George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, Chapter 12, being hit by a bullet
▻http://george-orwell.org/Homage_to_Catalonia/11.html
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 centre 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 shrivelled 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 paralysed. 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 comer 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 comer 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 paralysed 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 morphia, 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 morphia 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.
