THE INFIRMARY (PART 2)

Evan grew more determined to investigate the strange goings-on after lights out in his cottage. After midnight he began to listen out for the thumps accompanied by the single footstep of “Old Peg-leg,” as he named his nocturnal visitor. Oddly, he was not overtaken by panic or even a hint of trepidation. The noises merely tweaked his curiosity. He set out to document the war graves on the farm and adopted a plan of action to access the service records he could unearth. He was certain that Peg-leg had been a combatant and that he must have perished, not on the battlefield, but in the infirmary. The wounds must have been severe enough to have warranted hospitalisation, and the nature of the noises that accompanied the visitations of the apparition inclined him to believe an amputation must have preceded his demise. Evan was sure, too, that a prosthetic would most certainly have been involved as part of the treatment. Infection probably played a role.

The bureaucratic acumen of the British Imperial Civil Service was unparalleled amongst colonial powers of the era. The military, a vital cog in Britain’s imperial clout, had perfected its scrupulous record keeping – not neglecting to chart and record for posterity the minutiae of details concerning the service rendered by every soldier, the wounds inflicted on the battlefield, treatment at the front and in every infirmary under the army’s aegis. These records found their way into military archives and could be studied by any determined researcher. It is quite uncanny how much information the bureaucrats accumulated – the records included not only acts of heroism, but even details of egregious acts the perpetrators would rather have hidden from public scrutiny. It was into these meticulous records that Evan delved.

The list of names he compiled from the headstones in the farm’s wartime cemetery was narrowed down to one, by the time he had sifted through endless reams of military papers. The name, Tom Higgins, stood out, as it had been noted that the poor fellow had died in the infirmary in 1900 after the amputation of his right leg just below his knee. According to the bureaucrats of the military medical corps (RAMC), he had spent some five months in the infirmary before breathing his last …

It transpired from Tom’s service file that he had been part of the cavalry stationed along the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek border with Natal. Out on patrol, his platoon of about twenty men (cavalry platoons seldom exceeding thirty men), he had been shot through the tibia and the horse upon which he had been mounted was struck by a second bullet. They had been caught in a well concealed ambush on a rocky outcrop. The horse reared, before collapsing into a whimpering heap amongst the thorn brush, flinging Tom into a thorn tree. Tom extricated himself from the spiky landing spot and deftly gave the animal the coup de grace from his Lee-Metford .303 rifle, despite his own agony from a shattered lower leg. Several of his comrades in arms lay dead where they fell, their trusty old steeds galloping off in haste to escape the noisy, chaotic battlefield. Those cavalrymen who had survived the initial attack, returned fire as soon as they regained their composure. The skirmish was over in minutes, although the firefight felt like an eternity in the heat of the moment. The Boers hot-footed it out of the location without casualty.

Every brigade of the British Army had attached to it three officers and about fifty-seven men of the RAMC (Medical Corps), whose job it was to comb the scene of a skirmish and transport the wounded to the nearest hospital wagon for emergency attention. In Tom’s case, the injury inflicted required urgent casualty evacuation (casevac), to the tents and small infirmary on the farm that was dedicated to medical intervention.

Upon arrival at the infirmary, it was determined by the doctor and medical orderlies that amputation was the best option. So shattered was the lower leg that the bones would not knit together and the muscles had been shredded – strips of flesh tenuously dangling from his limb. Bleeding was profuse and had to be stemmed by a tourniquet. There was no time to lose! The use of anaesthetic was out of the question given both the urgency and lack of availability. Of whisky there was plenty, and copious amounts were poured down Tom’s throat amidst his squeals of agony. Out came a saw (also liberally doused with liquor), and some scalpels to whip off the lower leg and slice off the dangling sinews. Tom passed out from the fierce pain and the wound was sewn with what vaguely passed as sutures. In an act reminiscent of the disposal of Stonewall Jackson’s arm during the American Civil War (it was buried where it was amputated in 1863, and the rest of his body elsewhere after he later succumbed to pneumonia), Tom’s leg was interred in a shallow grave behind the cottage/little hospital. 

Recuperation in the infirmary was a slow process. The fitting of a wooden prosthetic leg was done when the first signs of healing appeared on the stump that had been left. Records kept by the orderlies indicate that Tom continued, throughout his sojourn there, to experience intense pain in the stump. He would, by all accounts, pace to-and-fro at night, moaning audibly as his peg leg bore his weight, whilst the remaining booted foot was steadied to transfer the mass of his frame to it. It was a strange, awkward gait, with which he slowly moved from room to room and back to the kitchen. 

Tom Higgins, barely nineteen years old, shifted his gaunt frame around the infirmary like a man sixty years his senior. A large fellow when he signed up for service in 1899, Tom became a mere shadow of the farm hand he had once been. 

Evan, the articled clerk who was the new resident of the former infirmary, became more intrigued by Tom’s story with every snippet of information he managed to uncover. Of one thing he was absolutely sure – the regular visitor clunking through his little cottage every other night, was likely to be Tom Higgins. His curiosity was piqued by every file he browsed. Each file was bound by red bureaucratic tape, tied in a neat little bow. He respectfully untied each one, turning the pages gently as he accorded the apparition the dignity he had been denied during his final weeks in the infirmary, as infection assailed his body and ultimately claimed the last remaining embers of his life as he writhed in agony, one foot already in the grave.

©Paul M Haupt

Photo credit: Lee Metford Mk 1 .303 inch bolt action carbine, 1895 |Online Collection|National Army Museum, London.