Ah, how much I had to see and to go through in the whole of this same day! It would in truth be the simplest way and the most pleasant to pursue the narrative no further. One shuts one’s eyes and turns away one’s head when something altogether too horrid presents itself—even the recollection has the power to make one shut one’s eyes. And if there is no more power to help (and what can be altered in this stony past?) why torture oneself and others by writing up these horrors?
Why? I will answer the question afterwards. Now I can only say I must do it.
More still. I will not merely tax my own memory that I may be able to relate what I have in view, for my powers of perception were far too weak to bear the burden of the events, but I will also add what Frau Simon, Dr. Bresser, and the Saxon inspector of field hospitals, Dr. Naundorff, told me. As in Horonewos, so also in many of the villages in this neighbourhood, Hell had set up branch establishments. It was so in Sweti, in Hradeck, in Problus. So in Pardubitz, where, when the Prussians first took possession of it, “over one thousand severely wounded men, operations and amputations, were lying about, some dying, some already dead, corpses mixed with those in the act of death, and those who envied them their end, many with nothing on but bloody shirts, so that no one could tell even what countrymen they were. All those who had still a spark of life in them were shrieking for water and bread, writhing with the pain of their wounds, and begging for death as a blessing.”
“Rossnitz,” writes Dr. Bauer in his letters—“Rossnitz, a place whose picture will live in my memory till the hour of my death—Rossnitz, whither I was sent by the St. John’s Society six days after the murderous fight, and where the greatest misery which the human fancy can picture was still reigning down to that day. I found there ‘R.’ of ours with 650 wounded, who were lying in wretched barns and stables without any nursing in the midst of death and half-dead men, some of them lying for days in their own offal. It was here that after the erection of the funeral mound of the fallen Lt.-Col. von F⸺ I was so overcome with pain that for an hour I poured out the hottest tears and could hardly regain self-control in spite of the expenditure of all my moral force. Though as a medical man I am accustomed to look at human suffering in all its forms, and in the exercise of my profession have learnt to bear the shrieks of tortured human nature, yet here in very truth tears which I could not repress welled from my eyes. It was here in Rossnitz that when, on the second day, I found that our powers were not equal to cope with such misery, I lost courage and left off dressing the wounds.”
“In what condition were these 600 men?” It is Dr. Naundorff who is speaking this time. “It is impossible to depict it accurately. Flies were feeding on their open wounds, which were covered with them; their gaze, flaming with fever, wandered about asking and seeking for some help—for refreshment, for water and bread! Coat, shirt, flesh and blood formed in the case of most of them one repulsive mass. Worms were beginning to generate in this mass and to feed on them. A horrible odour filled every place. All these soldiers were lying on the bare ground; only a few had got a little straw on which they could repose their miserable bodies. Some who had nothing under them but clayey, swampy ground had half sunk into the mud it formed; they had not the strength to get out of it. Others lay in a puddle of horrible filth which no pen could consent to describe.”
“In Masloved,” so says Frau Simon, “a place of about fifty houses, there were lying, eight days after the battle, about 700 wounded. It was not so much their shrieks of agony as their abandonment without any consolation which appealed to heaven. In one single barn alone sixty of these poor wretches were crowded. Every one of their wounds had originally been severe, but they had become hopeless in consequence of their unassisted condition, and their want of nursing and feeding; almost all were gangrenous. Limbs crushed by shot formed now mere heaps of putrefying flesh, faces a mere mass of coagulated blood, covered with filth, in which the mouth was represented by a shapeless black opening, from which frightful groans kept welling out. The progress of putrefaction separated whole mortified pieces from these pitiable bodies. The living were lying close to dead bodies which had begun to fall into putrefaction, and for which the worms were getting ready.
“These sixty men, as well as the greater number of the others, lay for a week in the same situation. Their wounds were either not dressed at all, or only in a most imperfect way—since the day of the battle they lay there, incapable of moving from the spot—only scantily fed, and without sufficient water. The bedding under them corrupting with blood and excrement—that is how they passed eight days! living corpses—through whose
