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// The Butchers' Harvest 
// Story: In the Company of Night 
// by Mitch H 
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SBMS154

No matter how large the medical corps you build, how well-staffed, no such unit is prepared for the flood of agony and terror which is the butchers-bill of a major battle.  Like a farmer who has failed to diversify her crops, and has put all of her acres into one single cultivar, our harvest comes at us all at once, in an irresistible torrent.

This was the wall of blood and shattered bone which I watched approach my ponies from my post at the forward triage stations the day of the grand assault in the Clearances.  We did the only thing we could do – charge our scapels, square our shoulders, and meet the 'enemy' at a dead run. 

Triage is a game of speed, of rapid-fire decision-making.  You look at this pony, and write her off.  Set her to the side, if she's lucky, her stretcher-bearers might give her last few minutes some company.  You look at this jack, and you see, if you have eyes to see, that his fore-legs are written off, but the rest of him is salvageable.  Will he survive the dying of his legs, if you push him back to the surgical tents?  Yes?  Push him to the other side, to await his ambulance-ride to the rear, and turn a deaf ear to his howls of agony.  You look at this buck, and see, if you have eyes to see – he will not live to make it to the surgeons, but maybe, maybe –

And the triage-station becomes for those precious few seconds an open-air surgery.  Needle, thread, gauze, padding – enough to keep that open artery from pouring the buck's life-blood out into the super-saturated soil of that muddy land.  Not nearly enough to fix him, or even keep him alive.  Just enough to keep him alive long enough for the ambulance-ride back to the surgeons.

Move on.

These two are barely hurt, put them aside for the eventual ride back, but not one of the precious ambulances.  They can catch an empty wagon-ride and get their bones set when time allows.  That one, though – she's got a damp patch under her caparison – bleeding out from a secret tear, and would have just walked a half-mile back to the hospital and keeled over dead, with nopony the wiser.  More precious thread, more befouled needles.

We need a boiling-station.  Get an orderly to take care of it.  Send back an order to the swineherds, to start butchering.   The soupstocks won't be sufficient the way we were going that day.  What does that have to do with anything?  I can explain later.  For now – another wave of stretcher-bearers.

Repeat it all over again.  And again.  And again.  And we're using the fresh-boiled needles and rags in place of gauze, and the wounded just keep coming.  And coming.  They start to pile up in front of the stations, and there's just too few of me, and not enough of the rest.

So I choose to multiply me.  The Spirit helps me. Helps us, in her guise as the Princess.  The trick I had performed in previous weeks?  Of ghosting my hooves' skill upon the hooves of Company ponies in the field, to save their brothers and sisters I couldn't be near in time?  I found Company carters, and stretcher-bearers, and orderlies – and I conscripted them to be my eyes, my hooves, my mouths.  The militia-regulars, our allies – they could handle the simple tasks of stretcher-bearing, carting, acting as orderlies.

The Princess cupped her blue-feathered wings over us all, and I was no longer one, single, one-eyed zebra with a limp.  I was ten ponies, and every one saw with my seeing eyes, and worked with my hooves' dexterity, and ordered in my knowing voice.

And the odds flipped back in our favor.  A moment did not become ten moments, but the same moment ten times, and when one paused, she or he could contribute understanding to those of us who were overwhelmed, too overburdened to pause to think.  There was always somepony else right over your shoulder, to do your thinking for you.

And the triage wore on, as the stubborn summer sun broke through the heavy clouds here and there to put bright light upon our mud and gore and misery.  The baskets outside the stations filled up with crushed bone and pulped flesh that had once been a proud soldier's hoof, or her leg below the cannon.  Or her detached long-lobed jenny's ear.  We sent back the surviving wounded lighter for their burdens carved away, those bits of themselves which never would again twitch to the mind and soul's demand.  If thine hoof offendeth thee, cut it off – we cut off so many we lost count.

In the end, it all was a game of preservation of life, of maintaining blood within the equine body.  We have no way to bring back the life-blood once it has leached from the burst vessel, to replace that which is lost.  I've read of mad experiments of zebra and unicorn and griffish surgeons, of their attempts to transfer living blood from one pony to another, to reintroduce spilled blood to lacking body.  None I've ever heard that were successful.  

The only trick I've ever learned to stave off the horrible weakness that comes from a body being bled white, is to induce that body to go into overdrive to replace the lost blood.  There are potions – dangerous, reserve-devouring potions, which can send the marrow into wild over-production, to produce entire pints of living blood in short hours, or days.  To keep them on those potions for more than a day and a half, however, would and does cause livers and spleens to burst.  Can't keep it going forever, and you have to hydrate the tartarus out of them.

You also have to feed that body's resource-stocks, to get them all the nutrition they need to build all of that blood.  And you can't be a cringing herbivore about the matter.  Blood is blood, and its best feed-stock is other blood, or flesh, or marrow if you can get it.  And most ponies are too civilized to indulge in cannibalism this side of the undead.  Which leaves… swine.  Pigs.  Pork soup, because if you try to feed the wounded flesh, they're gonna throw it right back up again, because I don't care how atavistic and brutal your soldiers are, most ponies just have something against a meat diet.  Picky eaters, I know, but there it is.

The Company brought several herds of swine down from Rime, and picked up a few more along the road.  We hired on a couple eccentric swineherds to manage the herds, and they were generally more than willing to act the butcher when it came time to thin or even decimate their flocks of pigs.  Nopony actually likes pigs, after all.  They're filthy creatures, and dumber than the foul shit they leave everywhere.

That evening, the swine-herds turned to their secondary professions, and butchered an entire herd of swine.  Their bloody harvest went into the cook-pots, and they rendered those pigs down to the base-stock of a thousand meals a day, feed-stock for all those soldiers bled dry before we could stitch their wounds closed.

Finally, finally the wounded stopped coming through, and we could – I could let loose, let go.  The Princess helped me unclench my jaw, guided me to give up my death's-grip upon the minds and bodies of my triage-aides.  I gasped in shame when I realized how tightly I had bound them all to my will.  All I could do was bow my head before my staff and my volunteers, and beg their forgiveness.  Some of them looked a bit wild-eyed after our common ordeal, but none took the opportunity to beat me down into the blood-soaked floor-boards for my abuse of their trust in Company order and the need of the moment.  I sort of wished that one of them had done something, said something.  

I had grossly overstepped my bounds, and I felt like I needed some sort of – I don't know.  Correction?   The Spirit refused to indulge my masochistic need for punishment.   

And so, we got to cleaning out our mess, recovering those tools and materials which could be used again, the next time the  Army found a battle, or some other way to paint the landscape with blood and viscera.

For those on the front lines, battle is something blood-stirring, a matter of adrenaline, of vigour, of assertion of will over the will over others.  For ponies like me, battle is a slaughterhouse, and I'm the one that has to hose down the shop floor after the butchers' harvest is complete.