Get Those Toes!

There were rows of snake-rail fencing surrounding the fields where we were camping. Several soldiers had been asked to begin tearing the wood logs down and chop them up for the campfires and cooking. While I was helping separate the coffee and sugar rations before dinner I heard several of the men yelling and laughing by one of the nearby fences. When I went over to see what they were yelling about I saw that one of the men was pulling an axe out of his boot. Somehow he had missed the log he was chopping on and the axe blade had sunk into the top of his foot.

                The man’s face had gone ghostly white. The axe blade was near the toe-end of his boot. When he pulled it up and saw the blood on the axe head he exhaled a curse that caused the other soldiers around him to erupt in laughter.

                “Does it hurt, Henry?” asked one of the soldiers.

                “Not too bad. Maybe I just nicked myself,” he answered. He sat down on another log and took off his boot. I gasped when I saw that the three smallest toes on his sockless left foot were gone. They had been cut clean off leaving behind three raspberry shaped nubs.

                “Well! Where’s yur toes, Henry?” asked one of the laughing soldiers.

                Henry picked up his boot and turned it upside down and began shaking it out. I watched as three little white sausages fell out into the grass.

                “Get those toes before the dogs do, Henry!” Another round of laughter erupted. Henry claimed there wasn’t much pain to be felt, at least not yet. Regardless he was given a discharge and sent back home. I overheard some of the other soldiers claiming that Henry did it on purpose just for that reason. They said that when he heard the guns from Gettysburg booming in the distance he began to grow yellow. Maybe that was true, maybe not. Either way I’m sure there were some other soldiers there who were more than a little jealous of Henry’s discharge orders.

--from Time Trip #4: Killing for Country

TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 4

KILLING FOR COUNTRY  

To be released in March 2013!