The Tinsmith Read Online Free Page A

the armies. But without the constant shrieking and pounding of shells, the worst of the killing was over, and Anson’s body responded. Several times he dashed from the operating table and relieved his bowels in the pasture, where at least the spread manure made his foul contribution less apparent. The cramps intensified as the night wore on, and the energy spent in these evacuations soon brought back his fits of violent coughing.
    Once, returning to the table where an anaesthetized man with an arm fracture lay in readiness for amputation, Anson encountered Rawley, the barrel-chested career army man whose silver-grey beard and pallid skin gave him a ghostly appearance in the candle flickers.
    â€œFor heaven’s sakes, Baird, don’t be so dainty, man!” With a sweeping motion of one arm, he indicated the black, fetus-curled figures of the wounded nearby. “This is no time for niceties. Go in your breeches if you have to!” Then he slapped Anson on the shoulder and, with a broad smile, said, “It’s always you bachelors who are so fussy. You need a good woman to take care of the manners for you.”
    Though Anson was not sure how a woman could make his diarrhea any less unpleasant, he took his superior’s point—with the ever-increasing miasma of odours (blood, shit, smoke, vomit, chloroform), no one was going to remark on his excretions.
    And it was true: with each hour, more stragglers came in from the great battle, many suffering from shock and loss of blood. Some managed remarkably to reach the hospital under their own power, while others were helped in either by comrades or by one of those men deputized for the duty. As such men were mostly drawn from the ranks of shirkers or were soon needed to help out as nurses, the fresh supplies of wounded inevitably dwindled toward the early hours of the new day.
    By then, the piteous cries of stranded soldiers, for water, for their mothers, or for death, decreased. Anson clutched his stomach and leaned on the operating table with his other hand. In the candlelight, his hand appeared savage, pale skin showing under the blood smears and gore; it looked as if he had cut it off and forgotten to toss it on the nearest stack of limbs. But his feet troubled him the most. They were swollen and aching, and no matter how he adjusted his weight, he could find no relief.
    Then the rain began, lightly at first, sending up a gentle chorus of patters among the tree leaves and on the barn roof. But quickly the light shower became a downpour and operations had to be performed inside the barn. Now, as he sawed into bone, his shadow loomed grotesquely on the beams and stables and stacked hay. His arms, black and several times larger on the planks, moved with a creeping, spidery motion that he could hardly bear to witness. Anson knew that others noticed this as well and likely couldn’t draw their eyes away. Each time he laid his amputating knife against skin, he imagined he was cutting into a huge indrawn breath.
    Finally, he lost count of the amputations and of those who perished on the table before he could begin. Some had already died before they were lifted into place. Other waiting wounded were regularly pulled out of the line as corpses. In the brief pauses between operations, Anson heard the sound of digging just outside. At one point, Samuel Cossins, another assistant surgeon, appeared in the gloom and shadows with a chart in his hand. He wearily but methodically checked every wounded man—and there were hundreds sprawled in the barn—seeking their identification for possible use in his growing registry of graves. Anson almost envied him his miserable work, for at least it did not involve this relentless sawing of bone.
    The rain fell softer, the thin drops tapping the boot-slopped ground outside the open barn door. With difficulty, Anson fished around in a gaping thigh wound, seeking to ligate an artery to stop the bleeding. Blood gushed