When G Troop Passed On Across The Trail To The Left I Stopped At The
Place Where The Column Had First Halted - It Had Been Converted Into A
Dressing Station And The Wounded Of G Troop Were Left There In The
Care Of The Hospital Stewards.
A tall, gaunt young man with a cross
on his arm was just coming back up the trail.
His head was bent, and
by some surgeon's trick he was carrying a wounded man much heavier
than himself across his shoulders. As I stepped out of the trail he
raised his head, and smiled and nodded, and left me wondering where I
had seen him before, smiling in the same cheery, confident way and
moving in that same position. I knew it could not have been under
the same conditions, and yet he was certainly associated with another
time of excitement and rush and heat. Then I remembered him. As now
he had been covered with blood and dirt and perspiration, but then he
wore a canvas jacket and the man he carried on his shoulders was
trying to hold him back from a white-washed line. And I recognized
the young doctor, with the blood bathing his breeches, as "Bob"
Church, of Princeton. That was only one of four badly wounded men he
carried that day on his shoulders over a half-mile of trail that
stretched from the firing-line back to the dressing station and under
an unceasing fire. {3} As the senior surgeon was absent he had chief
responsibility that day for all the wounded, and that so few of them
died is greatly due to this young man who went down into the firing-
line and pulled them from it, and bore them out of danger.
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