Page:Nurse and spy in the Union Army.djvu/198

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180
IN THE OLD MILL.

fer where the shot and shell could not reach them, I delivered my orders. In a few moments more there was not a soul left to minister to those poor fellows who were huddled together m that mill by the score ; all had gone to the front, and I was left there in a sad plight.

I put my vicious little "Reb" in a building near the mill, where there was plenty of hay and corn, but did not dare to unsaddle him. I then examined the extent of the injury done to my arm, and found it was worse than I had supposed. It was badly mangled by the horse's teeth, and in one place a large piece of flesh was torn from the arm and hung by small shreds. But the arm was not the worst ; he had kicked me in the side, which had lamed and bruised me sadly. Yet this was no time to groan over a slight kick from a horse, when so many lay around me with shattered limbs and ghastly saber wounds, some of them even now in the very agonies of death. So, resolutely saying to pain and lameness, "Stay thou here while I go yonder," I bound up my arm in a sling, and set about removing the blood-clotted clothing from the bounds of those who needed it most; but having neither knife or scissors, I was obliged in many instances to use my teeth in order to tear the thick woolen garments stiffened and saturated with blood, the very remembrance of which now makes me feel rather uncomfortable in the gastric region ; but then there was no unpleasant sensation.