There were times too when morphine was no use. Arthur Osburn, striving desperately to care for a group of cavalrymen hit by a heavy shell on the Aisne in 1914, found:
One terribly wounded… lay with both legs partly torn away at the knee, one arm broken and other wounds; he was still conscious.
’Oh! My God! Shoot me! Shoot me!’ he moaned. ‘Quick!’ I injected some morphia into his breast. Someone who had rushed into the yard was standing, breathless, horror-stricken, beside me. The tortured man recognized him – his brother!
’Shoot me. Tom! Oh! Shoot me! For the love of God! Shoot me, will you! WILL YOU!’ he began to scream piteously.
Irresolutely, the man appealed to, fumbled with his revolver and looked at me rather wildly. Then, suddenly, dropping his revolver, he covered his face with his hands and staggered away.
I hastily soaked with chloroform a piece of clothing that had literally been blown from one of the other wounded, and doubling it, I laid it over the mouth of the agonised man beside whom I was now kneeling…
I was dulling pain with chloroform; morphia seemed quite useless.
My knees were soiled with manure from the yard; the spouting arteries that I had tried to check had drenched the front of my tunic and accoutrements and sprinkled my face, where the blood dried. My arms to the elbows were caked.
Source:
Holmes, Richard. "Steel and Fire." Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front, 1914-1918. London: HarperCollins, 2004. 474. Print.
Original Source Listed:
Osburn Unwilling Passenger pp. 134-5.
Further Reading:
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