Mud and Blood
The surgeon stood outside the medical tent having a well-deserved cigarette, he savoured the taste of the unfiltered tobacco, blue smoke curling away from him reaching up into the misty atmosphere that had hung over the battlefields of Ypres, or wipers as the rankers called it.
He had finished dealing with the latest round of casualties from the last series of clashes, the last man, well boy really, had finally stabilised, no more than eighteen if he had to guess. The lad had lost both legs beneath the knees, what sort of future would he have?
He took one last deep pull on his navy cut cigarette, and dropped the butt in the mud, standing on it to extinguish it. He rubbed his eyes whilst yawning, dog tired after sawing and sewing his way through the bone and muscle tissue of the forty-seven men he had personally operated on, he had roughly averaged a man for every thirty minutes at the operating table, which in reality was a ‘requisitioned’ farmhouse dining table, still at the front a man couldn’t be choosy about medical equipment.
Over twenty-four hours on his feet, he knew that if he sat down, he would fall into a deep slumber and be unable to help the last man that he could now see being stretchered behind the last line of trenches and directly towards him.
He watched as a small party of men carefully carried their burden over the pitted and drenched landscape, once he imagined this would have been lush green fields of grazing grass, or ripe golden cornfields, now it was just the colour of mud, not brown though, more a lifeless grey, as if even the earth itself had given up any hope of growing new life from its now shell-pocketed soil.
To his left a man with a large box camera from the London Evening News was perched precariously on the back of a flatbed truck, the surgeon watched as the nitrate in the photographer’s film sparked as he exposed the camera to take a picture of the men as they struggled with their burden.
One of the soldiers had caught the flash of the camera and stared back at the photographer with a look on his face that seemed to say ‘I hope you enjoyed the view vulture’, at least that was what the surgeon assumed. A steady rain began to fall as the men finally approached the medical tent, they approached the surgeon and gently put the stretcher on the ground before him.
He crouched down and placed his hand on the man’s neck searching for a pulse, he could feel the ice-cold stagnancy of a man just gone. Shaking his head, he rose to his feet and pointed the men to where the bodies of the fallen were laid out in neat rows awaiting identification if possible and then burial.
‘Sorry lads, this one didn’t make it.’