The Red Glutton: With the German Army at the FrontCobb, Irvin S. (Irvin Shrewsbury)
History
The Red Glutton: With the German Army at the Front
Cobb, Irvin S. (Irvin Shrewsbury)
World War, 1914-1918 -- Campaigns -- Western Front; World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
I particularly remember one other man who was brought in off this first
train. He was a young giant. For certain the old father of Frederick
the Great would have had him in his regiment of Grenadier Guards. Well,
for that matter, he was a grenadier in the employ of the same family
now. He hobbled in under his own motive power and leaned against
the wall until the first flurry was over. Then, at a nod from one of
the shirt-sleeved surgeons, he stretched himself upon a bare wooden
table which had just been vacated and indicated that he wanted relief
for his leg--which leg, I recall, was incased in a rude, splintlike
arrangement of plaited straw. The surgeon took off the straw and the
packing beneath it. The giant had a hole right through his knee, from
side to side, and the flesh all about it was horribly swollen and
purplish-black. So the surgeon soused the joint, wound and all, with
iodine; the youth meanwhile staring blandly up at the ceiling with
his arms crossed on his wide breast. I stood right by him, looking
into his face, and he didn't so much as bat an eyelid. But he didn't
offer to get up when the surgeon was done with treating him. He turned
laboriously over on his face, pulling his shirt free from his body as
he did so, and then we saw that he had a long, infected gash from a
glancing bullet across the small of his back. He had been lying on one
angry wound while the other was redressed. You marveled, not that he
had endured it without blenching, but that he had endured it at all.
The train stayed with us perhaps half an hour, and in that half hour at
least a hundred men must have had treatment of sorts. A signal sounded
and the orderlies lifted up the few wasted specters who still remained
and toted them out. Almost the last man to be borne away was injured
in both legs; an orderly carried him in his arms. Seeing the need of
haste the orderly sought to heave his burden aboard the nearest car.
The men in that car protested; already their space was overcrowded.
So the patient orderly staggered down the train until he found the
crippled soldier's rightful place and thrust him into the straw just as
the wheels began to turn. As the cars, gathering speed, rolled by us we
could see that nearly all the travelers were feeding themselves from
pannikins of the bull-meat stew. Wrappings on their hands and sometimes
about their faces made them doubly awkward, and the hot tallowy mess
spilt in spattering streams upon them and upon the straw under them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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