FIRST ACTIONS OF WOUNDED SOLDIERS. 165 



souls, and so breathe their last. It will be only in some such 

 struggle as at Antietam, or before the stone wall at Fredericksburg, 

 or in Pickett's charge at Gettysburg, and the front line at that, 

 that men will die retaining full intensity of battle ardor so long 

 as breath holds out. There we may expect to find men dead with 

 their weapons poised and their colors held firm in the death-grip.* 

 The manner in which men fall depends also upon the nature 

 of the action in which they are engaged. Nearly every one is 

 familiar with the traditional stage fall, where the victim of a 

 supposed death-shot strikes an attitude, clasps his hand to his 

 heart, stiffens every joint and muscle, breathes hysterically, and 

 goes down like a log toppled over from the end. Another popular 

 yet erroneous notion is that men shot through the vitals leap 

 into the air and go down in a dramatic attitude. Sometimes men 

 are found on the field in striking positions, but often an examina- 

 tion shows that the position was taken after the fall. As a rule, 

 a man who is hit above the hips goes down.f The slighter the 

 wound the more commotion, for the body instinctively resists, 

 just as it does when one slips or is pushed or collides with some 

 object. But a wound in a vital spot weakens the resistance, and 

 men sink at once, or reel and tumble with very little self-control. 

 One reason why men are found dead in a variety of positions is 

 that so long as consciousness remains they strive to help them- 

 selves. The wound and the fall together create a temporary 

 panic. Any one who knows the sensation of being temporarily 

 arrested, when at a high rate of speed, by some accident, may 

 imagine the general state of mind of a soldier when hit in action. 

 Something has happened ; he is the victim ; how serious is it ? 

 A man's first thought is of the rear of the column, and this not 

 from fear, but because he expects surgical aid from that direction. 

 So long as he can move he goes toward the place of help. When 

 no longer able to move he makes himself as comfortable as he can 

 and waits. In this waiting many die, and it is a question whether 

 many do not die from over-anxiety that is, add to their hurt by 

 fretting and struggling. There are soldiers of the civil war 

 living to-day who received wounds as serious at the time as some 

 who died on the field. Either their temperaments were more 

 hopeful or their circumstances more favorable. 



* Physiological science recognizes, and in a measure accounts for, rigor mortis in cases 

 of the kind cited. 



f There is an apparent, but, I think, not a real contradiction of thjs statement in the 

 statistics collected by Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, in the United States Army Hospital at Phila, 

 delphia, during the war. Out of fifty-six wounds involving the arm system of nerves, 

 twenty-seven fell. But he had excluded all cases accompanied by " early and severe 

 haemorrhage," and was not considering the dead and mortally wounded, nor those cases too 

 severe for long-distance transportation. 



