ortitude and heroic
self-control than that presented by these wounded men the world has
never seen. Many of them, as appeared from their chalky faces, gasping
breath, and bloody vomiting, were in the last extremity of mortal agony;
but I did not hear a groan, a murmur, or a complaint once an hour.
Occasionally a trooper under the knife of the surgeon would swear, or a
beardless Cuban boy would shriek and cry, "Oh, my mother, my mother!" as
the surgeons reduced a compound fracture of the femur and put his leg in
splints; but from the long row of wounded on the ground there came no
sound or sign of weakness. They were suffering,--some of them were
dying,--but they were strong. Many a man whose mouth was so dry and
parched with thirst that he could hardly articulate would insist on my
giving water first, not to him, when it was his turn, but to some
comrade who was more badly hurt or had suffered longer. Intense pain and
the fear of impending death are supposed to bring out the selfish,
animal characteristics of man; but they do not in the higher type of
man. Not a single American soldier, in all my experience in that
hospital, ever asked to be examined or treated out of his regular turn
on account of the severity, painful nature, or critical state of his
wound. On the contrary, they repeatedly gave way to one another,
saying: "Take this one first--he's shot through the body. I've only got
a smashed foot, and I can wait." Even the courtesies of life were not
forgotten or neglected in that valley of the shadow of death. If a man
could speak at all, he always said, "Thank you," or "I thank you very
much," when I gave him hard bread or water. One beardless youth who had
been shot through the throat, and who told me in a husky whisper that he
had had no water in thirty-six hours, tried to take a swallow when I
lifted his head. He strangled, coughed up a little bloody froth, and
then whispered: "It's no use; I can't. Never mind!" Our Dr. Egan
afterward gave him water through a stomach-tube. If there was any
weakness or selfishness, or behavior not up to the highest level of
heroic manhood, among the wounded American soldiers in that hospital
during those three terrible days, I failed to see it. As one of the army
surgeons said to me, with the tears very near his eyes: "When I look at
those fellows and see what they stand, I am proud of being an American,
and I glory in the stock. The world has nothing finer."

It was the splend