See? Totally happened- “Hold!” I impulsively shouted. He turned. “Yes?” I was bursting to order him to flee. Go to California, I wanted to command him, go to town called Inskip, and that there he would find the most beautiful creature in the world, and that he would be safe there until I came back from the war. Ha, how painful fully naïve and innocent my impulses remain, even after all this time. Never mind the whole desertion issue, Ma Bichette would have never acquiesced to that arrangement. Her jealously would have been triggered by my concern and affection for another living human being, and to get back at me she would either sleep with him or eat him. Probably both. Instead, I smiled weakly. “You’ll be fine,” I half-heartedly assured him. Lionel nodded. He wanted to believe it, I am sure, but I certainly could not guareente it. He went off towards the rest of the troops. I stood where I was for a few moments, my eyes fixed to the muddy canvas tent in from of me. You’d think I would be desensitized to death, and I am to an extent yes, yes I am, but that is business. I am not a sociopath, I cannot stress that enough. I may have wholly disapproved of the Confederacy, but that did not translate into wanting to see their wholesale slaughter. “Ate!” Dr Linz shouted at me (‘Ate’ being the way he pronounced Étienne). “You are going to battle to tend minor wounds. The more grievously injured will be brought back here to me. Go fetch your field kit!” Business. That’s what I decided, that I would treat this as business. I had coped with proverbial buckets of blood previously, so there was no reasonable reason I could not do so now. I turned back towards the surgical tent for my kit. Truthfully, I had hoped to rely on Dr Linz’s experience, as he had served in the Mexican-American War, but I was now being sent into battle with basically no training, only my lies and arrogance to rely on. Lies and arrogance had got me this far already; a fool may think that it could carry hum further, but I was more or less at the precipice of pretend and reality at this point. Said precipice is one of the worse locales one could possibly reach. If I was mortal I would have been scared out of my wits, but things being as they were, I was more concerned with accidently killing a patient. It took me a while to get everything in order, and by the time I had mounted my steed the cavalry unit has already rode off and the infantry had just left. I suppose I would have gone with the infantry, but by the time they arrived Lionel may already have bleed to death or some other awful imagined death. I jerked the reigns on my horse and trotted back to the medical tent. “Dr Linz,” I called, not bothering to dismount, “how will I find the battle?” “How do you think?” he shouted back. He was busy preparing his surgery table. I stared back. Look, I had never been in a war before. There are a great deal of logistical problems involved that do not get attention come the nightly news or tedious textbooks or dull documentaries. It’s not like GPS was invented back them either (and it’s not like I need it today, I can find the damn Target, darling, we saw it from the interstate, how hard can it be? Give me a minute, alright?) sometimes you just had to rely on your senses. I was entering a bit of a fogged blur, however, and my typically razor-sharp senses began to rust as the enormity of the situation started to dawn on me. It’s not often that a person is involved in a civil war. “Listen for it?” I meekly offered after moment of contemplation. “Gunpowder you fool! You’ll see it! You’ll smell it! Now go and stop wasting time!” His instructions where punctuated by relatively close-by cannon fire.
Posted on: Thu, 08 Aug 2013 18:16:42 +0000
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