They were discussing whether to take his foot off at the ankle or at the knee. The discussion gave way to an argument, the argument turned ugly, and as the lieutenant watched, horrified, they began to fight.
They were bashing each other with the severed limbs of previous amputations. And as they swirled about the hospital, swinging their grotesque clubs, patients who had lost limbs leaped or crawled from their pallets, desperately sorting through the debris of the battling doctors for their own arms and legs.
In the middle of the melee he escaped, galloping crazily through the main doors on his half-blown-away foot.
He hobbled into a brilliant green meadow that was strewn with Union and Confederate corpses. Like dominoes in reverse, the corpses sat up as he ran past and aimed pistols at him.
Finding a gun in his hand, Lieutenant Dunbar shot each of the corpses before they could squeeze off a round. He fired rapidly and each of his bullets found a head. And each blew apart on impact. They looked like a long line of melons, each of them exploding in turn from perches on the shoulders of dead men.
Lieutenant Dunbar could see himself at a distance, a wild figure in a bloody hospital gown, dashing through a gauntlet of corpses, heads flying into space as he went.
Suddenly there were no more corpses and no more firing.
But there was someone behind him calling in a beautiful voice.
“Sweetheart . . . sweetheart.”
Dunbar looked over his shoulder.
Running behind him was a woman, a handsome woman with high cheeks and thick sandy hair and eyes so alive with passion that he could feel his heart beating stronger. She was dressed only in men’s pants and she ran with a blood-drenched foot in her outstretched hand, as if in offering.
The lieutenant glanced down at his own wounded foot and found it gone. He was running on a white stump of bone.
He came awake, sitting upright in shock, groping wildly for his foot at the end of the bed. It was there.
His blankets were damp with sweat. He fumbled under the bed for his kit and hastily rolled a smoke. Then he kicked off the clammy blankets, propped himself on the pillow, and puffed away, waiting for it to get light.
He knew exactly what had inspired the dream. The basic elements had actually taken place. Dunbar let his mind wander back to those events.
He had been wounded in the foot. By shrapnel. He had spent time in a field hospital, there had been talk of taking off his foot, and not being able to bear the thought of this, Lieutenant Dunbar had escaped. In the middle of the night, with the terrible groans of wounded men echoing through the ward, he’d slipped out of bed and stolen the makings of a dressing. He’d powdered the foot with antiseptic, wrapped it heavily with gauze, and somehow jammed it into his boot.
Then he had snuck out a side door, stolen a horse, and, having no place else to go, rejoined his unit at dawn with a cock-and-bull story about a flesh wound to the toe.
Now he smiled to himself and thought, What could I have been thinking of?
After two days the pain was so great that the lieutenant wanted nothing more than to die. When the opportunity presented itself, he took it.
Two opposing units had sniped at each other across three hundred yards of denuded field for the better part of an afternoon. They were hidden behind low stone walls bordering opposite ends of the field, each unsure of the other’s strength, each unsure about mounting a charge.
Lieutenant Dunbar’s unit had launched an observation balloon, but the rebels had promptly shot it down.
It had remained a standoff, and when tensions reached their climax in the late afternoon, Lieutenant Dunbar reached his own personal breaking point. His thoughts focused unwaveringly on ending his life.
He volunteered to ride out and draw enemy fire.
The colonel in charge of the regiment was unsuited for war. He had a weak stomach and a dull mind.
Normally he would never have permitted such a thing, but on this afternoon he was under extreme pressure. The poor man was at a complete loss, and for some unexplained reason, thoughts of a large bowl of peach ice cream kept intruding into his mind.
To make matters worse, General Tipton and his aides had just recently taken up an observation position on a high hill to the west. His performance was being watched, yet he was powerless to perform.
The topper was this young lieutenant with the bloodless face, talking to him in clenched tones about drawing fire. His wild, pupilless eyes scared the colonel.
The inept commander consented to the plan.
With his own mount coughing badly, Dunbar was allowed to take his pick of the stock. He took a new horse, a small, strong buckskin named Cisco, and managed to get himself into the saddle without crying out from pain while the whole outfit watched.
As he walked the buckskin toward the low stone wall, a few pings of rifle fire came across the field, but otherwise it was dead silent and Lieutenant Dunbar wondered if the silence was real or if it always became this way in the moments before a man died.
He kicked Cisco sharply in the ribs, jumped the wall, and tore across the bare field, bearing straight down on the center of the rock wall that hid the enemy. For a moment the rebels were too shocked to shoot, and the lieutenant covered the first hundred yards in a soundless vacuum.
Then they opened up. Bullets filled the air around him like spray from a spigot. The lieutenant didn’t bother to fire back. He sat straight up so as to make a better target and kicked Cisco again. The little horse flattened his ears and flew at the wall. All the while Dunbar waited for one of the bullets to find him.
But none did, and when he was close enough to see the eyes of the enemy, he and Cisco veered left, running north in a straight line, fifty yards out from the wall. Cisco was digging so hard that dirt jumped from his back hooves like the wake from a fast boat. The lieutenant maintained his upright posture, and this proved irresistible to the Confederates. They rose like targets in a shooting gallery, pouring out rifle fire in sheets as the solitary horseman dashed past.
They couldn’t hit him.
Lieutenant Dunbar heard the firing die. The line of riflemen had run out. As he pulled up he felt something burning in his upper arm and discovered that he’d been nicked in the bicep. The prickle of heat brought him briefly back to his senses. He looked down the line he had just passed and saw that the Confederates were milling about behind the wall in a state of disbelief.
His ears were suddenly working again and he could hear shouts of encouragement coming from his own line far across the field. Then he was aware once more of his foot, throbbing like some hideous pump deep in his boot.
He wheeled Cisco into an about-face, and as the little buckskin surged against the bit, Lieutenant Dunbar heard a thunderous cheer. He looked across the field. His brothers in arms were rising en masse behind the wall.
He laid his heels against Cisco’s side and they charged ahead, racing back the way they had come, this time to probe the other Confederate flank. The men he had already passed were caught with their pants down and he could see them frantically reloading as he sped by.
But ahead of him, down along the unprobed flank, he could see riflemen coming to their feet, the guns settling in the crooks of their shoulders.
Determined not to fail himself, the lieutenant suddenly and impulsively let the reins drop and lifted both his arms high into the air. He might have looked like a circus rider, but what he felt was final. He had raised his arms in a final gesture of farewell to this life. To someone watching, it might have been misconstrued. It might have looked like a gesture of triumph.
Of course Lieutenant Dunbar had not meant it as a signal to anyone else. He had only wanted to die. But his Union comrades already had their hearts in their throats, and when they saw the lieutenant’s arms fly up, it was more than they could bear.