Death at the Edges of Empire by Bontrager Shannon;

Author:Bontrager, Shannon; [Bontrager, Shannon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS036050 History / United States / Civil War Period (1850-1877), HIS036060 History / United States / 20th Century, SOC036000 Social Science / Death & Dying
Publisher: UNP - Nebraska

When his unit moved into Monastir, Bluethenthal told Davey and Arthur that the officers had situated their headquarters in a building between two mosques, and they often had to outrun German artillery shells. “They bombard pretty steadily.” With a note of western “Othering” of the East, he reported to his friends that none of the ambulance drivers was hurt because “we know at least enough to duck or dive into a cellar when not driving, while the civilians start running around wild.” One attack killed several children of the neighborhood, including a girl of five or seven who “was blown into minute pieces.” After the shelling stopped, ambulance drivers and townsfolk emerged to locate the injured. One ambulance driver described the state of his ambulance as “being shot through and through . . . but worst of all the windshield and top were ruined and a horrible piece of the little child wound round and round the steering-wheel.”39 Imbrie described the scene as “appalling.” His car’s “sides were blown in and the entire machine was plastered with blood and strips of human flesh, the shell which did the damage having torn to shreds a little girl who was standing by at the time.” This was a powerfully horrifying scene for Imbrie. “In all the war,” he continued, “I have never seen no more horrible sight than that of the child’s family gathering the still warm particles of flesh, finding here a hand, there a finger or a foot, the while moaning in anguish, and the rolling on the ground.”40 John Munroe too described his damaged ambulance, but “the worst feature was that a little girl of seven, who used to play around and talk to us while we were oiling and greasing, was literally blown to pieces and fragments of her burned flesh were spattered all over.” Munroe described how “half of her head landed on the top of my car and had to be scraped off with essence. It was pretty sickening.”41

In this moment of stunning catastrophe that profoundly affected most who witnessed it, Bluethenthal made a revealing observation to Davey and Arthur that survived their editing process. He said that “the little girl’s death was rather ghastly,” but that was about all of the emotional commitment he could produce. He described the aftermath: “All the Mothers rush out clucking to their off-jump and try by a process of elimination to find the unlucky one.” Finally one of the Americans found “two fairly intact legs and a piece of ribbon hanging on his Steering Wheel. By means of these the poor kid was spotted.” Bluethenthal continued:

The grandfather then started picking up the smoking, dripping hunks off the ground, and getting them piled together. Between trips, he tore his hair, and beat his breast in true Biblical style. I took a picture of him with the legs in his hands, not because I am specially fond of it, but it seemed the proper thing to do at the time, which I did nonchalantly.

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