One Second After [148]
John circled past the military hospital. It was empty. The wounded who still needed treatment had been transferred up to Gaither Hall, which was being heated by the retrofitted boiler. Makala now ran that hospital, tending to the nearly forty who were still struggling to survive.
The casualties had indeed been high, over 700 dead, 120 of those students, and 700 wounded, of whom a third had died, and some were still dying, even now.
Nearly a third of the students had thus died in the battle or afterwards, another third wounded. A horrific price. In class, so long ago, when he spoke of Civil War battles where a regiment would lose two-thirds of their men in a battle, it had always been numbers. Now it was real, so terribly real. Both Jeremiah and Phil had died in the fight, and so many others of his kids, as John had once called them.
Just yesterday he had attended another funeral, of the girl Laura who had lost her leg above the knee. She just could not beat the subsequent infections.
The funeral had been a heartbreaking affair. Only a handful showed up, those with the strength to show, and as she was laid to rest, the surviving members of the choir sang the song that somehow had become associated with the college and the battle: "The Minstrel Boy."
"The minstrel boy to the wars is gone,
In the ranks of death you will find him ..."
The dead from the battle were all interred in the veterans cemetery at the edge of town, one slope of the cemetery given over to their graves. There had been talk that someday a monument would be erected to them ... someday.
Everyone agreed they needed a special resting place and not just the golf course.
There was still the occasional skirmish that needed the militia. A small band of a couple dozen raiders made the trek over the Swannanoa mountains and hit down along old Route 9, and a week later an expedition was led by John down into Old Fort to root out the few remaining members of the Posse, most of them wounded, who had somehow escaped. Six more dead for the college as a result. As for Old Fort itself, barely a civilian was left alive after the treatment the Posse had given them.
Those of John's troops who were still left were indeed hardened now.
Regarding Kellor's prediction about another epidemic, he had been right. Days after the battle, what some were now calling the plague month began.
There were nearly three thousand new graves at the golf course, one of them for Doc Kellor. The medical staff had been particularly hard-hit; there were only two doctors and one vet remaining. It had indeed been like the plague in years of old, most physicians heroically standing to their duty until they were felled, but one had just fled, hiding in his cabin, and was now an outcast, the town pariah.
The simple combination of disease and starvation had created a death rate as terrible as that of the Black Death of the fourteenth century. Added in were hundreds with hepatitis A, others carrying B and C, which would kick in later, the usual injuries, the minor cuts that led to amputation and death.
It was the dying-off time and by yesterday's count just over forty percent of the two communities, which had been alive little more than four months back, were still alive. As a war, it was the most horrific since the Middle Ages. The legendary twenty-five million dead in the Soviet Union during World War II had been but one-seventh its population.
And yet now briefly they were swimming in food. The carefully guarded cornfields had yielded a bumper crop. Every apple orchard was striped of its fruit, even the wormy ones. Pumpkins had fleshed out to fifteen, twenty pounds or more, and would not just be used this year for carved decorations. The college scavengers were bringing in bushel baskets of nuts, pinecones, sunflowers, and in some