American Meteor

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I got so I could disentangle from the general stink the various odors that combined in an evil and rancid atmosphere, oppressing the sound, the maimed, and the dying alike. My nose, always a perceptive organ, would search among the currents of stagnating air, like a monkey’s snuffling delicately over a tempting morsel (filth, to you and me). I soon learned to recognize the different fumes of carbolic, pine tar, iodine, cigar smoke, whiskey, turpentine, creosote, blood, gore, lamp oil, sweat, paraffin, and the reeking contents of bedpans noisy with the riot of flies. I lay on the cot in a drowse, moving only to swat at them — sight halved by a bandage over my eye.

Bored, I would watch the bloodstained surgeons and nurses passing to and fro, in frantic haste or in weariness, among long rows of cots that would seem, in their regularity, like cemetery plots if it weren’t for the thrashing of bodies consigned to their untidy sheets. My good eye fixed on the rafters overhead, I would not have known that the man next to me, whose blasted leg had been hauled away in a slop bucket, was still among the living if it hadn’t been for his infernal groans. I swear I’m not ashamed to say that, on more than one occasion, I wished him dead. I couldn’t sleep, you see, because of the ache in my socket after its eye had been put out by a red-hot piece of rebel shell.

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