Men without Bones by Gerald Kersh

Author:Gerald Kersh
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: For the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Published: 1954-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

And then, not far from Trois Ruisseaux – you know my luck – the rhythm halted and changed. The mare Cocotte had gone lame and was limping on her off hind leg.

I assumed that she had picked up a flint or, perhaps, a bit of a broken spike from those deplorable roads. So, saying, “Patience, Cocotte, my darling; we will put you right in no time at all, and you shall yet help Tessier to save France,” I dismounted, took out my pocket knife, and lifting up the mare’s lame hoof, explored it with my fingertips, since there was no light to see by. I could feel nothing amiss. Then I remembered how Cocotte had started and kicked while Cornelys, the blacksmith, driving home a nail, was making eyes at the innkeeper’s wife, and my heart sank. He had lamed her through his inattention, the accursed idiot! I realized then that I would have done better to let Cornelys go unpursued to find himself stuck in the mud with a lame mare, while I took my chance in the direction of the French lines. But I ask you, how was I to have foreseen this?

Full of bitterness, I let go Cocotte’s hoof. She shook her leg, and kicked me in the face. I do not know, my friend, how long I lay unconscious in the ditch. I know that when I came to myself I was lying on my back, blinking at a dirty sky from which the rain was no longer falling, and that for the moment I thought that I was again in Spain, when the English stormed the battery and an infantryman knocked me down with the butt of his musket. I was in the most atrocious pain, and my throat was full of blood. It was this very blood, this very pain, that brought me back to consciousness; for the blood made me cough, and the cough shook my head, and my lower jaw was badly broken. Several of my teeth were embedded in my tongue, which was half bitten through.

I have, in my time, been wounded in almost every conceivable way. I have survived grapeshot in my ribs, a musket ball in the stomach, a pistol ball in the shoulder and, most miraculous of all, a biscayen ball in the hip – I say nothing of a bayonet thrust or a saber cut here and there – and I have had most of the fluxes, dysenteries and agues that our frail flesh is heir to; together with a rheumatic fever which, I believe, was the ultima Thule of punishment. But the gathered might of all my enemies, my friend, never inflicted upon me one half of the anguish I suffered under the hoof of that white-eyed devil of a dapple-gray mare!

The pain of the broken bones in my face was terrible. The agony of my bitten tongue was worse. But worst of all was the pain of a shattered nerve on the left-hand side of my face.

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