War Letters

He didn’t shoot, though, and because he didn’t shoot, as he turned, the rifle in the tree discharged and a single bullets somehow struck Collins’ in the muscle of a calf, traveled through that calf, and then through the other. As he fell, he remembered having looked back up to the face of the boy in the tree, whose eyes looked sad and weary. The boy was raising the rifle again.

But a shot rang out, from among the soldiers who were catching up to the major, and the boy fell out of the tree and lay, dead, on the ground just beside where Collins’ had fallen. Before Collins’ was lifted up by his orderly, Collins’ was face to face with the boy on the ground for long enough for it to register than the boy’s eyes retained their look of sadness.

Collins’ was transported to the nearest U.S. Army field hospital near Basel. His orderly, Private Montgomery stayed with him, having been very useful in tending to Collins on the spot and keeping him as comfortable and stabilized as possible en route to the field hospital because Montgomery himself had been a medic in an ambulance unit.

At the field hospital, the orderly stuck by the bedside of the major, providing additional nursing care twenty-four hours a do to what the busy hospital could afford. The wound was painful and it would prevent Major Collins from preceding with his unit or meeting up with the 157th until they were approaching Heidelberg, in Germany, some ten weeks later. But his wounds were minor compared to others the hospital had to deal with under short-staffed conditions, so the presence of the orderly meant everything in the initial care of the patient.

When the major came out of the near coma, induced by painkilling drugs, though, he turned away from the orderly and refused to respond to him. At length, he asked to be transferred to another hospital and for his orderly to be sent on to catch up with the 157th, which is what transpired.