Seeing as how we reenactors fake being shot all the time, perhaps it’s instructive to read this account by a talented writer. The entire work is on the Internet, by the way. - Jonah
Excerpt from "Homage to Catalonia"
by George Orwell
Wounded by a Fascist Sniper
They had promised us a trench-mortar for the company; I
was looking forward to it greatly. At nights we patrolled as usual--more
dangerous than it used to be, because the Fascist trenches were better manned
and they had grown more alert; they had scattered tin cans just outside their
wire and used to open up with the machine-guns when they heard a clank. In the
daytime we sniped from no man's land. By crawling a hundred yards you could get
to a ditch, hidden by tall grasses, which commanded a gap in the Fascist
parapet. We had set up a rifle-rest in the ditch. If you waited long enough you
generally saw a khaki-clad figure slip hurriedly across the gap. I had several
shots. I don't know whether I hit anyone--it is most unlikely; I am a very poor
shot with a rifle. But it was rather fun, the Fascists did not know where the
shots were coming from, and I made sure I would get one of them sooner or
later. However, the dog it was that died--a Fascist sniper got me instead. I
had been about ten days at the front when it happened. The whole experience of
being hit by a bullet is very interesting and I think it is worth describing in
detail.
It was at the corner of the parapet, at five o'clock in the morning. This was always
a dangerous time, because we had the dawn at our backs, and if you stuck your
head above the parapet it was clearly outlined against the sky. I was talking
to the sentries preparatory to changing the guard. Suddenly, in the very middle
of saying something, I felt--it is very hard to describe what I felt, though I
remember it with the utmost vividness.
Roughly speaking it was the sensation of being at the center of an explosion. There
seemed to be a loud bang and a blinding flash of light all round me, and I felt
a tremendous shock--no pain, only a violent shock, such as you get from an electric
terminal; with it a sense of utter weakness, a feeling of being stricken and
shriveled up to nothing. The sand-bags in front of me receded into immense
distance. I fancy you would feel much the same if you were struck by lightning.
I knew immediately that I was hit, but because of the seeming bang and flash I
thought it was a rifle nearby that had gone off accidentally and shot me. All
this happened in a space of time much less than a second. The next moment my
knees crumpled up and I was falling, my head hitting the ground with a violent
bang which, to my relief, did not hurt. I had a numb, dazed feeling, a consciousness
of being very badly hurt, but no pain in the ordinary sense.
The American sentry I had been talking to had started forward. 'Gosh! Are you hit?'
People gathered round. There was the usual fuss--'Lift him up! Where's he hit?
Get his shirt open!' etc., etc. The American called for a knife to cut my shirt
open. I knew that there was one in my pocket and tried to get it out, but discovered
that my right arm was paralyzed. Not being in pain, I felt a vague satisfaction.
This ought to please my wife, I thought; she had always wanted me to be
wounded, which would save me from being killed when the great battle came.
It was only now that it occurred to me to wonder where I was hit, and how
badly; I could feel nothing, but I was conscious that the bullet had struck me somewhere
in the front of the body. When I tried to speak I found that I had no voice,
only a faint squeak, but at the second attempt I managed to ask where I was
hit. In the throat, they said. Harry Webb, our stretcher-bearer, had brought a
bandage and one of the little bottles of alcohol they gave us for field-dressings.
As they lifted me up a lot of blood poured out of my mouth, and I heard a
Spaniard behind me say that the bullet had gone clean through my neck.
I felt the alcohol, which at ordinary times would sting like the devil, splash on
to the wound as a pleasant coolness.
They laid me down again while somebody fetched a stretcher. As soon as I knew that
the bullet had gone clean through my neck I took it for granted that I was done
for. I had never heard of a man or an animal getting a bullet through the middle
of the neck and surviving it. The blood was dribbling out of the corner of my
mouth. 'The artery's gone,' I thought. I wondered how long you last when your carotid
artery is cut; not many minutes, presumably. Everything was very blurry. There
must have been about two minutes during which I assumed that I was killed. And
that too was interesting--I mean it is interesting to know what your thoughts
would be at such a time. My first thought, conventionally enough, was for my
wife. My second was a violent resentment at having to leave this world which,
when all is said and done, suits me so well. I had time to feel this very vividly.
The stupid mischance infuriated me. The meaninglessness of it! To be bumped
off, not even in battle, but in this stale corner of the trenches, thanks to a
moment's carelessness! I thought, too, of the man who had shot me-- wondered
what he was like, whether he was a Spaniard or a foreigner, whether he knew he
had got me, and so forth. I could not feel any resentment against him. I reflected
that as he was a Fascist I would have killed him if I could, but that if he had
been taken prisoner and brought before me at this moment I would merely have
congratulated him on his good shooting. It may be, though, that if you were
really dying your thoughts would be quite different.
They had just got me on to the stretcher when my paralyzed right arm came to life
and began hurting damnably. At the time I imagined that I must have broken it
in falling; but the pain reassured me, for I knew that your sensations do not become
more acute when you are dying. I began to feel more normal and to be sorry for
the four poor devils who were sweating and slithering with the stretcher on
their shoulders. It was a mile and a half to the ambulance, and vile going,
over lumpy, slippery tracks. I knew what a sweat it was, having helped to carry
a wounded man down a day or two earlier. The leaves of the
silver poplars which, in places, fringed our trenches brushed against my face;
I thought what a good thing it was to be alive in a world where silver poplars grow.
But all the while the pain in my arm was diabolical, making me swear and then
try not to swear, because every time I breathed too hard the blood bubbled out
of my mouth.
The doctor re-bandaged the wound, gave me a shot of morphine, and sent me off to
Sietamo. The hospitals at Sietamo were hurriedly constructed wooden huts where
the wounded were, as a rule, only kept for a few hours before being sent on to
Barbastro or Lerida. I was dopey from morphine but still in great pain, practically
unable to move and swallowing blood constantly. It was typical of Spanish
hospital methods that while I was in this state the untrained nurse tried to
force the regulation hospital meal--a huge meal of soup, eggs, greasy stew, and
so forth--down my throat and seemed surprised when I would not take it. I asked
for a cigarette, but this was one of the periods of tobacco famine and there
was not a cigarette in the place. Presently two comrades who had got permission to leave the line for a few hours appeared at my bedside.
'Hullo! You're alive, are you? Good. We want your watch and your revolver and your
electric torch. And your knife, if you've got one.'
They made off with all my portable possessions. This always happened when a man
was wounded--everything he possessed was promptly divided up; quite rightly,
for watches, revolvers, and so forth were precious at the front and if they
went down the line in a wounded man's kit they were certain to be stolen somewhere
on the way.
By the evening enough sick and wounded had trickled in to make up a few ambulance-loads,
and they sent us on to Barbastro. What a journey! It used to be said that in
this war you got well if you were wounded in the extremities, but always died
of a wound in the abdomen. I now realized why. No one who was liable to bleed
internally could have survived those miles of jolting over metal roads that had
been smashed to pieces by heavy lorries and never repaired since the war began.
Bang, bump, wallop! It took me back to my early childhood and a dreadful thing
called the Wiggle-Woggle at the White City Exhibition. They had forgotten to
tie us into the stretchers. I had enough strength in my left arm to hang on,
but one poor wretch was spilt on to the floor and suffered God knows what
agonies. Another, a walking case who was sitting in the corner of the ambulance,
vomited all over the place. The hospital in Barbastro was very crowded, the
beds so close together that they were almost touching. Next morning they loaded
a number of us on to the hospital train and sent us down to Lerida.
I was five or six days in Lerida. It was a big hospital, with sick, wounded, and
ordinary civilian patients more or less jumbled up together. Some of the men in
my ward had frightful wounds. In the next bed to me there was a youth with black
hair who was suffering from some disease or other and was being given medicine
that made his urine as green as emerald. His bed-bottle was one of the sights
of the ward. An English-speaking Dutch Communist, having heard that there was
an Englishman in the hospital, befriended me and brought me English newspapers.
He had been terribly wounded in the October fighting, and had somehow managed
to settle down at Lerida hospital and had married one of the nurses. Thanks to
his wound, one of his legs had shrivelled till it was no thicker than my arm.
Two militiamen on leave, whom I had met my first week at the front, came in to see a wounded friend and recognized me. They were kids of about eighteen. They stood awkwardly beside my bed, trying to think of something to say, and then, as a way of demonstrating that they were sorry I was wounded,
suddenly took all the tobacco out of their pockets, gave it to me, and fled before
I could give it back. How typically Spanish! I discovered afterwards that you
could not buy tobacco anywhere in the town and what they had given me was a week's
ration.
