the columns and have a surgeon's
certificate as to their condition. When a battle is impending, and the
field of conflict fixed, the chief medical officers of the corps take
possession of houses and barns in the rear, collect hay and straw for
bedding, or, if more convenient, pitch the tents at proper localities. A
detail of surgeons is made to give the necessary attendance. While the
battle proceeds, the lightly wounded fall to the rear, and are there
temporarily treated by the surgeons who have accompanied the troops to
the field, and then find their way to the hospitals. If the fighting has
passed beyond the places where lie the more dangerously wounded, they
are brought to the rear by the 'stretcher bearers' attached to the
ambulance trains, and carried to the hospitals in the ambulances.
Sometimes it happens that the strife will rage for hours on nearly the
same spot, and it may be night before the 'stretcher bearers' can go out
and collect the wounded. But the surgeons make indefatigable exertions,
often exposed to great danger, to give their attention to those who
require it. At the best, war is terrible--all its 'pomp, pride, and
circumstance' disappear in the view of the wounded and dead on the
field, and of the mangled remnants of humanity in the hospitals. But
everything that can be devised and applied to mitigate its horrors is
provided under the systematized organization of the medical department.
In the Army of the Potomac, at least, and undoubtedly in all the other
armies of the North, that department combines skill, vigor, humanity,
and efficiency to an astonishing degree. Its results are exhibited not
only in the small mortality of the camps, but in the celerity of its
operation on the field of battle, and the great proportion of lives
preserved after the terrible wounds inflicted by deadly fragments of
shell and the still more deadly rifle bullet. Military surgery has
attained a degree of proficiency during the experiences of the past
three years which a layman cannot adequately describe; its results are,
however, palpable.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: Since that article was written, some changes of detail have
been made, but the principles remain the same.]

AENONE:

A TALE OF SLAVE LIFE IN ROME.

CHAPTER VIII.

Raising himself with an assumed air of careless indifference, in the
hope of thereby concealing the momentary weakness into which his better
feelings had so nearly betrayed him,