Savage Love by Douglas Glover

suffer tormina and tenesmus associated with the flux. We gripe and strain and evacuate little balls or blood or pus and then evacuate again, thinking what a way to die.
    Or we suffer the shivering chills, sweats and hallucinations of the ague.
    Those who can lift their eyes to the grey cliffs and the medical wagons and mutter encouragement out of habit to the others. Some weep at the sight of the medical officers on exhausted horses plashing along the beach, other ranks in scarlet coats at the double, without arms, hardbitten veterans of long campaigns in France and Spain and Canada. Music on top of the cliffs, dried-up wild grapevines like nets or veins against the clay, exploding milkweed pods, and a spruced-up boy in an oversized homespun tailcoat with clodhopper boots, a red rag tied round his throat, loping down the track and jabbering to the brown girl in the wedding dress.
    There is a girl in my boat dying, left behind by a husband in the Provincial Dragoons who went down at Sandusky before our fatally delayed departure, went down in the water, shaking himself to death and weeping in his girl’ s arms, terrified to die, cheeping for his mam, the girl overcome with adoration and embarrassment for him and running away to shit when her guts cramped so that she was away when he died and in despair — half dead herself from despair — when she returned to find the camp gravediggers already wrapping him in a canvas shroud they used over and over to preserve the dignities.
    She is beside herself, shaking with the ague or shock, no pulse, almost a ghost, not a tear in her egg-like eyes, sunk in the dark socket of bone and lash.
    As we are all beside ourselves, stumbling trinities of I and not-I and the world beyond that presents only a curtain of sensation, all fluffs and billows like a linen sheet next to an open window in a gale.
    We have the Americans to thank for enlisting us in the army of saints, yes, to thank for our education in asceticism and otherworldliness, for helping us to disentangle ourselves from the flesh as the desert hermits of old, our immediate state of dis-ease being a sign of something invisible that beckons.
    In Sandusky, the energetic and the mad used their hands to dredge the swamp and construct islands for sleeping and standing, and there was some attempt to keep up drilling in a shallow pond otherwise a home to bustards and ducks.
    S gt. Collins, always the wit, said, “I don’t wish to die and go to Heaven. I have a fear of heights.”
    I report to Surgeon Kennedy of the 41st, whose dun stallion, name of Clarify, knocks me over in its prancing. Kennedy leaps down, striding along the sand, chewing a clay pipe with a goat and horns on the bowl, ordering fires built, the kettles on, stooping to speak to the prisoners, making signs to his aides.
    Already soldiers walk up and down with fresh apples and knives, offering slices to suck, rain falling the whole time, cold and dismal.
    â€œPeruvian bark is wanted,” I say, breathless at keeping up, teetering on my pins. “Charcoal and laudanum to bind the bowels and for pain. And blankets, man, blankets. Dry clothing. Clear soup with blood and plenty of water and salt, shreds of meat, not diced, pulped vegetables.”
    Surgeon Kennedy, saturnine, gloomy, sees the body as a flame, life as an explosion. He nods and nods and quietly gives orders to his aides. He has a year at Edinburgh. I have no teaching at all but cut off a man’s leg with a hatchet after the Raisin and sewed the flap with binder twine and, by God, he was strong enough to survive, which is as good as a medical degree. The rest is bedside manner and prayer, I believe.
    â€œNot five in fifty will see active service again,” says Kennedy, measuring the ruined men.
    â€œFor God’s sake, don’t try to bleed anyone,” I say. “They’ll go off in a nonce.”
    â€œAnd who might you be? ” he asks.
    â€œSurgeon’s Mate