“Where are you wounded?” you inquire, timidly and with indecision, of an old, gaunt soldier, who, seated in his hammock, is watching you with a good-natured glance, and seems to invite you to approach him. I say “you ask timidly,” because these sufferings inspire you, over and above the feeling of profound sympathy, with a fear of offending and with a lofty reverence for the man who has undergone them.
“In the leg,” replies the soldier; but, at the same time, you perceive, by the folds of the coverlet, that he has lost his leg above the knee. “God be thanked now,” he adds,—“I shall get my discharge.”
“Were you wounded long ago?”
“It was six weeks ago, Your Excellency.”
“Does it still pain you?”
“No, there's no pain now; only there's a sort of gnawing in my calf when the weather is bad, but that's nothing.”
“How did you come to be wounded?”
“On the fifth bastion, during the first bombardment. I had just trained a cannon, and was on the point of going away, so, to another embrasure when it struck me in the leg, just as if I had stepped into a hole and had no leg.”
“Was it not painful at the first moment?”
“Not at all; only as though something boiling hot had struck my leg.”