``Reckon you'd best git up.They-'uns is a-goin' to take you away.'' To this I only answered, ``Water, water.'' I had a grim sense of amusement on finding that the old woman was not deaf, for she went out, and presently came back with a gourdful, which I eagerly drank.An hour later the graybacks returned, and finding that I was too weak to walk, carried me out and laid me on the bottom of a common cart, with which they set off on a trot.The jolting was horrible, but within an hour I began to have in my dead right hand a strange burning, which was rather a relief to me.It increased as the sun rose and the day grew warm, until I felt as if the hand was caught and pinched in a red-hot vise.Then in my agony I begged my guard for water to wet it with, but for some reason they desired silence, and at every noise threatened me with a revolver.At length the pain became absolutely unendurable, and I grew what it is the fashion to call demoralized.I screamed, cried, and yelled in my torture, until, as I suppose, my captors became alarmed, and, stopping, gave me a handkerchief,--my own, I fancy,--and a canteen of water, with which I wetted the hand, to my unspeakable relief.
It is unnecessary to detail the events by which, finally, I found myself in one of the rebel hospitals near Atlanta.Here, for the first time, my wounds were properly cleansed and dressed by a Dr.Oliver T.Wilson, who treated me throughout with great kindness.
I told him I had been a doctor, which, perhaps, may have been in part the cause of the unusual tenderness with which I was managed.
The left arm was now quite easy, although, as will be seen, it never entirely healed.The right arm was worse than ever --the humerus broken, the nerves wounded, and the hand alive only to pain.I use this phrase because it is connected in my mind with a visit from a local visitor,--I am not sure he was a preacher,--who used to go daily through the wards, and talk to us or write our letters.One morning he stopped at my bed, when this little talk occurred:
``How are you, lieutenant?''
``Oh,'' said I, ``as usual.All right, but this hand, which is dead except to pain.''
``Ah,'' said he, ``such and thus will the wicked be--such will you be if you die in your sins: you will go where only pain can be felt.For all eternity, all of you will be just like that hand--knowing pain only.''
I suppose I was very weak, but somehow I felt a sudden and chilling horror of possible universal pain, and suddenly fainted.When I awoke the hand was worse, if that could be.
It was red, shining, aching, burning, and, as it seemed to me, perpetually rasped with hot files.When the doctor came I begged for morphia.He said gravely: ``We have none.
You know you don't allow it to pass the lines.'' It was sadly true.
I turned to the wall, and wetted the hand again, my sole relief.In about an hour Dr.
Wilson came back with two aids, and explained to me that the bone was so crushed as to make it hopeless to save it, and that, besides, amputation offered some chance of arresting the pain.I had thought of this before, but the anguish I felt--I cannot say endured--was so awful that I made no more of losing the limb than of parting with a tooth on account of toothache.Accordingly, brief preparations were made, which Iwatched with a sort of eagerness such as must forever be inexplicable to any one who has not passed six weeks of torture like that which I had suffered.
I had but one pang before the operation.
As I arranged myself on the left side, so as to make it convenient for the operator to use the knife, I asked: ``Who is to give me the ether?'' ``We have none,'' said the person questioned.I set my teeth, and said no more.
I need not describe the operation.The pain felt was severe, but it was insignificant as compared with that of any other minute of the past six weeks.The limb was removed very near to the shoulder-joint.As the second incision was made, I felt a strange flash of pain play through the limb, as if it were in every minutest fibril of nerve.This was followed by instant, unspeakable relief, and before the flaps were brought together I was sound asleep.I dimly remember saying, as I pointed to the arm which lay on the floor:
``There is the pain, and here am I.How queer!'' Then I slept--slept the sleep of the just, or, better, of the painless.From this time forward I was free from neuralgia.
At a subsequent period I saw a number of cases similar to mine in a hospital in Philadelphia.
It is no part of my plan to detail my weary months of monotonous prison life in the South.In the early part of April, 1863, Iwas exchanged, and after the usual thirty days'
furlough returned to my regiment a captain.
On the 19th of September, 1863, occurred the battle of Chickamauga, in which my regiment took a conspicuous part.The close of our own share in this contest is, as it were, burned into my memory with every least detail.It was about 6 P.M., when we found ourselves in line, under cover of a long, thin row of scrubby trees, beyond which lay a gentle slope, from which, again, rose a hill rather more abrupt, and crowned with an earthwork.We received orders to cross this space and take the fort in front, while a brigade on our right was to make a like movement on its flank.
