Head: Sabre Wound
The strokes of a sabre
on his wan head –
those blows repeated
in the heat
of battle
where sabres whirl
like flames.
An attack
by a tiger
or the wake
of a cutlass?
He is conscious
but he can’t speak.
Better the clean cut
of the sabre than all
the musket-fire, grape-shot
or tearaway cannonball.
A field surgeon knows
such a head injury
gives ‘frequent opportunities
of seeing the upper
and the lateral parts
of the cerebrum
exposed
by sabre wounds.’
To manoeuvre a cavalry horse
ridden in balance
staying steady
always
leaving the sabre arm free
is a skill
parried by another:
to remove fragments of bone
from the skull
allowing the wounded
dragoon
to recover.
About this poem
To celebrate the Quincentenary of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, twenty-one Scottish poets were commissioned by the Scottish Poetry Library to write poems inspired by the College’s collections and work. Like surgeons they have used ‘the hand that sees’, but in this case the writing hand that acts at the prompting of insight and imagination. The poems and their comments, alongside photographs of items that inspired them, were published in The Hand that Sees: Poems for the quincentenary of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, edited by Stewart Conn, and published by the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in association with the Scottish Poetry Library in 2005.
Author’s note:
The sources of inspiration for this poem come from two exhibits. One is a ‘Waterloo’ watercolour drawing by Charles Bell of an unnamed soldier admitted to a Brussels hospital 5 July 1815, showing a sabre wound. The bone fragments from this patient’s skull were among the anatomical and pathological specimens sold to the RCSEd by Bell in 1825.
The other is a cavalry sabre of the Napoleonic period – ‘the sabre of Major Robert MacGregor killed by a grape shot at the Battle of Delhi 11 September 1805 while charging the Enemy Artillery this Sword taken from his Grasp after Death’.
I was fascinated to read the recent book by Kaufman and Carswell, Musket-ball and Sabre Injuries from the first half of the nineteenth century, RCSE 2003.
My great-grandfather was a cavalryman in the Scots Greys. As a student in South India I rode out each morning with the Maharajah of Mysore’s Mounted Company, which gave me some experience of manoeuvres and the training of cavalry horses to respond to the slightest movement. I had never visualized what injuries their training was designed to inflict, nor thought what it might be like to receive a sabre cut, until I visited the museum. I enjoyed talking to a retired surgeon in the library, who described the conditions which field surgeons faced after battles such as Waterloo.
I don’t usually suffer from headaches, but I have to admit that while I was composing this poem and concentrating on the idea of a head wound, I had the mother of all sore heads!
