The doctor had but little time to lose, and the bullets were pinging past him and his patient in every direction.
'The bullet is lodged near the spine,' said the doctor, 'and it must be cut out, but not here.'
'Is—is the wound dangerous?' he faltered.
'Not very; but great care will be requisite.'
Whether on the part of himself or his medical attendant Charlie did not inquire; the tone in Which the doctor said 'very' lessened his hopes.
'God's will be done,' said he; and there flashed on his memory all that little Célandine de Caillé had said to him that morning about religion; while the doctor put a pad on the wound, bandaged it, and hastened to look at Schönforst, but he was long since past all aid, and stone-dead.
Save the moans, cries, and interjections—pious, fierce, or despairing—of those around him, Charlie heard little more but the occasional boom of the heavy guns as the tide and din of the battle rolled away towards Gravelotte; and great faintness, like a kind of sleep, stole over him. From time to time the acute agony of his wound roused him, and amid his terrible thoughts, ever present were the images of Ernestine and his family.
The emotion of faintness increased as the day wore on and evening came. He saw many around him die, and thinking that his own time would soon come too, he thought once more of the French girl's words, and strove to fashion a prayer or two, but they were little else than pious invocations.
Dying, as he certainly deemed himself to be, his thoughts flashed incessantly to her he loved; her whose soft hand might too probably never be in his again; anon to his boyhood's home in Warwickshire; the voices of his father and of his dead mother came drowsily to his ear; the soft English faces of his sisters floated before him. Oh, how hard it was to lie there bleeding, and too probably dying, when they were all making merry, perhaps, in that drawing-room which he remembered so well, and many of the pettiest details of which, even to a crack in the ceiling, came strangely back to memory now, with scraps of songs and forgotten airs.
Would the Krankentrager never come to take him away? Had the doctor and hospital attendant both forgotten him, or had been killed? The latter, too probably.