"Harry, help me, quick! I'm bleeding fast. Tear off my suspender, or take my handkerchief and tie it as tight as you can draw it around my thigh, and help me off the field."
Ripping up the leg of his trousers with my knife, I soon check the flow of blood with a hard knot,—and none too soon, for the main artery has been severed. Calling a comrade to my assistance, we succeed in reaching the woods, and make our way slowly to the rear in search of the division-hospital.
Whoever wishes to know something of the terrible realities of war should visit a field-hospital during some great engagement. No doubt my young readers imagine war to be a great and glorious thing, and so, indeed, in many regards it is. It would be idle to deny that there is something stirring in the sound of martial music, something strangely uplifting and intensely fascinating in the roll of musketry and the loud thunder of artillery. Besides, the march and the battle afford opportunities for the unfolding of manly virtue, and as things go in this disjointed world, human progress seems to be almost impossible without war.
Yet still, war is a terrible, a horrible thing. If my young readers could have been with us as we helped poor Stannard off the field that first day in "the Wilderness;" if they could have seen the surgeons of the first division of our corps as we saw them, when passing by with the lieutenant on a stretcher,—they would, I think, agree with me that if war is a necessity, it is a dreadful necessity. There were the surgeons, busy at work, while dozens of poor fellows were lying all around on stretchers awaiting their turns.
"Hurry on, boys, hurry on! Don't stop here; I can't stand it!" groaned our charge.
So we pushed on with our burden, until we saw our division-colors over in a clearing among the pines, and on reaching this we came upon a scene that I can never adequately describe.
There were hundreds of the wounded already there; other hundreds, perhaps thousands, were yet to come. On all sides, within and just without the hastily erected hospital-tents, were the severely and dangerously wounded, while great numbers of slightly wounded men, with hands or feet bandaged or heads tied up, were lying about the sides of the tents or out among the bushes. The surgeons were everywhere busy,—here dressing wounds; there, alas! stooping down to tell some poor fellow, over whose countenance the pallor of death was already spreading, that there was no longer any hope for him; and down yonder, about a row of tables, each under a fly,[2] stood groups of them, ready for their dreadful and yet helpful work.
A Scene in the Field-Hospital.