Crawling Between Heaven And Earth Read Free Page A

Surveying him from the narrow corridor about six feet away, I thought he couldn't be anything but dead and must have died the moment he received his wound. I couldn't imagine why anyone had dragged his corpse in.

    His head was all a mass of gore, from which nothing human emerged.

    Yet, the gore appeared to move.

    Curious, I stepped amid the wounded, careful to avoid touching the infection-swollen limbs and extricating myself from hands that grasped my ankles.

    To be honest, I no longer noticed the grabbing hands, nor the piteous moaning of the poor sufferers, nor could I any longer smell the miasma of putrefaction and illness that pervaded the room. I'd smelled its like or much worse after other campaigns and in other hospitals, worse provisioned than this.

    In those other necessity-engendered hospitals, the wounded had lain in tents that could not keep the water fully away from their tortured bodies, and had been crowded so tightly together that there had been no room to step between them.

    At least here there was plenty of room around this man for me get close to him. Close enough to realize that what moved amid the gore and blood on his face was no human muscle but a mass of maggots that writhed and danced like children at a feast, all the while making a sound like hogs feeding on mash.

    Revolted, my stomach reacting to this sight with a violence I hadn't experienced since the early days of the war, I attempted to find an orderly that would take the corpse away, before its corruption contaminated the living bodies lying beside it.

    But just then the assumed corpse spoke, a whisper barely audible above the sound the maggots made while feasting his still-living flesh. "France," he said, with startling clarity. "And the English, too." His voice subsided into a low sound that might not have been more than labored breathing.

    His uniform might be a mishmash of Confederate and Federal issue, but his voice held the slow accent of the South.

    I rushed out to the yard of the farmhouse, where I found a pail and filled it with water from the pump, displacing the walking wounded who had been taking turns pumping cold water over their afflicted limbs.

    Though his words held no meaning for me, they were words, the words of a fellow human being suffering the tortures of hell while in this world. And his accent was the accent of a compatriot. To assist him and others such as him, I'd left my studies in England to come to the succor of my homeland, when it first seceded from the Union.

    I'd come back, against my mother's besieging and my father's instructing, and through two years of hard, bitter campaigning, I'd lived to endure the full pain of my decision. But I'd never regretted it, because what use is man if he doesn't do something for his fellow?

    I took the pail with water and a discarded rag that I found in a corner of the yard.

    Kneeling by the wounded man, I did my best to clear away the blood and gore, and the vermin that infested it. As I cleared the gore, I found his injury was less than I'd at first suspected.

    The right half of his head was intact, his elongated dolichocephalic cranium covered in pale blond hair. But the left half couldn't be cleaned. It remained a mass of gore and hair, with bits of bone and metal sticking to it. I could do no more than clear away the vermin and wrap his head in the cleanest ligature to be found.

    He would be very young, perhaps twenty at most, and at one time might have been thought handsome, with clean-cut squarish features, somewhat obscured by a puffy swelling of his face.

    As a man who'd long been interested in the human brain and the science of phrenology, I marveled at his being still alive despite his wound and wondered what faculties he would find missing, should he survive.

     . . . . . .(pages missing, where a rat gnawed at manuscript) . . .as well as procuring food from the vegetable gardens and pens of the farm, besides keeping those wounded who could