The Rocks On Either Side Were Spattered With Blood And The Rank Grass
Was Matted With It.
Blanket rolls, haversacks, carbines, and
canteens had been abandoned all along its length.
It looked as
though a retreating army had fled along it, rather than that one
troop had fought its way through it to the front. Except for the
clatter of the land-crabs, those hideous orchid-colored monsters that
haunt the places of the dead, and the whistling of the bullets in the
trees, the place was as silent as a grave. For the wounded lying
along its length were as still as the dead beside them. The noise of
the loose stones rolling under my feet brought a hospital steward out
of the brush, and he called after me:
"Lieutenant Thomas is badly wounded in here, and we can't move him.
We want to carry him out of the sun some place, where there is shade
and a breeze." Thomas was the first lieutenant of Capron's troop.
He is a young man, large and powerfully built. He was shot through
the leg just below the trunk, and I found him lying on a blanket half
naked and covered with blood, and with his leg bound in tourniquets
made of twigs and pocket-handkerchiefs. It gave one a thrill of awe
and wonder to see how these cowboy surgeons, with a stick that one
would use to light a pipe and with the gaudy 'kerchiefs they had
taken from their necks, were holding death at bay.
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