Benedict Arnold crippled in battle.

• Author: Palmer, Dave
• Position: Profiles in History

"Having been wounded twice and, very possibly, fated to be an invalid for the rest of his life, he started turning his attention away from further military assignments. Poison may have stopped oozing from his leg, but his heart remained full of rancor. In those long weeks of recuperation, his sense of core values shifted from selfless service to self-interest."

AN 18TH-CENTURY battlefield was a place of awful carnage. Darkness on Oct. 7, 1777, had ended the fighting at the Second Battle of Saratoga, but not the activity nor the agony. Officers struggled to gather their troops in preparation for a resumption of combat the next morning. Walking wounded straggled to the rear. Wagon drivers hustled food and ammunition forward. Guards herded prisoners into tight knots to prevent escape. Soldiers tried to comfort critically injured comrades in their final hours of life or to find ways to get them to the surgeons' tents. Others searched for patriots killed in action and dragged their bodies to designated spots for later burial. Ghoulish scavengers stripped Hessian and English corpses of footwear and other useful clothing. (It was not unheard of for men wielding daggers in the dark, upon coming across a foe still living, to hasten the unfortunate victim's rendezvous with death.) Many men, wholly exhausted from the day's fighting, simply dropped where they were, fast asleep. Here and there a pistol shot signaled the killing of a wounded horse. Torches flickered everywhere. Moans punctuated the macabre scene.

Gen. Benedict Arnold became a part of that woeful tapestry. Seeing him fall, nearby soldiers rushed to free him from his horse. They cut away his trouser leg to reveal the wound and to provide strips of cloth for a tourniquet to stanch the bleeding. Veterans among them shook their heads knowingly as they inspected his mangled limb. It was beyond serious. In that day and age, such wounds were fatal more often than not; amputation would very best of expected outcomes. Hurriedly, the soldiers fashioned a makeshift litter from materials lying about the redoubt and started carrying the officer back to find a doctor.

We only can guess what a terrible ordeal that trip was. The way back was not an easy one in daytime--at night, in haste, stumbling along in the uncertain light of a torch or lantern, the stretcher bearers hardly could have been gentle. Each bounce or jolt sent paroxysms of pain surging through the helpless patient. An agonizing hour passed, maybe more, before the weary bearers eased Arnold's fitter to the ground near patriot headquarters. Overburdened doctors there, involved in the grim work of casualty triage, could do little more than check and adjust the primitive first aid administered in the field, immobilize the leg as best they could, and send him in a wagon another 30 jarring miles to a military hospital set up in Albany. There, nearly four tortuous days after being shot, the famous warrior came under the care of surgeon James Thacher.

Thacher and every other physician who looked at the wound came to the same conclusion: amputation. Otherwise, one just did not recover from having a limb shattered by a musket ball. Even if the bone somehow could be coaxed into knitting together again, the injured leg would end up being significantly shorter than the other and ever painful. Besides, bone splinters mingled with fragments of the musket ball itself dangerously would hinder healing. Gangrene...