"Well, Captain," said he, "we have got, by Jove! our allowance of to-day's rations. Hadn't we better look up a doctor's shop? I feel, by the everlasting Jove!—excuse me—that I stand in need of a sup of whiskey. Lieutenant—I beg your pardon—I see you are wounded—I hope you're not much hurt, sir—but have you a drop of the article about the battery? No! By Jupiter! You go into action mighty short of ammunition. I beg your pardon for troubling you. This is, by Jove! the dryest fighting that I ever saw. I wish I was in Mexico, and had a gourd of aguardiente."
By the way, I wish the reader to understand that, when I introduce a "By Jove!" into Van Zandt's conversation, it is to be understood that that very remarkably profane officer and gentleman used the great Name of the True Divinity.
"Where is the company, Lieutenant?" asked Colburne.
"Relieved, sir. Both companies were relieved and ordered back to the regiment fifteen or twenty minutes ago. I got this welt in the shoulder just as I was coming out of that damned hollow. We may as well go along, sir. Our day's fight is over."
"So the attack failed," said Colburne, as they took up their slow march to the rear in search of a field hospital.
"Broken up by the ground, sir; beaten off by the musketry. Couldn't put more than a man or two on the ramparts. Played out before it got any where, just like a wave coming up a sandy beach. It was only a regiment. It ought to have been a brigade. But a regiment might have done it, if it had been shoved in earlier. That was the time, sir, when you went off for reinforcements. If we had had the bully old Tenth there then, we could have taken Port Hudson alone. Just after you left, the Rebs raised the white flag, and a whole battalion of them came out on our right and stacked arms. Some of our men spoke to them, and asked what they were after. They said—by Jove! it's so, sir!—they said they had surrendered. Then down came some Rebel General or other, in a tearing rage, and marched them back behind the works. The charge came too late. They beat it off easy. They took the starch out of that Twelfth Maine, sir. I have seen to-day, by Jove! the value of minutes."
Before they had got out of range of the Rebel musketry they came upon a surgeon attending some wounded men in a little sheltered hollow. He offered to examine their hurts, and proposed to give them chloroform.
"No, thank you," said Colburne. "You have your hands full, and we can walk farther."
"Doctor, I don't mind taking a little stimulant," observed Van Zandt, picking up a small flask and draining it nearly to the bottom. "Your good health, sir; my best respects."
A quarter of a mile further on they found a second surgeon similarly occupied, from whom Van Zandt obtained another deep draught of his favorite medicament, rejecting chloroform with profane politeness. Colburne refused both, and asked for water, but could obtain none. Deep in the profound and solemn woods, a full mile and a half from the fighting line, they came to the field hospital of the division. It was simply an immense collection of wounded men in every imaginable condition of mutilation, every one stained more or less with his own blood, every one of a ghastly yellowish pallor, all lying in the open air on the bare ground, or on their own blankets, with no shelter except the friendly foliage of the oaks and beeches. In the centre of this mass of suffering stood several operating tables, each burdened by a grievously wounded man and surrounded by surgeons and their assistants. Underneath were great pools of clotted blood, amidst which lay amputated fingers, hands, arms, feet and legs, only a little more ghastly in color than the faces of those who waited their turn on the table. The surgeons, who never ceased their awful labor, were daubed with blood to the elbows; and a smell of blood drenched the stifling air, overpowering even the pungent odor of chloroform. The place resounded with groans, notwithstanding that most of the injured men who retained their senses exhibited the heroic endurance so common on the battle-field. One man, whose leg was amputated close to his body, uttered an inarticulate jabber of broken screams, and rolled, or rather bounced from side to side of a pile of loose cotton, with such violence that two hospital attendants were fully occupied in holding him. Another, shot through the body, lay speechless and dying, but quivering from head to foot with a prolonged though probably unconscious agony. He continued to shudder thus for half an hour, when he gave one superhuman throe, and then lay quiet for ever. An Irishman, a gunner of a regular battery, showed astonishing vitality, and a fortitude bordering on callousness. His right leg had been knocked off above the knee by a round shot, the stump being so deadened and seared by the shock that the mere bleeding was too slight to be mortal. He lay on his left side, and was trying to get his left hand into his trousers-pocket. With great difficulty and grinning with pain, he brought forth a short clay pipe, blackened by previous smoking, and a pinch of chopped plug tobacco. Having filled the pipe carefully and deliberately, he beckoned a negro to bring him a coal of fire, lighted, and commenced puffing with an air of tranquillity which resembled comfort. Yet he was probably mortally wounded; human nature could hardly survive such a hurt in such a season; nearly all the leg amputations at Port Hudson proved fatal. The men whose business it is to pick up the wounded—the musicians and quartermaster's people—were constantly bringing in fresh sufferers, laying them on the ground, putting a blanket-roll or havresack under their heads, and then hurrying away for other burdens of misery. They, as well as the surgeons and hospital attendants, already looked worn out with the fatigue of their terrible industry.