Soldier's Heart by Gary Paulsen Read Free Book Online Page B

running so hard he ran himself onto the bayonet before falling off to the side, dying as he fell, his lungs and heart torn. Charley’s bayonet was stuck and he had to put his foot on the man’s chest to jerk it loose.
    After that there was no order, no sense, no plan. Charley became a madman. He attacked anything and everything that came into his range—slashing, clubbing, hammering, jabbing, cutting—and always screaming, screaming in fear, in anger and finally in a kind of rabid, insane joy, the joy of battle, the joy of winning, the joy of killing to live.
    And at last there was nothing around to hit, to fight, to kill. He stood with the rifle hanging at his side, his bayonet bent at the tip, thestock shattered, his arms weak, his legs soft, his chest heaving as he sucked air, his throat rasping.
    â€œThey’ve run,” somebody said. “They’ve took foot.”
    â€œYou’re hit.” A corporal stood in front of Charley.
    â€œNo. I’m all right.”
    â€œYou’re hit there, in the shoulder.”
    Charley looked down. He was covered in blood, his arm and chest and pants wet with it. “Oh …”
    â€œThe surgeon’s tent is back there a half mile, in those trees. Can you walk it?”
    â€œI think so.”
    â€œGo it, then. Get patched. We’ll see you later.”
    Charley walked in a kind of daze, dragging his broken rifle by the sling. With the dark the temperature had plummeted but he didn’t feel the cold. He didn’t feel anything.
    He saw the lanterns of the surgeon and the ambulance drivers and walked toward them. Somebody in a bloody apron stopped him and held a lantern up, lighting his face with a yellow glow.
    â€œWhere are you hit?”
    â€œI don’t know. They sent me back. I think it’s my shoulder but it don’t seem to hurt.”
    â€œOver there. Sit with that group by the tent and we’ll get to you when we can.” The man turned back to the tent with no sides where a doctor working by lantern light was sawing a leg off a soldier. Near the tent was a pile of arms and legs that stood four feet high and ten or twelve feet long.
    Ambulance wagons kept coming with more men, and Charley moved to an area where fifteen or twenty men lay on the ground waiting for attention. Off to the other side of the tent there was another group of two or three hundred men. They were not moving and Charley realized they were dead.
    He sat and waited for the pain to come. Once when he was a boy he’d struck his foot with an ax. The blade had cut a three-inch gash between two of his toes and he’d walked to town to get it sewed up. It hadn’t hurt for the entire walk, hadn’t hurt until the doctor had stitched it up and he’d walked home. Then it had kept him up all night.
    He thought it would be the same here but the pain didn’t come. He tried to sip some water from his canteen but it had frozen into slush and wouldn’t drain through the neck of the bottle, so he lay back on the ground. Men around him moaned and some died waiting to be taken under the tent.
    Presently—it could have been an hour, a day, a week, for Charley no longer thought in terms of time, no longer really thought at all—the man with the bloody apron came back to him.
    â€œShuck your coat—let’s see how bad you’re hurt.”
    Charley unbuttoned his greatcoat, then his uniform jacket and his flannel shirt.
    â€œLet’s see …” The attendant held the lantern up, pulled the shirt away and looked down the front and back. “Hell, boy, you ain’t hit.”
    â€œI’m not?”
    â€œNot a scratch. That’s other men’s blood all over you.”
    â€œOh.”
    â€œYou can go back.”
    â€œNot yet.” A doctor came out of the tent. “I need help here. The wind is making up and the cold is freezing my hands. I need some kind of windbreak—see if the