“Lean on me, Baroness Martha, my poor child,” he said softly.
I did lean on him as well as I could, but what a position of torture it was! When one has been accustomed during the whole of one’s life to repose upon cushioned seats, carriages on well-hung springs, and soft beds, how heavy it falls on one all at once, after an exhausting day’s travel, to be sitting on a jolting country cart, the hard planks of which are cushioned only by a layer of bloody straw. And yet I was uninjured. What then must those have felt who were hurried over stock and stone in such a conveyance as that with shattered limbs and their bones sticking out of their skin?
My eyelids closed with a leaden weight. A painful feeling of sleepiness tortured me. Sleep was indeed impossible from the discomfort of my position—every limb was aching—and from the excitement of my nerves, but the somnolence which I could not shake off had the more terrible effect on me. Thoughts and images, as confused as the visions of fever, whirled through my brain. All the scenes of horror which the regimental surgeon had described repeated themselves before my spirit, partly in the very words of the narrator, partly as delusions of sight and hearing, called up by those words. I kept seeing the gravediggers shovelling in the dead, saw the hyenas sneaking up, heard the shrieks of those who were being sacrificed in the burning lazaretto, and between whiles words came in as if they were pronounced aloud in the accents of the regimental surgeon, such as carrion crows, market folks, sanitary patrols. That, however, did not prevent me from hearing the conversation that was being carried on half aloud by my companions in the cart.
“A part of the routed army fled to Königgrätz,” Dr. Bresser said; “but the fortress was closed and the fugitives were fired on from the walls—especially the Saxons, who in the twilight were mistaken for Prussians. Hundreds plunged into the ditches of the fort and were drowned. The flight was checked by the Elbe, and the disorder reached its height. The bridges were so overcrowded by horses and cannon that the infantry could find no room. Thousands flung themselves into the Elbe—even the wounded.”
“It must be a horrible state of things at Horonewos,” said Frau Simon. “All abandoned by its inhabitants—village and castle. The whole of the inner rooms destroyed and yet filled with helpless wounded men. What joy will the refreshments we are bringing give the wretched men! But it will not be enough—not enough!”
“And our medical aid is also not enough,” added Dr. Bresser. “There should be a hundred of us, in order to do what is required; we are in want of instruments and medicines; and would even these help us? The overcrowding of these places is such as to threaten the outbreak of dangerous epidemics. The first care is always this, to send away as many wounded as possible, but their condition is usually such that no conscientious man would take the responsibility of their transport—to send them off means to kill them, to leave them there means to introduce hospital gangrene—a sad alternative! The horrors and miseries I have seen in these days since the battle of Königgrätz exceed all conception. You must prepare yourself for the worst, Frau Simon.”
“I have the experience of many years and courage. The greater the misery, the higher rises my determination.”
“I know, your fame has preceded you. I, on the contrary, when I see so much misery feel all my courage sink, and it strikes me to the heart. To hear hundreds—nay, thousands—of men in want of help, praying for help, and not to be able to help—it is hideous! In all these ambulances which have been set up in the most hasty way around the field of battle we have been in want of restoratives—above all things, there is no water. Most of the wells around have been made unserviceable by the inhabitants, far and wide there is not a piece of bread to be obtained. All rooms that have a roof over them, churches, country houses, châteaux, huts, all are filled with sick. Everything in the shape of a carriage has been sent off with its load of wounded. The roads in all directions are covered with such carts of hell, for in truth the sufferings carried by those wheels are hellish. There they lie—officers, petty officers, soldiers, disfigured by dirt and dust and blood till they are unrecognisable—with wounds for which there is no human help available, uttering cries of pain, shrieks which are hardly human; and yet those who can still cry are not the most pitiable.”
“Then many die on the way.”
“Certainly, or after they are unloaded they finish quietly and unobserved on the first bundle of straw on which they have been left to die. Some quietly, but others raving and raging in a desperate fight with Death, uttering such curses as might make your hair stand on end. It must have been curses like these that that Mr. Twining of London heard who made the following proposal at the Geneva Conference: ‘Would it not be well, if the condition of a wounded man leaves not the slightest hope of recovery, in such a case to give him first the consolations of religion, then, as
