id gravely: "We have
none. You know you don't allow it to pass the lines." It was sadly true.

I turned to the wall, and wetted the hand again, my sole relief. In
about an hour Dr. Wilson came back with two aids, and explained to me
that the bone was so crushed as to make it hopeless to save it, and
that, besides, amputation offered some chance of arresting the pain.
I had thought of this before, but the anguish I felt--I cannot say
endured--was so awful that I made no more of losing the limb than
of parting with a tooth on account of toothache. Accordingly, brief
preparations were made, which I watched with a sort of eagerness such as
must forever be inexplicable to any one who has not passed six weeks of
torture like that which I had suffered.

I had but one pang before the operation. As I arranged myself on the
left side, so as to make it convenient for the operator to use the
knife, I asked: "Who is to give me the ether?" "We have none," said the
person questioned. I set my teeth, and said no more.

I need not describe the operation. The pain felt was severe, but it was
insignificant as compared with that of any other minute of the past
six weeks. The limb was removed very near to the shoulder-joint. As the
second incision was made, I felt a strange flash of pain play through
the limb, as if it were in every minutest fibril of nerve. This was
followed by instant, unspeakable relief, and before the flaps were
brought together I was sound asleep. I dimly remember saying, as I
pointed to the arm which lay on the floor: "There is the pain, and here
am I. How queer!" Then I slept--slept the sleep of the just, or, better,
of the painless. From this time forward I was free from neuralgia. At a
subsequent period I saw a number of cases similar to mine in a hospital
in Philadelphia.

It is no part of my plan to detail my weary months of monotonous prison
life in the South. In the early part of April, 1863, I was exchanged,
and after the usual thirty days' furlough returned to my regiment a
captain.

On the 19th of September, 1863, occurred the battle of Chickamauga, in
which my regiment took a conspicuous part. The close of our own share
in this contest is, as it were, burned into my memory with every least
detail. It was about 6 P. M., when we found ourselves in line, under
cover of a long, thin row of scrubby trees, beyond which lay a gentle
slope, from which, again, rose a hill rather more abrupt, and crowned
with a