The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [253]
I missed Marsali and Young Ian badly. Colonel Everett had promised me two assistants, but God knew where the Colonel was at the moment. I took a moment to survey the gathering crowd, and picked out a young man who had just deposited a wounded friend beneath a tree.
“You,” I said, tugging on his sleeve. “Are you afraid of blood?”
He looked momentarily startled, then grinned at me through a mask of mud and powder smoke. He was about my height, broad-shouldered and stocky, with a face that might have been called cherubic, had it been less filthy.
“Only if it’s mine, ma’am, and so far it ain’t, Lord be praised.”
“Then come with me,” I said, smiling back. “You’re now a triage aide.”
“Say what? Hey, Harry!” he yelled to his friend. “I been promoted. Tell your momma next time you write, Lester done amounted to something, after all!” He swaggered after me, still grinning.
The grin rapidly faded into a look of frowning absorption, as I led him quickly among the wounded, pointing out degrees of severity.
“Men pouring blood are the first priority,” I told him. I thrust an armful of linen bandages and a sack of lint into his hands.
“Give them these—tell their friends to press the lint hard on the wounds or put a tourniquet round the limb above the wound. You know what a tourniquet is?”
“Oh, yes, Ma’am,” he assured me. “Put one on, too, when a panther clawed up my cousin Jess, down to Caroline County.”
“Good. Don’t spend time doing it yourself here unless you have to, though—let their friends do it. Now, broken bones can wait a bit—put them over there under that big beech tree. Head injuries and internal injuries that aren’t bleeding, back there, by the chestnut tree, if they can be moved. If not, I’ll go to them.” I pointed behind me, then turned in a half-circle, surveying the ground.
“If you see a couple of whole men, send them to put up the hospital tent; it’s to go in that flattish spot, there. And then a couple more, to dig a latrine trench… over there, I think.”
“Yes, sir! Ma’am, I mean!” Lester bobbed his head and took a firm grip on his sack of lint. “I be right after it, Ma’am. Though I wouldn’t worry none about the latrines for a while,” he added. “Most of these boys already done had the shit scairt out of ’em.” He grinned and bobbed once more, then set out on his rounds.
He was right; the faint stink of feces hung in the air as it always did on battlefields, a low note amid the pungencies of blood and smoke.
With Lester sorting the wounded, I settled down to the work of repair, with my medicine box, suture bag, and a bowl of alcohol set on the wagon’s tailboard, and a keg of alcohol for the patients to sit on—provided they could sit.
The worst of the casualties were bayonet wounds; luckily there had been no grapeshot, and the men hit by cannonballs were long past the point where I could help them. As I worked, I listened with half an ear to the conversation of the men awaiting attention.
“Wasn’t that the damnedest thing ye ever saw? How many o’ the buggers were there?” one man was asking his neighbor.
“Damn if I know,” his friend, replied, shaking his head. “For a space there, ever’thing I saw was red, and nothin’ but. Then a cannon went off right close, and I didn’t see nothin’ but smoke for a good long time.” He rubbed at his face; tears from watering eyes had made long streaks in the black soot that covered him from chest to forehead.
I glanced back at the wagon, but couldn’t see under it. I hoped shock and fatigue had enabled Jamie to sleep, in spite of his hand, but I doubted it.
Despite the fact that almost everyone near me was wounded in some fashion, their spirits were high and the general mood was one of exuberant relief and exultation. Farther down the hill, in the mists near the river, I could hear whoops and shouts of victory, and the undisciplined racket of fifes and drums,