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Yet, as he had said, it was but a bagatelle, beside the all but mortal wounds, the agonizing neuralgia, the prostrating fever, the torture of bullet-torn nerves, and the scorching fire of inflamed sword-wounds that had in their turn been borne by him in his twelve years of African service things which, to men who have never suffered them, sound like the romanced horrors of an exaggerated imagination; yet things which are daily and quietly borne, by such soldiers of the Algerian Army, as the natural accompaniments of a military life borne, too, in brave, simple, unconscious heroism by men who know well that the only reward for it will be their own self-contentment at having been true to the traditions of their regiment.
But it surged in Kate's heart that after what Abe Hawk had done for her, to let the poor, bullet-torn, neglected body be put into the ground without some effort to pay a tribute of gratitude to the man that had once animated it, would be on her part fearfully cold. The difficulties of the situation were many. She feared the anger of her father, and owed his feelings something as well.
Certainly in her present frame of mind those damp, bullet-torn clothes drove Jess frantic, so much so that had she been a man she would probably have sworn a consolation that her sex denied her.
But they could not reach that wall except singly, or in twos and threes, then only to fall. And the waves of men no longer broke from the woods to lap up and recede sullenly down the slope. Out of nowhere, just as they fell back to the first fringe of trees, came an officer on a tall gray horse. His coat was gone, he rode in his shirt sleeves, and a bullet-torn tatter waved from one wide shoulder.
A Highlander, in a shrunk kilt and with long bare legs, had his head bound about with bandages till it looked like a great melon, and his sleeve dangled empty from his great-coat. Others of the Seaforths, and mere boys of the Highland Territorials, wore khaki shirts over their tartan, and these were bullet-torn and hanging in great rents.
The men stacked the old muskets, which they had carried in a hundred fights, surrendered the bullet-torn colors, which had waved over victorious fields, and silently returned, like mourners, to their desolate homes. Two days after the surrender, Mohun was still alive. Three months afterward, the welcome intelligence reached me that he was rapidly recovering. He had made a narrow escape.
Young Gerlot crumpled up and slid part way down the flag pole, then suddenly threw out both arms and crashed lifeless to the deck, his bullet-torn and bleeding body acting as a shield for several who had thrown themselves prostrate.
Despite a heavy fire of pebbles, the landing was ultimately effected; the invaders abandoned their trousers and floundered gallantly through the bullet-torn shallows. Ensued a complete rout of the Turks, who were pursued inland across the heather with triumphant shouts and the corpse of a seagull, found on the beach, hurled after them from the point of a piece of driftwood.
Dawn was breaking when a squadron of Rhodesian Light Horse cantered up to the bullet-torn stockade, their arrival being hailed with three cheers by the undaunted patrol and a deafening clamour from the natives, who had played no inconspicuous part in the defence of the kraal. Twenty minutes later the Waffs marched in, followed by an Indian battalion, which bivouacked in the open.
So it was every man for himself, with the devil rapidly taking not only the hindmost, but the foremost as well. Thicker and thicker fell the dead. The trenches now not only were filled to the level of the ground, but piled with a windrow of bullet-torn bodies knocked down by the ever-spitting rifles.
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