156 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tal wounds insist that nothing serious is the matter, and act up to 

 the idea until death or nervous exhaustion lays them low. 



This much, however, may be said in a general way : When 

 felt at all, bullets through the flesh usually produce a burning 

 sensation more or less acute. "When bones are broken, stinging 

 accompanies the burning. When bones are hit but not broken, 

 there is a numbing sensation in the whole region involved in the 

 shock, followed very soon by severe and sometimes intense pain. 

 When muscles and tendons are involved, there is a tugging sen- 

 sation, sometimes very slight, and shell-wounds produce feelings 

 similar to those by bullets, more or less exaggerated, according to 

 the size of the missile and the degree of velocity. Bayonet- 

 wounds I never saw except upon corpses for I was not a hospital 

 attendant and as for cannon-balls, they do not, as a rule, leave 

 anything behind to exhibit feelings.* 



Again, a soldier may receive two or even more hits so close 

 together as to produce counter-sensations. I once saw my com- 

 manding officer prostrated by a piece of shell that shattered his 

 thigh-bone. While he was falling, pieces of another shell hit 

 him in the arm and hand, and a piece of a third shell quickly fol- 

 lowing grazed the crown of his head. He has always believed 

 that he felt three ways at once during those few seconds, and he 

 is very positive that he felt badly hurt, and cordially wished to be 

 out of it. 



Not infrequently, too, when a victim has been spared the 

 smallest amount of vitality after the impulse of anger is cut 

 short by a slashing wound, he feels very much as did an enthusi- 

 astic tar upon a trying occasion. In an affair now memorable in 

 history, a certain war-vessel's crew was compelled by the eti- 

 quette of the service to stand by and see their country's flag 

 hauled down in contempt, without being given a chance to strike 

 in its defense. " It was the saddest hour of my whole life," said 

 one of them, " and for quite a spell I alternated between a desire 

 either to cry like a baby or swear like a pirate." 



All this preliminary to a paper the scope of which is only 

 partially suggested by the title. Poets and orators, who take a 

 wholly sentimental point of view, ask the world to accept the 

 notion that it is a glorious fortune for the individual man to 

 suffer punishment in honorable warfare ; but between the wound 

 and the sequence, whether death or the hospital and the scalpel, 



* Experts affirm that a cannon-ball having velocity to keep it in the air will make a 

 clean cut of flesh, bones, and ligaments, and not simply tear them, or push them aside as 

 with a punch ; and that a ball slowing up and rolling along the ground at the rate at which 

 a man moves in rapid walking will crush the bones of a foot or leg that resists it. In 

 the civil war spherical and elongated shells usually served the stead of solid cannon- 

 balls. 



