American Rifle - Alexander Rose [133]
What Roosevelt (and everybody else) had misunderstood was that caliber and velocity were certainly factors critical to a bullet’s behavior before impact, but once metal hit skin, the projectile’s shape, construction, and eventual destination heavily influenced the extent of actual damage. Though the metal-jacketed Krag (or Mauser) slugs penetrated deeply into tissue, owing to their hardened sheathing the bullets did not fragment or deform within the victim—unlike the old lead ones that on impact transformed into a mushroom shape or shattered apart against bone. Hence Colonel Senn, the Americans’ chief operating surgeon, was surprised to find relatively few Mauser bullets lodged in the body. It seems they were passing straight through the victim in one piece.54
Whether a soldier survived hinged on what the bullet hit as it toured his body. The primary purpose of a projectile is to disrupt tissue: when a bullet enters a human, it crushes the tissue directly in front as it drills forward. The channel created by its passage is termed the permanent cavity. In addition, it pushes or “stretches” the meaty tissue, as well as the bloody juice surrounding the channel, centrifugally, rather as a stone hitting water sends ripples outward, thereby creating a temporary cavity, which is many times larger than the permanent cavity. After expanding to a certain volume, these temporary cavities collapse behind the bullet. Thus the victim might very well have a small entrance wound, or even a small exit one, but experience an explosion inside his body. Gore splashes out at the points of entrance and exit, because the temporary cavity has torn muscle and connective tissue, ruptured small blood vessels, ballooned the larger ones, and compressed nerves. However, if a bullet fragments inside, its minute shards shoot radially outward like secondary missiles, each of them creating a new, smaller permanent cavity and minor temporary ones. As the shards are irregularly shaped and turn randomly on their axes, the extent and jaggedness of the permanent cavities they leave in their wake can vary widely. Thomas Long -more, a British war surgeon who was among the first to describe permanent-and temporary-cavity effects in the 1870s, wrote that there was generally “a huge hollow . . . formed inside the limb which, when it is fully laid open and the effused blood sponged away, offers to view a large mass of lacerated muscle intimately mixed with sharp-pointed and jagged-edge splinters of bone.”
The body’s ability to repair these cavities depends on the elasticity of the organs or tissue affected. Muscles, bowel walls, lungs, and skin are relatively “stretchy,” and recovery from damage by Krag/Mauser rounds there was often a matter of time and decent care. Assuming their wounds did not become infected or they did not collapse from blood loss, soldiers suffering such wounds would often be nursed back to health. While during the Civil War 62 percent of perforating chest wounds caused by fragmenting minié balls were fatal, a few years after the Spanish-American War the American military attaché in Manchuria recalled seeing enemy soldiers walking eighteen miles to the rear after being shot in the lungs with Krag rounds. On the other hand, the liver is a brittle organ, and a hit there was a death sentence.55
Owing to the apparently reduced lethality of warfare, some well-meaning commentators even cheered that “the reduced cartridge accomplishes its object in a more humane manner [than the .45], in that it disables the soldier equally well for the time being