took a long, jolting ride that was all a torture, at the end of which he was taken in an open wagon to a long, low building, and laid on one of many narrow cots which were ranged in double rows. He could not raise his head or turn his body. He could only rest utterly helpless and inert, and indifferent to either life or death.

Of Liddy he thought many times, and of his mother and father as well, and he wondered what they would say and how they would feel when the tidings reached them. Then a kind-faced woman came and lifted his head and held it while he took medicine or sipped broth, and then he was wandering beside a brook again, or in green meadows. Later he could see the white cots all about and the unceiled roof over his head and the same motherly face, and he was asked who his friends were and whom he would like to send for, and from that time on he began to hope.

Would the one human being on earth he cared most to see come so far, and could she if she would? And would life still be left in him when she reached his side; or would he have been carried out of the long, low room, dead, as he had seen others carried? He wondered what she would say or do when she came, and oh! if he could only know whether she was coming! He could see the door at one corner of the room where she must enter, and it was a little comfort to look at that. Then a resolution and a feeling that he must live and be there when she came began to grow upon him. He knew four days had passed since she had been sent for and he could now count the hours, and from that time on his eyes were seldom turned away from that door while he was awake. Did ever hours pass more slowly than those? Could it be possible? I think not. He had no means of knowing the time except to ask the nurse, and when night came he knew that sleep might bridge a few hours more speedily.