Ah! well, the glory, I suppose, is abiding; the ghastliness is soon hidden in the grave.
But oh, reader mine, is it not dreadful to read that on the very night that followed the battle men were sickening and dying with cholera in numbers as great as before?
It is no wonder, methinks, that as I write that sentence, tears that I fain would repress make dim the lines before me. Because I know something of the horror that cholera brings in its train, and the agony, despair, and suffering—a suffering so great that many times and oft the surgeon breathes a prayer of thankfulness to Heaven when his patient's eyes are closed in death. And, horrible to relate, even after death cramps and spasms sometimes come on, so that the ignorant would believe that the subject had once more come to life.
We naval and army surgeons are called non-combatant officers. Heaven help us! we have as many dangers, in ship or field, to encounter, as the men who, sword in hand, march at the head of their companies; and when the field is won our work is only beginning. And they, the so-called combatants, get nearly all the glory.
After the battle of Alma, fain would some of the generals have had their troops come down and bivouac beside the river, for sake of the water. But that plucky old soldier Raglan must have them sleep on the heights, in the field they had covered with glory—and dead.
The men were for the most part tired to excess, war-worn, and thirsty, yet seeming to want sleep more even than water, which they felt too far gone to drag uphill.
Llewellyn and Grant had escaped without injury, and together, in the cool of the evening, they strolled down to the river's bank. As far as the stripping of the wounded (which takes place after European battles by the ghastly hordes that hover in the rear intent on plunder) was concerned, it was conspicuous only by its absence. But here was a sight that caused the blood of those two young men almost to curdle with horror.
There were many men lying, or even sitting, dead, in the very position they had assumed just before the messenger of death came singing towards them. Many were lying on their backs, with arms upstretched as if appealing to Heaven for help or mercy. Llewellyn and his friend were standing near a corpse which lay in this position, with the musket across the chest, when their own surgeon came up.
"No," said the latter, with a sad kind of smile; "that man passed away painlessly, and at once. His arms are but outstretched as if still holding his gun."
Here was a headless trunk. Blood and brains had been spattered over the clothes and faces of other men who also had been killed. Here a dead body, with both legs torn off and flung to a distance. Here another, with one arm lying by its side, broken perhaps; the other, but a shattered and bloody stump, held aloft. Both eyes were open, and the face had a scared and awful look.