Democratic Sentinel, Volume 22, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 October 1898 — THOUGHT HE WAS SHOT DEAD. [ARTICLE]

THOUGHT HE WAS SHOT DEAD.

Sough Rider Telle How It Feels to Bo Killed. How it feels to be shot dead Is the subject of some rather curious observations on the part of a trooper of Roosevelt’s regiment, which was intended to be made up of rough riders, but from force of circumstances was transformed into an organisation of rough walkers in Cuba. This particular trooper has been In the thick of the fighting all the time, and he relates his most peculiar experience in a letter to a friend: “Tolstoi doesn’t know anything about being shot dead,” he writes. “In that description he gives he’s away off. There’s altogether too modi of it. He never went through It, so how should he know? The real thing is very short and simple; anybody could do it This is how I came to know all about it It was the second day at San Juan, and my troop was stretched out at full length on its very much attenuated stomach shooting over the top of the hilL The Spanish were also doing all the shooting that seemed to us necessary, and my own notion was that any of us who got out whole would be mighty lucky, for the Spanish aim may be bad, but there is a whole lot of people in this vicinity who wish It were a darn sight worse, the undersigned among the number. “The chap on my left was close up to me and firing fast, getting up on one knee each time he let off and then dropping back for a. few seconds. Bullets were dropping all around and so were men, and I haft spotted one Spaniard who seemed tq be responsible for a lot of it. Well, I was just getting a good bead on him when it happened. There was a sudden shock that didn’t seem to strike any place In particular on my head, but/all over It My teeth ground together!and my eyes tried to get out of their sockets and escape, and no wonder, for my head was full of flames. Then everything went black and I felt myself falling. “ ‘That’s the end of me,’ I thought to myself before I lapsed Into total blankness, and as I remembered it I didn’t eare a snap. “After that I rolled down the hill. It might have been any length of time for all I knew when consciousness began to return. I wondered what world I was in and reckoned that I ought to have a pair of wings of one kind or another on my shoulders. It was something of ,a surprise to me to find that there wfere none there, but my dismal suspicion that maybe I had gone wrong was followed by a surmise that I was still in the land of the living. But I had felt that bullet go through my head and I couldn’t figure what right I had to be alive at all Besides, it was no fun, for I had a headache that you couldn’t have crowded into a beer barrel. As soon as I found I could move I felt around for the bullet hole, but couldn’t find it. While I was still searching and getting pretty mad over it (not being able to find an escaped collar button is nothing to not being able to find a mortal wound in your own head) a couple of fellows came along, picked me up and poured some water over me. “ ‘Look out,’ Ij said, ‘it’ll got Into my brain,’ and I explained about the wound. “They explored and they couldn’t find any hole, either, and that made me madder than ever, for a bullet that goes clean through a man without leaving any opening to show for It is robbing him of the glory of dying for his country. All the time my head was feeling like the Inside of a mince pie, but I finally crawled back to the firing line and there they told me what happened. The chap on my left, in rising to fire, had got a Mauser bullet through his heart and in falling had swung his gun with great force over in my direction. The butt caught me Just behind the ear, knocking me completely out. I’ve got a lump there now like the end of a squash. “But it’s a great thing to have had the experience of being shot dead without compelling your family to go into mourning.”—New York Sun.