"Sorry to tell you, that yours is a compound fracture of the most serious kind."
"Is it reducible?" I asked, in a low voice.
"No; I regret to say that your arm must come off."
"My arm--must I lose it?" I asked, feeling keener anguish with the unwelcome announcement.
"Yes; and without delay," he replied, stooping towards his instrument case.
"I cannot spare it--I must have some other--excuse me, sir--some older advice," I exclaimed, passionately.
"As you please, sir," replied the staff-surgeon, coolly; "but we have no time to spare here, either for opposition or indecision."
The other two glanced at my arm, poked it, felt it as if it had been that of a lay figure in a studio, and supported the opinion of their brother of the knife. But the prospect of being mutilated, armless, for life, and all the pleasures of which such a fate must deprive me, seemed so terrible, that I resolved to seek for other advice at the hospital tents, and towards them I took my way, enduring such pain of body and misery of mind that on reaching them I should have sunk, had brandy not been instantly given to me by an orderly. It was Sunday morning now, and the gray light of the September dawn was stealing over the waters of the Euxine, and up the valley of Inkermann. The fragrant odour of the wild thyme came pleasantly on the breeze; but now the rain was falling heavily, as it generally does after an action--firing puts down the wind, and so the rain comes; but to me then it was like the tears of heaven--"Nature's tear-drop," as Byron has it, bedewing the unburied dead. A red-faced and irritable-looking little Deputy Inspector of Hospitals, in a blue frogged surtout, received me, and from him I did not augur much. The patients were pouring in by hundreds, and the medical staff had certainly no sinecure there. After I had been stripped and put to bed, I remember this personage examining my wound and muttering,
"Bad case--very!"
"Am I in danger, doctor?" I inquired.